Summary
Africa's social, economic, and political relations urgently need to be transformed through a focused and determined international effort if Africa is to be lifted out of the poverty trap. The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) presents itself as a visionary and dynamic initiative by a core group of new generation African leaders to reconstruct and develop the continent.


Blurred Vision
But NEPAD's vision is blurred by fixing its sights on increased global integration and rapid private sector growth as the answer to overcoming poverty, and by its failure to engage with Africa's people to transform the continent. The remarkable political will generated by NEPAD must be focused into a participatory transformation of Africa through direct, immediate, and decisive action to overcome the causes of Africa's impoverishment.


The Role of the Church
The church is committed to engaging with Africa's legitimate political leaders in the interests of the common good of Africa's development. We are called by God, together with all people of faith and good will, to restore our collective vision for 'a new heaven and a new earth' no less than we are called to bring individual or personal healing and peace. The church continues the mission of Christ at the service of humanity and the earth when we engage with NEPAD to 'bring the good news to the afflicted, proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favour from the Lord'.


Proclaiming Good News
The general issues addressed by NEPAD are not entirely new but NEPAD does contain several promising aspects that could give renewed hope and life to Africa's people. NEPAD can strengthen accountability and effective collaboration between African governments in a way that has not happened before. This can build peace and stability and holds out the possibility to develop an authentic development model that is appropriate to Africa's needs rather than simply adopting inappropriately imposed conditions that damage African communities. NEPAD puts Africa's development firmly on the global agenda and generates a new confidence in Africa that corrects perceptions of Africa as a doomed continent.


People, Poverty, & the Prophetic Mission of the Church
NEPAD contains some problematic elements that have proven to be ineffective in building peaceful, just, and caring societies in Africa. Its economic strategy is discredited by the harsh impact on the poor in African countries that have already adopted similar policies. It pretends to be unaware of the severe negative social impact that rapid privatisation of basic and social services has on impoverished communities in Africa. It fails to address the underlying power relations that constrain Africa's development. It does not provide a decisive mechanism to repair the persistent damage done to individuals, families, whole societies, and environments in Africa's history. Most of all, NEPAD has neglected Africa's people both in the process of its construction and in its primary focus. If NEPAD does not focus on Africa's people first, it can result in an increasingly divided Africa at the continental and national levels.

NEPAD must focus primarily on immediate poverty eradication interventions that will deliver direct benefits to the poor rather than it current focus on a long-term and indirect development strategy. Meaningful debt cancellation for Africa must be prioritised as a pre-condition for Africa's sustainable development, so that budget support can be provided for public investment in social services such as health care and education and the provision of water and electricity. NEPAD must also propose decisive structural changes to the current international financial and trade systems, including proposals such as an international currency transaction tax and special protection for vulnerable African industries.


The Pastoral Mission of the Church
The church must participate with energy and commitment in Africa's reconstruction and development. We therefore engage with NEPAD in a spirit of mutual responsibility and commitment to building a better world for Africa's people. Our first task is to promote broad-based popular dialogue on NEPAD. NEPAD's structures should equally be directed to this purpose. Faithful to continuing the mission of Christ, the church must also continue to raise the collective public conscience about the ethical choices that lie at the heart of the current global financial, trade, and political systems in which NEPAD proposes Africa should participate more actively.


The G7 Response to NEPAD
In the same way that African countries are willing to undertake a path of self-criticism and renewal, G7 leaders must make a firm commitment to support Africa according to the priorities and plans that are set through participatory and democratic processes in African countries. Ending the scourge of corruption cannot be seen as the responsibility of Africa exclusively because corruption is a global problem that could be worsened by increased foreign trade and private investment in Africa. A G7 over-emphasis on the "cost-free" elements of NEPAD such as peace-building and governance issues and on private sector development alone, without a corresponding commitment to support Africa's reconstruction and development in additional material budget-support terms, reinforces the distrust that makes many believe that African development based on the hope of a new partnership with rich countries is not viable.


Un-blurring the Vision
While NEPAD's analysis of the problems that confront Africa is accurate and its end goal of an African continent free from war and poverty expresses the deep-felt hope of all Africans and people of good will, the economic path it chooses is bound to fail this mission.

NEPAD's vision is blurred by setting its sights on the hope that greater global integration will save Africa. Yet NEPAD's vision can be restored if Africa's leaders enter into a new partnership with their people. The vision of a new Africa dawning in the 21st century is too precious to be lost because we failed to see that Africa's children, men, and women are its greatest treasure.


Protesters at WEF Meeting Slam Nepad
as 'Recolonisation of Africa'
by Zoubair Ayoob

Durban Bureau

The New Plan For Africa's Development (Nepad) is little more than recolonisation of Africa and is just an extension of Gear, protesters at a meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Durban said on Wednesday.

"The name Nepad is a myth - there is nothing new about it. It is just Gear for Africa and, just as Gear resulted in the loss of one million jobs in SA, so too will Nepad further plunge Africa into poverty," said Ashwin Desai of the Concerned Citizens' Group.

Desai said Nepad will leave African economies at the mercy of Western powers. "Nepad will deliver in Africa, but only to the elite. The poor will just get poorer. [SA President Thabo] Mbeki is looking after the interests of the emerging elite in Africa," he said.

Professor Dennis Brutus of Jubilee SA said the WEF is part of the global corporate process which is expected to support Nepad. "We regard Nepad as a new form of colonisation with the consent of African leaders.

"The essence of the document is that Africa promises to obey all requests from the West and will submit to their demands, particularly in the area of investment. Africa will be enslaved to satisfy the demands of the West," he said.

Brutus said the Nepad document was drawn up and is being debated without the input of ordinary Africans, on behalf of whom it makes a massive commitment. "Nepad will lead to privatisation of basic services which will then be sold back to Africa at a profit."

Richard Pithouse from the University of Natal (Durban) criticised Nepad's aim of opening African markets to the West. "Nepad is not an African concept and will not benefit Africa," he said, adding Nepad will leave African people and their resources open to exploitation.

The 100 protesters were confined to Speaker's Corner, about 100 metres away from the ICC. About 30 later made their way to the ICC and began protesting peacefully on the courtyard, engaging passing delegates in friendly discussion on Nepad. Police swiftly removed them.



Poor Miss Out as Rich Nations Cream Off Their Trade
Rec'd from Africa Canada Forum

Heather Stewart
The Guardian

Tuesday April 30, 2002


Rich countries grab most of the benefits when developing countries open their markets to international trade, an influential United Nations body said yesterday.

In its annual health check of the global market, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said many lower income countries had increased their share of world trade without seeing a corresponding rise in income.


* UNCTAD's Richard Lozul-Wright said that developing countries, which had followed the advice of the international community and diversified out of raw materials into manufacturing, often became trapped in "international production networks," assembling imported parts in low-skilled, labour intensive industries, owned by multinational companies.

While developed countries were able to "lock in" the benefits of technology, research and development and brand, their poorer trading partners were left competing against each other to provide low-cost labour. "Competition among firms, including international ones, in developing countries becomes competition among labour located in different countries," the report says.

"Most middle-income developing countries persist in labour-intensive manufactures because their producers are finding it difficult to upgrade and diversify."

Mr Kozul-Wright said it was time for the international community to abandon its 20-year "fixation with liberalisation" - the belief that opening up their markets provides developing countries with an automatic exit route from poverty.
HERE COMES THE DISCONNECT:
He called on the world's largest trading powers to use the current round of World Trade Organisation talks, launched in Doha late last year, to ensure developing countries get maximum benefits from opening their markets - and to give them better opportunities to sell their products into developed countries. "Market access is the litmus test of where this trading system is going," Mr Kozul-Wright said.

Progress in the trade talks has been threatened in recent months by the escalating dispute between the European Union and the US over President Bush's tariffs on foreign steel. In a thinly disguised criticism of the US policy, yesterday's report said countries should resist the temptation to resort to protectionist measures despite the downturn in the global economy.

"Even as governments extol the virtues of free trade, they are only too willing to intervene to protect their domestic constituencies that feel threatened by the cold winds of international competition."

Unctad also used its annual Trade and Development report to present its assessment of the prospects for the global economy. Commenting that the increase in international trade meant last year's slowdown hit developing countries more severely than previous downturns - with growth dropping to 2.1% - it expressed concern about the reliance of the rest of the world on the US economy.

"Much still hinges on the strength of the US recovery," it says, warning that growth could bounce back too slowly to benefit the developing world - and pointing to the risks of a devaluation in the dollar.