NEPAD Seeks to Revitalize Africa But Faces Criticism and Its Own Ailments by Sean OíDriscoll Few in the United States have heard of NEPAD, yet many African leaders are banking on it to reshape their continent. In July, the African Union (AU) held its third annual summit and voted to fast track NEPAD, otherwise known as the New Partnership for Africaís Developmentóa program that the AU hopes will solve many of Africaís problems through continent-wide agreement and increased spending on health, agriculture and education, and, importantly, the introduction of new political reforms. The July summit, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, talked of a "green revolution" in African agriculture that could overcome famine and undernourishment. Significantly, it went far beyond the hot air of previous conferences and committed members to a tracking mechanism that will check if they are sincere in their pledges to give 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture. For a country such as Ethiopia, which once had one of the worldís most bloated military budgets, this is a vital promise. NEPAD, as a structure and pledge for reshaping Africa, arose after the members of what was then called the Org anization of African Unity (OAU) gave its five initiating heads of state (Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa) a mandate to develop a plan that would revitalize the worldís poorest continent. The idea arose from the general feeling that Africa was not matching the growth experienced by developing countries in Asia. The OAU members eventually came up with NEPAD, which was adopted by the OAU in July 2001. Objectives included eradicating poverty, ensuring sustainable growth and development, and increasing womenís rights. Individual members of the African Union (now moving closer to the European Union model since the group changed its named from the Organization of African Unity) have taken the plan very seriously. Ghana, for example, now has a NEPAD minister, and many other states are reworking their economic targets to incorporate the plan, yet NEPAD continues to receive very little coverage in the Western media. With a plan this ambitious, it also does not come without criticism. Leftist commentators and academics say NEPAD is basically a reheated form of Western open-market economics and is neither environmentally sustainable nor based on Afro-centric community projects. Others say the plan is too slow and will just generate a lot more political waffle. African Union member states are well aware of the criticism, and some have attacked the slowness of the plan. At the Ethiopian summit, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo bluntly listed constraints hampering NEPAD. "One of our biggest challenges is to ensure maximum ownership of NEPAD by all peoples and countries of the African continent," he said, noting "crippling capacity gaps" at all levels of planning and implementation of the NEPAD project. The comments are particularly significant as Obasanjo is the chairman of the NEPAD Heads of State and Government Implementation Committee. In a particularly forthright part of his speech, he called on NEPADís development partners to stop producing documents and get on with actually implementing the project. "The list of unfulfilled commitments by our partners is growing long," he said. However, Obasanjo also pointed out that the economic outlook for Africa seemed to be improving, with the International Monetary Fund projecting a strong growth rate for the continent. Mohammed Jahed, the NEPAD Secretariatís chief economist, agreed that many people still feel they were not consulted about NEPAD. "People feel NEPAD is imposed upon them, therefore [they feel] no responsibility for its success or failure," he said. However, in an e-mail interview with The Washington Diplomat, Jahed defended NEPAD and said it has strong participation from all of the continentís stakeholdersógovernments, civil society, nongovernmental organizations, trade unions, community leaders, and both small and big businesses. This is particularly true, he said, because Africans are impatient to catch up with other developing countries. "NEPAD is Africaís response to the crisis of increasing poverty Ö at a time when the other developing regions of the world are making significant progress," he explained. Like many shaping Africaís future, Jahed sees problems created by colonialism, but also by the mismanagement of successive African governments. "Post-colonial Africa inherited weak states and dysfunctional economies, which were further aggravated by poor leadership, corruption and bad governance in many countries. The weak state remains a major constraint on sustainable development in a number of countries," he said. The new horror of the AIDS epidemic as well as a lack of infrastructure have led to whole rethinking of Africaís problems and the steps needed to catch up with the rest of the world. According to Jahed, NEPADís immediate goals are based on a framework that will allow the process to flourish. Above all, this includes the adoption of principles of good governance that will remain universal principles across the African Union. Hesphina Rukato, NEPADís advisor on the environment and tourism, also rejects the criticism and points to NEPADís framework document that talks at length about the need for environmentally sustainable community projects. This is particularly important, he said, because 60 percent of Africans rely on agriculture for a living. However, the criticisms continue to flow. A group of academics met in Kenya two years ago to discuss the NEPAD program and produced 19 mostly critical papers. One such writer, Zo Randriamaro, claimed that NEPAD "suffers from a narrow understanding of poverty issues that is likely to bring about contradictory outcomes and to increase existing social vulnerabilities and inequalities." Her paper on gender issues arising from NEPAD went on to say that NEPAD is really a development of Western open-market economies, which she describes as the "Washington consensus." According to Randriamaro, the plan shows "an excessive emphasis on growth as the single most important means for poverty reduction. She added that even the World Bank has begun to see the broader social picture, realizing that a single-minded push for growth has only led to disappointment in Africa. For another critic, professor Adebayo Olukoshi of Senegal, there is no debate on the need for political and governmental reform in Africa. He argues that Africa needs a "new social bargain" for the poor, and not just a push for new growth, otherwise any new wealth will flow directly toward those who already have wealth. Olukosh is joined in his criticism by Roldan Muradian of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, who believes that Africa should use its comparative advantage in natural resources and not allow foreign corporations to use NEPAD for their own benefit. "There can be no doubt that the path that NEPAD offers is the neo-liberal path that is espoused by the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO and most mainstream economists that work in African institutions such as the Economic Commission for Africa," he said. Some NEPAD proponents, however, are quietly disdainful of their critics, whom they see as middle-class academics with little knowledge of economic reform or the harsh realities of introducing change. One of NEPADís strongest proponents, Graca Machel, wife of former South African President Nelson Mandela, readily accepts that civil society in South Africa was "up in arms" because the plan was inspired by Western ideology. She called for a new appraisal of NEPAD as a way of solving Africaís problems. It is not a failed continent, she insisted, but one that can flourish with greater cooperation among its members. "NEPAD is an African initiative, and it is not perfect even today, but you have to be inside and make it work for you." Sean OíDriscoll is a contributing writer for The Washington Diplomat.