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The
path to reclaiming the 21st century
Richard
Kamidza
Extracted from Pambazuka News 228
November
03 2005
http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=30190
Given the prevailing
economic and social circumstances facing the African continent,
exactly how can Africa begin to chart a path for the future? A conference
due to be held this weekend in Durban, South Africa, brings academics
together to discuss this question and decide exactly how Africa
can reclaim the 21st century.
Introduction
The West tried for centuries to impose its models for development
on Africa with limited success and without taking into account existing
vast differences in culture and politics on the Continent. In this
regard, most post-colonial African states adopted Western blueprints
in the form of capitalism or socialism with limited trickling benefits
to the general populace. It thus seems that Africa is in most cases
worse off now than during colonialism despite billions of aid and
investment being poured into the Continent. The continent has witnessed
the controversy around which agency is more central in driving the
development process between state and markets in an environment
dominated by foreign actors, especially the Bretton Woods institutions,
through their "one-size fit all" policies in addition
to a host of imposed conditionalities. While this controversy continues,
the socio-economic and political conditions in a number of States
continues to deteriorate by the day.
Development paradigms and policies
Since the 1960s Africa has witnessed a contestation or confusion
of development agendas, namely, the nationalist agenda of an autonomous
development path anchored upon a derigiste economic nationalism
in ideological terms on the one hand, and the Bretton Woods institutions
propounding a neo-liberal economic adjustment programme premised
upon free market enterprise in ideological terms on the other. The
former has been and still is deliberately State-centric and encourages
State interventionism in economic management. The latter has evolved
as a market-driven development strategy and, as such, deliberately
set out to roll back the State.
This ideological contestation has forced the Continent’s leadership
to embrace several developmental paradigms and policies, particularly
in the 1980s and 1990s, in support of the two positions. The debate
moved towards convergence in 1997 when the World Bank, through the
question "Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?" accepted
and appreciated the key role of the State in the socio-economic
development of their respective countries. In response African leaders
fashioned their own developmental paradigms such as the New Partnership
for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) whose central thrust is collective
responsibility towards improving the Continent, including getting
directly involved in the search for long-term political stability
and sustainable development. Assertive leadership of this responsibility
is producing democratic fruits in former troubled nations and regions
such as the Great Lakes region, where the return to democracy and
constitutional route has resulted in positive socio-economic transformation.
Africa’s Challenges
Political conditions
Africa continues to face political challenges including many politically
induced conflicts that have, and will, continue to destabilize both
the respective member-State and/or the region. Scarce resources
are allocated annually to defense, security and military ministerial
portfolios in many African countries as a way of dealing with the
prevailing conflicts and/or as a precaution to peace, security and
humanitarian concerns, especially in those countries not directly
involved in conflict. Post-colonial States have fallen prey to the
ploy of destabilization, a factor that scares away both domestic
and foreign investors. The prevailing socio-economic conditions
have deteriorated in some countries to the point of contributing
to the unfolding conflicts. As a result millions of people have
been killed, displaced or forced into exile. This development also
denies Africa access to its resource – human capital – which is
now contributing to global capitalism without any compensation being
paid to "our" Continent.
Socio-economic conditions
Africa continues to face unimpressive socio-economic conditions
characterized by low economic growths; falling per capita income
and life expectancy; rising inflation rates, interest rates and
infant mortality rates; deteriorating external and domestic debt
stocks; worsening poverty situations evidenced by food dependence,
malnutrition and the fact that between 65% to 80% of the Continent’s
population is living below the poverty datum line; and lack of access
to basic social services (health, education, housing and water).
Macro-economic fundamentals
African countries are at different levels of economic development,
depicting wide disparities in their macro-economic fundamentals.
Such development impacts negatively on regional economic development
strategies. In addition, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are
yet to persuade member-States to move towards the convergence of
their macro-economic fundamentals, which are explained by other
factors. Of great concern at this juncture is also the duplicity
of RECs which makes them both weak and vulnerable to external shocks
and influence.
Production structure and trade
Production structure on the Continent has remained largely primary
production-oriented, a trend that renders Africa the largest net
importer of goods and services from the industrialized nations.
This means that the Continent specializes in the production of raw
materials, but has no input to global pricing. In addition, countries
have, in most cases, competed seriously against each other since
failure to diversify the economic base means the production and
exportation of similar commodities. Africa’s contribution to global
trade remains insignificant – just under 2%. This poses the question
as to how long can Africa continue to remain in this position.
Access to international markets
Throughout the Continent market reforms have failed to develop the
productive sectors. This has resulted in the underdevelopment of
industrialization strategies. Even the religious adoption of Western
driven economic reforms have failed to rejuvenate the industrial
base of most countries on the Continent. The industrial base remains
largely narrow and characterized by mono-commodities for export
to the same market. This is more pronounced in Southern Africa where,
for instance, Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo
(DRC) and Namibia produce and export diamonds to the same market.
Other common export products include tobacco, copper, fish, tea,
coffee, horticulture and cotton. This unfortunately generates less
foreign currency necessary to meet national import requirements
since the majority of member-States are net-importers. In the process
this serves as a constraint to industrial development. At the same
time debt service obligations means the availability of fewer resources
to support the social sector; the very foundation for building a
sound human resource base which is deemed critical for the Continent’s
developmental needs.
The debt burden
At a time when the Continent is grappling with many challenges,
member-States have accumulated large, but growing external debt
which takes away a significant proportion of available resources
for debt servicing. Industrial development requires foreign currency
which is used to service debt, while sacrificing social service
provisions in the process. In addition, no significant innovation
is taking place to improve the future prospects of the Continent.
A high debt overhang creates uncertainty for both domestic and foreign
investors. It is a situation that adversely affects a country’s
credit ratings and perception of risks. Furthermore, it limits potentially
viable firms from accessing finance from the international capital
markets. Moreover, the qualification of most countries to the highly
indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative, has failed to extricate
the Continent from this position. This means that the debt burden
is not only retarding economic growth and development, but it has
also become economically exhausting and unsustainable, politically
destabilizing and ethically unacceptable.
Aid flows and donor-recipient relations
While industrialized economies pledge to increase aid flow to countries
with sound socio-economic policies and democratic practices, in
many cases this pledge has come with conditions and selective application.
Inter-State relations has come to the fore, raising the question
of whether aid is a developmental instrument or a vehicle to globalize
capitalism, which is in search of markets. It appears that aid flows
have gone beyond the realm of economic policies to include new conditionalities
of good governance; respect for the rule of law and the environment;
and observance of human rights. In addition, foreign direct investments
(FDIs) tend to ignore certain regions. In particular sub-Saharan
Africa has remained an unfavourable destination of this capital
formation.
The current situation in Africa is not promising in terms of crafting
sustainable endogenous policy directions, options and space. Despite
decades of implementing developmental paradigms and policies on
her own and/or in collaboration with global strategic partners,
Africa has remained the poorest region in the world. Indeed, of
the 53 countries on the Continent, only 7 countries have graduated
onto the globally ranked middle income category (Countries include
Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Libya, Mauritius, Seychelles
and South Africa [World Development Indicators database, World Bank,
July 2005]).
The least developing countries (LDCs) category are of great concern
which suffer from huge, but growing external debt overhang and limited
capacity to industrialize and generate foreign currency necessary
to meet national requirements. To date, Africa contributes less
than 2% to the total global market, while it attracts only 2% of
the FDIs inflows. In addition, the adoption of Western driven initiatives,
presumed to offer lifelines to millions of poverty stricken people
in the form of debt relief and free access to European markets under
"everything else but arms (EBA)" initiatives, has failed
to produce positive tangible results. Similarly, the adoption of
neo-liberal policies has also failed to produce a success story
to act as a model for policy options. Notable also is the failure
of developmental State paradigms and policies to produce success
stories. Indeed, Africa has remained stuck in the same predicament
of an underdevelopment web characterized by unimpressive socio-economic
indicators, unstable political environments and conflict situations,
while countries in other Continents are making progress.
While Africa is preoccupied with identifying and correcting policy
errors of the past, the formulation of its relations with developed
regions is premised within the neo-liberal paradigm despite entrenching
weak and vulnerable States towards the ambit of global institutions
and agendas. A significant number of States have become increasingly
vulnerable to the donor payroll, a development that weakens State
capacity to offer alternative policy options, policy space and policy
directions. This further exposes the same weak State to the dictates
of donors, resulting in a vicious cycle of borrowing, harsh conditions,
and unavoidable compromises in terms of a State’s responsibility
to its citizens.
In this context, The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution
of Disputes (ACCORD) and the African Futures Institute (AFI) are
holding a two day conference focusing on the question: "Can
Africa (re)claim the 21st Century?" In this spirit there are
many questions regarding development that remains unanswered which
the conference can raise and provide pointers on. A revisit to developmental
paradigms and policies requires further interrogation by African
scholars, given the prevailing socio-economic and political conditions
prevailing on the Continent. Therefore the conference will bring
together various scholars and policy makers from the Continent to
discuss these issues.
Building sustainable strong state-citizens relationship offers unique
opportunity to empower the organs of the states to become truly
African with the "strong" belief that "Africa is
for Africans". This is imperative to mould the pillars of states
to uniquely guide socio-economic and political transformation in
a manner that facilitates development. In this respect, the conveners
are expecting the debate to focus on how Africa should de-industrialize
the donor sector and all its tentacles, which for long, has undermined
the acceptance of "uhuru" developmental strategies and
paradigms on the basis that Africans can not kick-start the developmental
steps of their territories without externally driven resources and
guidance, a development that demonizes the self-reliance concepts
as baseless and unsustainable.
Indeed, as conveners, we will be happy to be associated with the
creation of the right attitude in which Africans appreciate that
poverty alleviation is in our own interest rather than the donor
sector; that externalization of Africa’s resources is the main contributor
to the growing external debt overhang; that domesticating Africa’s
resources provides the basis for native industrialization strategies;
that trade negotiations requires African resources to prepare in
consultations of all the constituencies; and that demonisation of
self-reliance principles is a "defeatist attitude" based
on the "blame game" theory.
Africa has all the right signs for claiming the 21st Century. In
this regard, it is imperative for her to exploit every opportunity
that arises with positivist attitude. Indeed, the time to lament
historical injustices and causal relationships for the present "status
squo" is over. It’s high time that Africa realizes that globalization
has no room for philanthropic and benevolent gestures, hence the
expectation for the right attitude and a continent-orientated policy
framework.
* Richard Kamidza is a Senior Researcher at The African Centre
for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), Durban, South
Africa
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org
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