Goedgedacht Forum: "Nepad - Smokescreen or Essential Strategy?" and "Nepad: Fiction or Fantasy?"

Nepad wants to move beyond punitive disincentives to countries, it wants to move beyond threats. It makes use of positive sanctions and incentives by giving rewards for good behaviour, good governance and so on.

The governance and democracy initiative

Under the governance and democracy cluster which is led by South Africa, African states are supposed to create conditions for economic and political good governance. This implies liberal democratic and free market conditionalities. It seeks to make Africa attractive to foreign direct investment through, among other things, limiting state interference and reforming the civil service.

The initiative aims to identify and evaluate good practice and to monitor progress on a regular basis. It relies on the use of peer pressure to enhance good governance and democracy, using the so-called African great powers to apply pressure. It is intended to enhance Africa’s ownership of development and to ensure that policies are based on IMF and World Bank best practice. It unashamedly talks about these conditionalities. The doctrine is that Africa will come out strongly against anybody who comes to power through unconstitutional acts. There are certain pretexts for intervention – if sovereignty is under threat, or if instability in one state threatens the stability of other states. However, the will and capacity to intervene is in question.

The G8

After the G8 summit, it is hoped there will be a joint Africa-G8 action plan. The G8 says ‘give us the details, how and where do you want us to invest?’ They want to do an audit of the OAU and its institutions. They are seeking to transform the OAU mechanism for conflict resolution instead of creating a new one. The Nepad secretariat has suggested that the cost of Nepad will be US$64 billion a year plus growth. It is not clear how they arrived at the figures.

I am engaged in research on the cost of wars and what it costs to intervene in them. The G8 could be expected to say that the international response to African crises must speed up. (The response to the Rwanda genocide was very slow.) The G8 will expect Africa to come up with a plan to deal with Africa’s conflicts, to intervene in them, and to stem the proliferation of small arms on the continent. It can also be expected to want the end of the culture of impunity and violence in Africa, for example, what happened in Sierra Leone. I don’t know if Nepad is aware that the G8 uses language like ‘moving towards a regulation for the exploitation of African resources’.

Conclusion

The good news is there is a real world out there that says governance in Africa must engage, it cannot opt out. Disengaging is not an option. Mbeki has to engage with the West. I am worried about the desperate belief that foreign investment will bale us out. I know of no organising principle since the Cold War, Nepad is as good as it is going to get. You will not get another Marshall Plan. I am startled by how Mbeki believes foreign capital will save us. Even if foreign investment is an answer, the willingness to invest is not there. I am worried that it may not work.

Nepad: Fiction or Fantasy?

Peter Vale, Senior Professor at the School of Government and Professor of Social Theory, University of the Western Cape

Nepad is a ‘big idea’. It is very difficult for people to grapple with big ideas in an age of big ideas. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a proliferation of templates to organise the world, for example, globalisation. The ‘new world order’ was once used as an organising principle to counter the East-West view. Chris Landsberg has given us an enunciation of the operations and unfolding of Nepad. He has presented us with a problem-solving matrix. Robert Cox said one can look at the world through problem-solving theory or through critical theory. Critical theory would ask certain questions about Nepad, for example, how it will affect the lives of people, communities and the continent. What does it mean for lives of ordinary people?

Nepad assumes that the idea of states in Africa is completely settled, that there are non-contested identities for analysis and the operation of politics based on national sovereignty. Ian Taylor says South African foreign policy locates itself within multilateralism. This gives South Africa space to reassure that it is doing something about the world, but actually it is playing along with the neo-liberalism game instead.

What is Nepad?

What is Nepad? Sipho Maseko and I described the African Renaissance as the search for a register, a key for the Mbeki presidency. We said there is nothing really in the idea, but it gives the sense of a big idea from South Africa, something like the big ideas that succeeded in moving the US in the 20s and the 30s. But people are asking about the content of this big idea. I don’t know where the African Union fits into this. In a sense the OAU was closing down its shop, but what will happen to the assets of the OAU?

Nepad has been personally identified with Mbeki. Nepad will have to be an incredible site of struggle, but this government will resist any contestation. Nepad is a mediator between South Africa and the continent. This suggests Nepad can change the nature of the conversation, that South Africa has a role as a switcher of the African perspective and will feed it to the rest of the world. If this is the case, South Africa may be used as the West’s gendarmerie in Africa.

Why do we know so little about Nepad? Government has not sold the idea and made it part of the popular imagination. There is no popular book on Nepad, although there are lots of papers. There should be forums for discussion. African identity should be taught in schools. We need to rewrite the history books to infuse the people with this idea. Nepad as a form of politics could be an idea like the one put forward by Steve Biko.

Conforming to neoliberal discourse

In the wider context, Nepad is cast within prevailing neoliberal discourse. There is no suggestion that it is challenging the neoliberal ideology to redistribute social and economic goods and to build the capacity and potential of people to deal with problems like HIV/AIDS.

Chris Landsberg caught the sinister overtones of the ‘making the world safe for democracy’ discourse of the US when he said ‘this is making Africa safe for foreign investment’. This suggests the prospects for Africa’s survival is based on foreign direct investment. If this is the thread of Nepad, then there has been a retreat from the African Renaissance. The quick march to Nepad has been a march to compliance, compellance from neoliberalism.

Nepad can be seen as a good thing in the way the Marshall Plan was a good thing. But this will be a Marshall Plan riddled with conditionalities, dominated by the discourse of trade. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is the only large show in town, and the prospects of Africans being able to influence the WTO are very small. The US writes its own rules, as it did this week on steel, and this undermines the development-governance trade-off.

I don’t agree with the ‘Tina’ argument (‘there is no alternative’) about neoliberalism. There are alternatives. The neoliberalism of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan is the aftermath of the Chicago School of the 60s. Neoliberalism gives power over decisions of life and death with no accountability. We should be concerned about the fact that we have no control over what happens to our currency, for example. I get the sense that not even on the left wing of the African National Congress Alliance are any fresh ideas about alternatives. It is not in our national interest to have a growing gap between rich and poor. If there is a middle way, another way, a third way, I find it difficult to believe that this government and its president will explore that way, because this is a closed political party that is not very good at consulting about things.

The South African transition is not yet over. The current generation think it is closed – they think in terms of the market and the law, that the only mediator in the market is the law. Both are powerful disciplining codes. For the younger generation the matter is closed, it is not a matter of contestation. We have to retheorise social, economic, trade and community so we can look at what kind of world we are trying to create.

The state in Africa

What are African states? African states are not polite and defined with neat settled borders that have been in place for a long time like those of Europe. They are mainly invented. Anderson said states are ‘invented communities’. This is more the case in Africa than anywhere else. Research I have done indicates that people in Lesotho are willing to call themselves citizens of South Africa. Jenny Parsley studied African women traders in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa. The way they saw their identities was in order of priority: 1) women, 2) traders, 3) members of a particular tribe, 4) coming from a particular state. National identity is weak. Problem solvers think that states are like Lego blocks that are defined. The idea that you can trade governance and development is not an easy idea.

Many say the spatial development initiatives (SDIs) are an attempt to do this, as are cross-frontier conservation ‘peace parks’. These are good initiatives, but they are mired within neoliberal economics. Their capacity to bring lasting change are limited. They tie up police and lawmakers in repatriating migrants. State and sovereignty are not settled in Africa or anywhere else.

Peace and security

It is difficult to see how institutions for peace can be erected. If it is assumed that states are the organising principle for peace, it is impossible to have peace. People will continue to cross borders, states will continue to respond strongly, and this will result in conflict.

The post Cold War ways of dealing with this are: prevention of conflict, peace making, peace keeping and enforcing the peace. This is how strong states impose their will on weak states, for example, South Africa’s invasion of Lesotho. The US intervened militarily in Guatemala, Haiti and elsewhere. This is a rerun of the strong dominating the weak. The lives of individual people will not be improved like this.

When it comes to security, we have to ask ‘security for whom’ and ‘who will be the instrument?’ The metaphors for South Africa’s trade with the rest of Africa are all military – words like ‘assault’ and ‘capture’ are used to describe it. This suggests an aggressive, assertive way of interacting with Africa.

Liberal democracy is not the panacea for Africa’s problems. We can talk about going beyond democracy, monitoring progress, exerting peer pressure, but we cannot resolve the conflicts within Africa’s politics.

An alternative to Nepad

The forest always yields more. Africa’s citizens have retreated from the state. The state is incapable of exerting itself – just look at how badly it has done on AIDS. How will we recapture people? It is extremely hard thinking not to think about the power of the Lego blocks of states, but about the power of what constitutes communities instead. We need to look beyond states, above and below states, we need to look at communities.

States are only one of a number of players in the world. There is a group of people in southern Africa – about five million of them, and their identity is clear and settled. They are the members of the Zionist Christian Church. They are a social, political and economic community across the borders of states. We privilege states and sovereignty, but people’s lives are not only defined by states. They are defined by a multiplicity of identities. If you privilege states for a rather fragile thing called sovereignty, if you allow only states to make decisions, you will get elites, and they will not be accountable.

Larry Swatuk and I did research on water as an organising principle. One of the successes of southern Africa is how the states have shared sovereignty around water. Water is a major way of solving problems between the most difficult conflicts. Instead of using calculations to cost wars as a way of justifying aid, we should look at how communities solve problems: water, health, food, the environment and afforestation. This is not a quick exciting solution to the problems. It is not a headlines issue to document people dealing democratically and in an empowering way with problems. Nepad is a big idea driven by figures from elsewhere. It is cast within an ideological framework, and within a framework which casts states as a way of doing the work.

Negotiating the terms of Nepad

We want an Africa which has a larger voice in international affairs, which has economic development, jobs, and which stems the losses of things African. Is Nepad the vehicle for this, or is it a stalking horse for neoliberalism? Are the terms already negotiated? If they are, we should resist it. We will be worse off in 50 years if Nepad goes ahead in its current form.

The most popular vehicle for transmission of political ideas is culture, for example, the theatre. If the terms of Nepad are closed already, in three years, it will be derided at the Grahamstown Festival. If the terms are open for negotiation, it will appear as a form of critical engagement that is exciting.

If the government is open to negotiation about Nepad, then Nepad provides an opportunity to fill the concept with a multiplicity of ideas and lots of energy. If the government’s agenda is not open, and it calls opponents to the idea counter-revolutionaries, then we should resist Nepad.

Summary of debate points, thematically arranged

Nepad has the potential to move Africa forward

The idea of the African Renaissance and Nepad are the first initiatives since the 50s and 60s in Africa which have epochal possibilities. It has real possibilities for moving the continent forward as one. Few continents are able to move forward as one. Economics leads everything, this is a political project, people are buying into an idea.
Nepad should show it is an African solution. Nepad’s architects need to reinforce the unique value of Africa.
Because we have had to deal with 350 years of colonialism, 50 years of apartheid and 100 years of a mining economy by big companies, we have developed a dependence on Big Brother, the government, the West. This is part of the malaise. We need to build up our own identity, self-confidence and self-reliance. Nepad can help us to do this.

Nepad means different things to different people

If you ask President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya about Nepad, he would say it is about getting around the conditionalities of the IMF. President Obasanjo of Nigeria would say it is about infrastructure. Mbeki says it is about software. Nepad is a protean vision which changes every week. Very few African leaders really understand what is in the Nepad document – only five people understand it, and four of them are in South Africa.

South Africa could learn from other African countries

Should the rest of the continent look like South Africa? Maybe Nepad will allow us to come to an understanding of the rest of the continent and learn why, for example, West African entrepreneurs are better and Kenyan farmers more efficient. We may learn some useful things about how we should look.

A framework for accountability

How do we Africans hold our leaders accountable, how do we counter elites? Mbeki may also want push for a third term some time in the future. How do we get leaders to adopt rules and stick by them? Our leaders must be held accountable. This is not Europe where there are shared norms and values, and where conditionalities can be imposed on EU members or potential EU member states.
Nepad potentially provides a mechanism for holding elites and leaders accountable for providing real solutions to people’s problems on the ground.

Negotiating the terms of Nepad

Nepad is tremendously top-down, if only five African leaders understand it and only 19 agree.
The lack of participation and ownership of Nepad is a problem. It cannot work if it is top-down, it requires civil society input.
There are fundamental problems with Nepad. Ordinary people fought the struggle, but their names are not recorded. If Nepad is based on an elite few, it disregards the people’s ability to intervene. It is not just about changing the picture of Africa, it relies too much on big world issues. The alternative comes from the bottom up. The principle behind the process is a public-private partnership, but the partnership is not in place. The biggest issue about conditionality is whether countries can translate the principles of Nepad into something which is locally appropriate and focused on programmatic areas in the Nepad document such as rural development, food security and agriculture.

I am not sure whether it is acceptable or not, what are the alternatives? What can we do to disseminate the information to the person in the street? Will the masses be interested? For people to buy into Nepad, it should be localised as far as possible so they can own it.
There has not been enough rallying of the troops around the continent. Nepad preaches to the converted, only its five core members are marching on.
Nepad is a strategy for us to hold a vision of the future. We need to pay attention to several issues. 1) Process-related issues – participation, encouraging debates, bringing in civil society, making debates relevant. There must be a structure to accommodate public participation. 2) Achieving clarity about the strategy itself, and making it accessible to people, especially to South Africans. It is not to know enough about Mbeki. 3) Defining priorities that balance local and continental needs. Contintental agendas must inform what benefits arise. If we don’t deal with issues such as crime, job creation, entrepreneurship we will be shooting ourselves in the foot. 4) Countries must ensure that the conditionalities for Nepad to be a success are regularised, that there are rules for what to do.
We are bound to hear a lot more from the uncritically pro-Nepad cheerleaders in the next year or two. We need to keep justice in place as a core value.. I would like to see the notion of conflict resolution and peace building receive a high priority, and ask difficult questions about the easy way in which the arms deal was linked to Nepad.
The drivers of Nepad need to step back to bring people on board – the small players – to ensure they do not sabotage it later. Nepad should be removed from personal identification with Mbeki.
This could be an opportunity for dialogue between civil society groups in Africa to engage with the programme. There are choices in the document – you can choose the emphasis. Because donors want to fund health and education, organisations working in these areas should push these things as Nepad priorities.
Nepad is unstoppable. It is not set in stone, but there is broad agreement in the now nearly extinct Organisation of African Unity, and this will be endorsed by the African Union meeting in July. The World Bank and the IMF and others are in general agreement on the acceptability and importance of Nepad. Africa is at the end of its period of pessimism, it is coming out of the negativity of the post-independence era.
We can always resist and protest against Nepad, just as we have done with globalisation. I don’t agree with Nepad, but since it is there, we need to analyse it and establish who it benefits. Societies are made up of different class interests. In South Africa if we wanted to canvass the mass of people’s opinions on Nepad, we would first have to consult about structural adjustment and Gear with the workers and the unemployed. We may then be able to negotiate an African solution.
The Nepad document is flimsy, and there is not enough detail about its institutional mechanisms. It could be an elaborate wish list, or it could be something that can be implemented.

South Africa is a key to Nepad’s success or failure

The winners of investment as a result of Nepad are likely to be middle-income countries with stable government and good infrastructure. South Africa will get richer, which will make it more attractive to migrants, potentially destabilising it. Nepad is about rewarding winners and punishing losers.

Nepad will stand or fall by the extent to which South Africa drives and invests in it. Institutions such as the Africa Institute must proactively drive it, and promote a consciousness around it. We should promote university exchange programmes within Africa, promote intellectual dialogue around Nepad and the African Union. We have to bring imagination to this idea. If this is to be self-sustaining, it must be tied to material benefits for Africa. We need to use the African Parliament to push it forward.
One of the problems of talk about the African Renaissance is that it will happen somewhere in Africa. It has to happen here in South Africa. We must do it, we can’t say it must happen somewhere else. Nepad is far too top-down and leadership-driven. There must be a massive campaign so that all levels of society will be included. There must be a massive attempt to popularise Nepad and make people understand it. The hype is that Mbeki goes off to the G8 and gets promises. People think if we get our house in order, the West will save us. It will not. Nepad is Africa wanting to save itself. It should be seen as a call to action by Africans, and it should include programmes and action on programmes. Government must see that the people who must implement the programmes know what they are – national, provincial, civil society, so that they can see what they must do.

Nepad and world governance

Mbeki really thinks about the need to change the international machinery. He wants to ensure that South Africa is one of the countries that is able to affect this machinery. This year’s G8 summit will be the third G8 meeting in a row to which he has been invited. As a result of its association with Nepad, South Africa will be one of six countries to call the shots at the WTO. South Africa is punching well above its weight.
The club of world governance will not change the rules for Mbeki.

Development in Africa requires cancelling the debt first, then addressing the question of power in international political relations. The WTO and the World Bank talk about sustainable development, equity and other good things, but it is all talk. We need to remove the US veto on the UN Security Council, give Africa a bigger vote in the UN and abolish the World Bank and the IMF.

Nepad on natural resources, agriculture and economics

Some important areas are not covered well in Nepad. It is thin on natural resources, it is thin on agriculture (which is the bedrock of economic enterprise in Africa), the economic analysis is thin, and it contains nothing about rural development.

A Marshall Plan?

The Marshall Plan succeeded because of what the Europeans did themselves. Nepad is a chance for a mature partnership where the North is seen as part of the solution but not the solution.
The Marshall Plan took the form of grants, not loans. We should not take more loans, these will get us into more trouble.

Nepad and liberal democracy

It is unfortunate that the kind of democracy we have is pejoratively tagged as ‘liberal’. Liberal democracy is a principle of the African Union. Liberal democracy is not important just because the West wants it. It is necessary.
The establishment of liberal democracy and the rule of law can lead to a mushrooming of civil society institutions which keep governments in check. In Burkina Faso, society put the government out of power by going on strike.

Everybody would agree that human rights, accountability, good governance, freedom of the press and personal freedom are important and should be protected. However, the representivity factor of liberal democracy is insufficient. The people are too far removed from decision making.

The institutional form of Nepad

Nepad has a document and a programme, but it is not clear what the institution that backs it is. Is it a voluntary club of 19 members, or will it be like the African Union? Who manages, monitors and intervenes in conflict? I would like to see the institutional mechanisms which will give it form.

Collective commitment, collective responsibility

If Nepad only binds a few selected states, we may still be left with rogue states on our borders. Investors who don’t want to go into high risk areas will be affected. The closer you are seen to be in a union, the more you are affected negatively if there is a rotten apple in the basket. When you are in a union it becomes more difficult to say ‘we are not like the others in the union’. The government has on a few occasions said it rejects the idea of collective punishment if one member should stumble and fall. A collective commitment will bring advantages, but the danger is that a breach of the collective rules taints every party in the collective.
Nepad is a double-edged sword – there are enormous opportunities, but the let-down could be bad. A lot of African countries that deserve investment have not been able to do so because they have a bad name in foreign eyes. Nepad says Africa will be getting its act together, but when things go wrong, all African countries will be tarred with the same brush. The long-term negative consequences could be worse than the potential benefits.

Is Nepad aimed at giving the West what it wants?

Nepad has been painted as an Africanised version of what the G8 wants. In the 1980s, the African Leadership Forum worked on a document which was tabled in 1991, long before the G8 was in operation. African states themselves realised they must take control. It was not driven merely by the West, Africa started to take responsibility at that time. Nepad is not just Africa doing what the West wants.
Too close an embrace by the West could kill Nepad, it must not be changed to suit the West.
Africa’s relationship with the industrialised world is only one of Nepad’s elements. It is not only about the markets and how the West interacts with that.

The response of Northern countries

The level of interest in Nepad by the international community is extraordinary, considering that people said Africa was going to be off the agenda after the events of 11 September 2001. The challenge to Northern governments is, ‘if globalisation is so wonderful how can an entire continent be left out?’ After 11 September, it was said that any part of the world left out of the benefits of globalisation would come back at the North in vicious and unexpected ways. Nepad is by Africa, for Africa. Because Nepad was the first analysis that did not proceed from colonialism, it has created great interest in the international community.

Geoffrey Sachs, who is probably the most influential writer on development economics at the moment, is a profound critic of neoliberalism. He has said we need to understand that Nepad is there to make South Africa safe by making the rest of Africa look like South Africa. We now have a country on the continent that is a model – it is democratic, it has open markets, it promotes small, medium and micro enterprise, it is based on a redistributive principle, and it emphasises health and education. The West wants the miracle to be reproduced elsewhere in the world. Sachs has said South Africa’s constitution makes it seem like it wants to be like Denmark.

We have 45% unemployment in South Africa. We are the most unequal society in the world. We cannot be a model for Africa as we are, this would mean throwing our dream into the dustbin.
Mbeki has told the West, even though they don’t want to listen, that they have a responsibility to Africa. They may not want to work with us, but we must keep sending out the message, because public opinion can be mobilised in our support.

Overseas development aid

Only Canada has come up with more aid, Japan and Denmark have both cut back. It is likely that there will be less aid in future, but Africa is saying ‘put your money on the table before we come up with the political will to implement this’.
Donors are looking for model countries they can work with. They want to draw a distinction between projects they will support in model countries and universal aid priorities like humanitarian aid, education and health. By playing a key role in Nepad, South Africa is taking the opportunity to be seen by donors as a model country.

Is Nepad a framework for regional domination?

Nepad’s Achilles’ heel is that it is a smokescreen for neo-colonialism within Africa. It is three or four countries dividing Africa up. Countries could have the idea they have the right to intervene in other countries.
Nepad will facilitate regional domination by regional powers. Paul Kennedy’s pivotal state theory said the US should choose eight states around the world and use them as its local gendarmerie to keep the peace among the other states.
Counter-Nepad alliances could arise among the states which are left out of the benefits of the plan.

Intervention in conflict situations

In 1998 Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa made a military intervention in the constitutional crisis in Lesotho. Outside commentators were impressed, but I doubt if any countries would intervene in a constitutional crisis in Zimbabwe, Botswana or South Africa.
Some have said there is a sinister link between shared sovereignty around water and the invasion of Lesotho in 1998 – that the capture of the Katse Dam during the invasion of Lesotho was planned. In fact, it was a spur of the moment decision by a South African military commander.

Peer review and the situation in Zimbabwe

Nepad is based on Africans judging Africans. Peer review is an idea in Nepad, but is not fully internalised yet.
Nepad could fail this weekend if the election in Zimbabwe goes badly because peer review will be seen to have been ineffective.
‘Peer review’ will be a used to justify constructing clubs of states. One of the great myths of southern Africa has to do with the Frontline States alliance to oppose South African destabilisation in the region. Presidents went into a dark room and cooked it up. It was not set up in a democratic way, so it could not be called peer review. It is impossible to exercise peer review in Zimbabwe.
Western countries think Mbeki has not taken a strong enough stance on Zimbabwe.
The view that Mbeki has been inactive on Zimbabwe overlooks what has happened behind the scenes between him and Mugabe. Note that Mugabe was not invited to join the Nepad group. I am disturbed by the double standards that are applied – even though Zambia just had a deeply-disputed election, the World Bank and the IMF lifted their curbs immediately. Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo tried to convince Mugabe to step down, they offered him a dignified way out, but this was refused.

Foreign investment, trade not aid, technology transfer

You can attract investment in a dictatorship, but if the government is not democratic, the wealth goes to the elite. Nepad could suggest foreign investment should take place only in African countries which facilitate the transfer of wealth to their citizens.
Nepad is not just about attracting foreign capital for the continent. Other elements include replacing aid with trade and technology transfer.
Governments can do very little to attract investment – they can offer tax advantages and some other things, but they cannot invest themselves. The market does this. When you block the market, you block investment. In the North, the problems are of affluence, in the South they are about poverty. Governments don’t invest, companies do. We must make Africa attractive to investors. We have 45–50% unemployed, half of the people are below the poverty datum line, the gap between rich and poor is getting bigger. I am not arguing for unleashing the markets, I am talking about managing the benefits of foreign investment.

Nepad is about foreign investment, opening up markets to Africa, getting into technology exchange. In Malawi 70% of the population faces starvation each year. Starvation does not feature. Why talk about Nepad with people when they are starving? What are we doing about the fact that they are starving? The world produces enough food for the world to eat, but we are preaching to starving people about the flow of foreign investment.
Investment decisions are informed by the banking system, the availability of a pool of qualified employees, the availability of black professionals, labour rules, minimum wages, high minimum health and safety standards, levels of crime, levels of education and AIDS.
Privileged access can be allowed to the US market if it provides significant benefits in terms of development. This is a potential Nepad quid pro quo. South Africa is relatively advantaged for trade with the US compared to, for example, Japan. The Americans are talking about a free trade arrangement with SA.

In order to argue its case against the big five before the WTO, the US gave this exemption to South Africa. Allowing access to developing countries is one of the entries to international institutions – the WTO and the UN Security Council. Nepad is becoming a roleplayer in changing international institutions.

Nepad is a double-edged sword – there are enormous opportunities, but the let-down could be bad. A lot of African countries that deserve investment have not been able to do so because they have a bad name in foreign eyes. Nepad says Africa will be getting its act together, but when things go wrong, all African countries will be tarred with the same brush. The long-term negative consequences could be worse than the potential benefits.

Economic enterprise, access to finance, open markets, globalisation

The neoliberal economic analysis is a political given, it is part of the international consensus. Nepad is about creating an enabling environment for economic enterprise. It emphasises non-government access to finance. Overseas development aid is seen as only the third or fourth on a list of resources. It is about accessing international markets and using internal resources. At the moment, 90% of savings and investment generated in Africa goes abroad, that is why Nepad’s focus on improving internal markets and strengthening internal trade is so good.

The promise of open market access and greater trade is one of the reasons why the Western countries are interested in Nepad. The fact that we have deregulated and opened our markets to more efficient, more technologically advanced economies with lower wages is what stops South Africa from developing. First world countries developed their economies internally. All rich countries developed behind protective barriers of some kind because at the time enclosing their capital was thought to be acceptable. Now it is not. Governments in those countries were able to regulate and to discourage things which were bad for those economies. This is no longer considered to be acceptable. We are expected to open our markets in return for a set of quid pro quos, but what is the West’s quid pro quo? They are not opening their markets to us, there is not enough pressure on them. There is no pressure on the UK government, the US government or the French government. They have put off opening their markets for a decade. I don’t believe they will ever open their markets.
Globalisation is going to be driven by G8 and has to be resisted. In that interplay there will be a dynamic. The thesis is that globalisation is here to stay, the antithesis is that the victims of globalisation will take it on. There is a structural economic power shift between Western countries and the Asians, East and West.
Globalisation is not a policy, it is a process that has being going on in humankind for the longest time. Some of the instruments to regulate the process must be reformed, there must be global input, not just a big brother input. Nepad is an attempt to say how Africa can lock into globalisation to get its benefits.
Globalisation is not a natural process, all the work done on it suggests it has been driven by the interests of the developed world. Resisting this is not running away from it, it is engaging with it. If the deal is done, we should find a way to resist it – a counter-Nepad exercise.

Can African states be used as a basis for achieving the goals of Nepad?

There is a tendency to generalise about how dysfunctional African states are, but things are not the same across all the countries of the continent. Since the Cold War we have more states and more demands for sovereignty. Nepad does not want to open up the debates around 1885 carving up of Africa between the colonial powers and the imposition of state borders. It is a clear attempt to consolidate the situation with all its flaws.
How do we move beyond the idea that 53 states can speak with one voice?
How do you balance the rights of states with the rights of people? We cannot just move to a post-sovereignty world.
The first identification people have may be as Africans, rather than as citizens of particular states. There is a lack of understanding about African community beyond seeing people as citizens of states.
A recent survey of South Africa says there is a rapidly growing gap between rich and poor – 23:1 in the black community. We are not a nation in that sense.

Nepad, the ANC, neoliberalism and ‘getting the fundamentals right’

The IMF, the World Bank and the WTO have created a debt trap, making the poor get poorer. The whole logic of this system is based on countries making their economies attractive to foreign capital. We will fail to come up with real solutions if we stay in the neoliberal framework which Nepad has taken on without question.
Poverty is growing. Nepad and the Growth, Employment and Redistribution macroeconomic strategy (Gear) are in crisis because their promise of delivering a growing economy with more employment is not being met. Neoliberalism does not work. The economy is shedding jobs, not addressing poverty.
The ‘economic fundamentals’ of South Africa are said to be in place, yet the rewards for this austerity have not been forthcoming.
How can Western partners reward us for ‘getting the fundamentals right’ – they have no control over economic globalisation and people moving money across the world.

The neoliberal discourse says ‘there is no alternative’ (Tina). But there are a set of alternatives that have been put forward by, for example, the South African New Economics Foundation and others. Neoliberalism gives people the power over life and death decisions with no accountability. We should be concerned about the fact that we have no control over what happens to, for example, our currency.
All will agree 50% unemployment and heavy poverty is not in the national interest. We do not have the fundamentals in place as long as people do not have a means of earning a livelihood. The idea of rewarding winners and punishing losers is appalling. The world economy’s rules are now that the people who have more get more, those with less get less.

It is not a given that South Africa’s transition is over. There is still contestation about the character of its political economy. We should not think those we disagree with do not have a point to make. We have the challenge of restructuring, and there are useful elements in neoliberalism that could help us do this. Maynard Keynes and others debated the role of the market in the 60s, and this was crystallised by Margaret Thatcher. There is a role for the market, but it should be circumscribed. It cannot do everything it claims to be able to do.
Are we hoping Nepad will make Africa like Europe, or are we wanting something else? Do we have to have the violence of the Industrial Revolution and the way it denuded areas?
Point 65 of the Nepad document says the continent must ‘catch up’ with the rest of the world. ‘Catching up’ traps us in the ‘there is no alternative’ perspective.
As a result of dramatic changes in the price of oil, there were massive changes in the world’s financial system. There was lots of money in the banks, so they lent it out. Neoliberalism was a response to the inability of Keynsian economics to deal with all the money in the world economy that came from oil. South Africa has been under pressure from the corporate sector to open its markets. This was a mistake. We need an expanding market. People would want to invest, you would not have to persuade them. Our problem is lack of demand. We have created scarcity.

Decision making in the ANC, the Basic Income Grant, industrial policy

Mbeki was in exile when people faced the guns in South Africa. When he came back, he made a choice for the policies of the IMF and the World Bank. We cannot always take the line of least resistance – it means poverty for millions. The poor don’t have a choice, they suffer and die. Mbeki is the leader of a supposedly democratic party, but when Cosatu goes on strike, he does not look at what they are saying, he vilifies the leaders, calling them counter-revolutionaries. This is what will happen to African states that question the logic of neoliberalism. Governments should come together and to unite with their people.
The ANC should not be castigated as a group of people who don’t care about the poor. The ANC has great capacity to absorb different opinions in its various parts, matters are up for debate. This can be seen, for example, in the way Nelson Mandela came into the AIDS debate even though he is an ex-president. But Mbeki has launched the most radical project since the 1950s in the Letsema volunteerism project, using the masses. Under Mbeki’s leadership there has been more continuing engagement with the left wing of the Alliance. Nothing is concluded in SA, don’t underestimate the ability of the ANC to take on a new thing, for example, the Basic Income Grant. Even though Trevor Manuel has spoken against the grant, the ANC is protecting the idea. Industrial policy has taken years – the debate is only maturing now. Minister Alec Erwin has drawn up a new industrial policy document which has made everyone in the South African Communist Party Central Committee happy.
Mbeki’s volunteerism campaign could be seen as a historic innovation, or it could be seen as a way of copying George Bush to try to get the state to reconnect with the people.
The organisers of this Forum really tried to get someone from government to talk about Nepad, but were unable to do so. People need to get involved. We are not clear about what this all means, let us engage with this thing. We need to push for more information.

The ‘national interest’

It is important in the national interest that we continue democracy to protect human rights and personal freedoms.
It is not in our national interest to have a growing gap between rich and poor. It is not in the national interest that our president is seen to be out there talking and "schmoozing" with the rich and famous of the world. This is not a good idea when people in the country and in the region are doing so badly.

Crisis in the universities

Every university in South Africa is in free fall because they have no resources to continue. Our neoliberal economic policy is now allowing our own people to lose the most valuable resources. Australian universities are coming here. The government does not believe it has an alternative. Trevor Manual would rather buy weapons than make resources available for the universities.

Nation states are not free to do as they wish

Nation states have sovereignty, but they cannot do what they want to. Most governments are severely limited by what they perceive to be risk of economic punishment from forces beyond their control. You can be punished or rewarded for your policies. Our government has been told by the rich countries it was one thing to be a liberation movement, but they can pull the plug on us. There are pressures from international bodies and various countries. Some are benign, some are not. We are asked about what are we doing about Zimbabwe, but we are not told what we should be doing, and we are punished for it. The UK government did not impose sanctions on South Africa in the days of apartheid.
People have spoken about the nature of the market as an invisible hand in which government does not have power. However, it is within the power of the state to change things like crime and immigration policy (which, for example, kept a senior executive of a large mining country from returning to the country recently).