Can Thabo Mbeki save Africa? Surely not, since no single human being could have that much impact on such a huge, complicated, famously troubled continent. A more pertinent question might be: Can South Africa's President convince the rest of the world that Africa means business? The prospects are better for this task. Mbeki, along with a handful of other continental leaders, will be attempting just that when they push their New Plan for Africa's Development (NEPAD) at the World Economic Forum's Africa Economic Summit in Durban this week. That effort is a prelude to presenting the plan later this month to the toughest of customers, the Group of Eight industrialized countries, at their next meeting in Canada.
Born out of various plans discussed over the past three years by Mbeki, Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo and Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika, NEPAD — once known as the New Africa Initiative — is an enticing offer to the international community. In return for increased aid, investment, debt relief and trade opportunities, African states would commit themselves to democracy, good governance and peace. Mbeki has emerged as the chief salesman for NEPAD, which has been described as a Marshall Plan for Africa, with annual investment of $64 billion. If he can market it as the development arm of the new African Union that will be inaugurated in South Africa next month to replace the old Organization of African Unity, with himself as first chairman, he might accomplish what decades of foreign handouts, hectoring and hand wringing have failed to do: boost growth rates and reverse Africa's economic decline.
Many Africans think he has no choice but to succeed: NEPAD, they say, could be the continent's last hope for joining the global economy. As Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told a symposium in Addis Ababa last week: "In the present global environment, we all survive or sink together."
Mbeki's own senior economic adviser, Wiseman Nkuhlu, heads NEPAD's steering committee, which is drawing up in detail the required principles of good political and economic governance. Mbeki says these will not only be endorsed by the African Union but will also be guaranteed by an independent, nonpolitical, African peer-review system. "The element that has enabled the marketing of NEPAD is that it is an African initiative," he told journalists last month. "We are making our own commitments about democracy, about peace, about corruption and about our homegrown efforts to put our own resources into development." At an Africa Day briefing on NEPAD, hosted by South African diplomats in London, Nigeria's High Commissioner Christopher Kolade said the plan was the product of a new generation of African leaders who "no longer tolerate the perception of Africa as a continent of infinite woes."
NEPAD is laying down some tough rules for membership. Countries that want to join will have to sign up to a Democracy and Political Governance Initiative that demands specific obligations and required actions toward good governance conforming to international standards. They include parliamentary democracy, fixed terms of office for national leaders and an independent judiciary. Members will also have to agree to an independent peer review every three years on how they are living up to their NEPAD obligations.
Considering that probably a third of Africa's 53 states, including
some of NEPAD's own founding committee, do not meet the plan's criteria
for membership, the three-year peer review period might allow them
enough time to get their acts together. As it is, NEPAD's members
will be listed under four categories: those that comply with its obligations,
those that need a little help to meet them, those that need some serious
persuasion and those that require political and economic reconstruction
from the ground up (the latter are mostly countries, such as Angola
and Sierra Leone, that have endured long-running civil wars). Although
countries like Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe and tiny Swaziland, which
is ruled by an absolute monarch, have pointedly been left out of NEPAD's
formative negotiations, as members of the African Union they and others
with dubious democratic credentials will presumably get a chance to
sign up for NEPAD, which will be adopted as the A.U.'s development
plan.
