A new paradigm
The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is a continental initiative spearheaded by several African leaders, including our own President, cde Thabo Mbeki. NEPAD has been formerly adopted by the AU, and it has provoked major discussion and debate within our own country, in many parts of the continent, and in important international forums.
From a South African perspective, the NEPAD initiative (and the general vision underpinning it - the struggle for an "African renewal" or "renaissance") marks an important potential shift from the dominant international relations paradigm that prevailed in the first years after the 1994 democratic breakthrough. In the period immediately after 1994, "normalising" our diplomatic, sporting, trade, cultural and other relations with the rest of the world was the dominant paradigm. "Normalising" often meant, implicitly, "aligning" our policies and programmes with "international best practice", "bench-marking" ourselves against an assumed "norm", in a world that was assumed to be, fundamentally, "normal".
This paradigm was so powerful that even in our own movement we often talked about the end of "our" isolation - as if the belated and only partial isolation of the apartheid regime, for which we had struggled, had been "our" isolation. The paradigm obscured the deep complicity of imperialism and white minority rule in South (and southern) Africa, and it obscured the persisting reality of imperialism as the dominant world system.
These concerns were elaborated at our 10th Congress in July 1998, and they were raised at some length in the programme that was adopted at that Congress. We said at the time:
"Forgetfulness about the immediate past, and confusion about the present lead in turn, to a naРїve understanding of how South Africa should now engage with international realities. This engagement is often presented as a simple `return' to the `family of nations', as a programme to `integrate' ourselves as fully and as rapidly as possible into a generally benign global order."
Potentially, NEPAD enables us to approach the challenges of our country and continent from a different
perspective. The world is not "normal", and the plight of Africa is not "normal". From the outset, the
NEPAD document evokes the concept of "underdevelopment" to characterize the underlying reasons for Africa's
marginalisation.
Underdevelopment is not undeveloped, it is not isolation, it is the consequence of an integration of a
particular kind into the global capitalist system. Specifically, NEPAD notes that Africa's recent
integration into the global system has been by way of credit (which is to say by way of an unsustainable
debt burden) and aid (which is diminishing) -
"the credit and aid binomial has underlined the logic of
African development. Credit has led to the debt deadlock, which, from instalments to rescheduling, still
exists and hinders the growth of African countries. The limits of this option have been reached."
Africa's crisis of underdevelopment
The NEPAD document identifies the following key features of our continent's crisis of underdevelopment:
- The state in most African countries is weak, and therefore unable to play an effective developmental role. A major challenge is to strengthen the cohesion, vitality and participatory dimensions of national politics within African societies, thereby strengthening the capacity of states to govern and to lead long-term strategies;
- There is very little sustainable accumulation capable of grounding effective growth and development. Political weaknesses aggravate this problem - many states do not have budgets, and government economic activity is often reduced, at best, to the management of aid programmes, and, at worst, to patronage and corruption.
- Infrastructure (energy, telecommunications, transport) is weakly developed and skewed towards the interests of transnational corporations and the former colonial powers;
- Agricultur is in a serious crisis, and there is little beneficiation of agricultural produce within the continent;
- Patterns of trade further exacerbate the accumulation crisis. Most trade is with the North, and it is on unfavourable terms. Intra-African trade is, generally, non-existent or weakly developed
- Human resource are also gravely under-developed, there are high levels of illiteracy,
increasing numbers of African professionals, intellectuals, technical experts are located outside
of our continent, in a new diaspor. Within our continent there are very impressive pockets of
excellence, but there is little co-ordination between them, and, once more, the dominant points
of contact and co-operation are with the North;
- There is a major health crisis- with health systems (often dismantled by structural adjustment programmes, or by lack of capacity) in collapse. The food supply crisis impacts on the health crisis. There is a deadly resurgence of diseases that are, in fact, curable - cholera, TB, malaria. In addition to all of the above, there is the HIV/AIDS epidemic, with the UNAids estimating that 55 million Africans will die prematurely of AIDS by 2020;
- The accumulation of these and other crises also threatens the African environment. Yet, Africa's environmental resources (especially the most extensive rain-forests remaining in the world) are an important global resource and critical for the sustainability of the global environment.
At the heart of NEPAD are African-initiated strategies to overcome the crisis of under-development, and the strategies include:
- Mobilising for good political governance - this includes targeted capacity-building and institution reforms to ensure - effective administrative and civil services; strengthening parliamentary oversight; promoting participatory decision-making; adopting effective measures to combat corruption and embezzlement; and undertaking judicial reform;
- Fostering good economic and corporate governance - including prioritisaton of public financial management;
- The mobilisation of resources and effective strategic planning for - infrastructural development, that connects African countries (ICT, energy and transport); human resource development and the reversing of the brain drain; health infrastructure and programmes; turning around agriculture including beneficiation; deepening intra-African trade and campaigning for access to markets of developed countries for Africa's exports.
- The environment initiative targets eight sub-themes for priority intervention - combating desertification, wetland conservation, dealing with invasive species, coastal management, global warming, cross-border conservation areas, effective environmental governance, and financing for all of the above.
The SACP strongly endorses the broad thrust of all these. Carried through with consistency and determination, and guided by the principle of "with and for the workers and the poor", these pillars of NEPAD constitute (potentially) an enormously progressive line-of-march.
There are, however, some weaknesses and a number of potentially grave dangers within the NEPAD initiative that need to be addressed and vigilantly combated.
Weaknesses and potential dangers
There are several weaknesses that many have pointed to, and, in regard to at least some of which, the main protagonists of the NEPAD initiative have readily conceded:
- The lack of inclusivity (so far) in the process - while a core component of the NEPAD vision is of
popular involvement in Africa's renewal, of participatory policy-making, etc., so far the initiative
has been driven and largely confined to the inter-governmental level within Africa, and between Africa
and multi-lateral global institutions and the governments of the developed North. Even within Africa,
only some African governments are relatively active. The SACP regards these realities as challenges to be met and overcome, and not reasons to dismiss NEPAD. For us, the question is not so much "Where is NEPAD coming from?" as "Where do we, collectively, take NEPAD to?". The SACP intends to engage actively with the NEPAD process, and we intend to mobilize our own South African constituency, and our allies in Africa and internationally to be involved with, to discuss, debate and to help to shape this critical strategic initiative.
- Both the existing NEPAD document and the current initial institutional set-up are weak in regard
to gender. Little attention has been paid, so far, to the ways in which Africa's underdevelopment crisis is impacting on African women, and yet this is an entirely critical dimension. In its institutional arrangements, in its analysis and programmes, and in its participatory and mobilisational efforts, the NEPAD initiative must give much greater emphasis to women in our continent.
- In the view of the SACP, the NEPAD document in its present form under-estimates the critical role
of a progressive, strategic public and parastatal sector for driving development, especially
infrastructural development. It is our view that, notwithstanding vagueness in the document in this
respect, in actuality the major NEPAD-inspired infrastructural programmes that are beginning to unfold in our continent are often spear-headed by publicly-owned African parastatals - not least our own Eskom, Telkom, Spoornet, Port Operations and National Port Authority, Air Traffic Navigational Services, Civil Aviation Authority, SA Airways, and the IDC.
- Perhaps the greatest challenge for, and the greatest danger in the NEPAD initiative, is how to
conceptualise and implement the core concept of a "partnership". NEPAD, correctly
(although not always consistently), understands that Africa's underdevelopment is a crisis not
of absolute isolation from the world, but of a particularly distorted, inequitable, unsustainable
and oppressive integration into the global economy. Critical to any African renewal is, then, the transformation of this particular form of integration - hence the concept of a "new partnership" between Africa and the developed North. But what exactly is this "partnership"?
A new partnership?
For all of the reasons outlined in the first section of this chapter (in which we deal with the core features and underlying causes of the current phase of capitalist-driven "globalisation"),
the SACP believes that we must be extremely circumspect in our expectations in regard to the willingness and even capacity of the governments of the developed North, of the multi-lateral economic institutions, and of trans-national corporations to play a significant role in any African growth and development process.
But this does not mean that we must not try to win strategic and material support from these quarters. There are at least three reasons why there might be some space for manoeuvre in this regard:
- The global capitalist crisis is, in part, a crisis of productivity outstripping demand, itself the
consequence of large parts of humanity (not least in Africa) living in abject poverty. The response
of the developed North, and of the major trans-nationals is characterised by short-term measures
(the continued enforcement of debt repayments, scattered and largely self-interested aid projects,
enforced liberalisation that undermines development and growth in the South, protectionism and
flirtation with xenophobic currents in the North, financialisation as opposed to investment in
infrastructure and productive plant, etc.). All of these responses simply perpetuate the crisis in
the South and…less acutely, but no less certainly in the long run, in the North. The strategic
impasse in global economic governance, which is more acknowledged now than in the 1990s, provides
some space for bold engagements to consider a new paradigm for Africa's integration into the global
economy.
- The post-Cold War period has been widely conceptualised as a period in which there are prospects
for advancing and consolidating "shared human values" - human rights, democratisation. Of course,
there are competing class (and other) versions around the content of these shared human values.
But, again, as communists, as South Africans and as Africans we should not shy away from this
challenge, but seek to give it progressive content. In particular, we should not confine ourselves
to intra-governmental partnerships, or engagements with the multi-lateral global institutions.
We need to build partnerships with a wide range of progressive social movements, not least in the
North.
- The grave threat to the world's environment, and the inescapable fact that Africa's natural resources are a major asset in the struggle to preserve the conditions for the survival of human civilisation.
The challenge of an attempted neo-liberal hegemony over NEPAD
We should not be surprised to find that powerful forces internationally, much of the media (including within our country), and the local conservative liberal opposition political parties, are working full-time to hegemonise and interpret NEPAD for their own purposes. Essentially they seek to reduce NEPAD to the following features:
- Africa's crisis is acknowledged but largely attributed to "backwardness", and to the "inherent" propensity of African elites to be venal, corrupt and despotic.
- The partnership envisaged in NEPAD is reduced to a "trade-off" in which African governments promise to be good (and promise to "police" each other) in return for aid and foreign direct investment from the North. This particular reduction is already beginning to be used to invoke "collective punishment" - if South Africa "fails to deal with Zimbabwe" then the whole of NEPAD must fail;
- And being "good", i.e. "good governance", is largely reduced to ensuring the protection of private property and the implementation of neo-liberal austerity, liberalisation and privatisation measures.
In the view of the SACP not all of the existing NEPAD document is sufficiently buttressed to deal decisively with this attempted neo-liberal hegemony of the initiative.
To address this challenge the SACP believes that:
- While acknowledging serious problems in political and economic governance within our continent,
and while committing ourselves to working to address these - we must also increasingly raise
questions about global mis-governance (for which Africans are certainly not primarily responsible). Protectionism, the failure to ratify key global treaties (the Kyoto Protocol, the Ban on Landmines), the failure to pay fees to the UN, increasing unilateralism, etc.
- Likewise, in the very recent period, the fraudulent economic mis-governance of major transnational capitalist corporations has been more and more exposed (Enron, Worldcom, etc). Any "partnership" between Africa and the developed North must also be directed at exposing and cleaning up this variety of misgovernance, which also manifests itself in extremely corrupting practices by transnational corporations in their engagements with African governments and private companies;
- While seeking to leverage foreign investment - we must increasingly mobilise African resources (including, critically, public sector resources), and use these to kick-start strategic growth and development programmes.
In short, the "partnership" must be less about "good African" behaviour in exchange for "generous"
international investment - and more about a collective global endeavour to ensure good and equitable
governance, and a collective investment endeavour in which investment opportunities are provided as a
result of African-initiated and, as much as possible, African-resourced programmes. The idea of
"partnership" must not be reduced to an Africa/developed North partnership - we need to put a great
deal of emphasis on intra-African partnerships, and also on South-South partnerships.
Is FDI the fundamental answer?
Underpinning many of the potential dangers in the NEPAD document, as it currently stands, is a tendency
to see major flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) into Africa as the pre-eminent and fundamental
solution to our continent's underdevelopment. There is a real danger that soliciting FDI will become
the over-riding concern. There is no doubt that major FDI flows are, indeed, required; but NEPAD's core
assumptions in this regard need to be examined carefully and critically.
NEPAD uses the concept "resource" in somewhat contradictory ways. On the one hand, Africa is portrayed
as a "resource"-rich continent ("an indispensable resource base"). On the other hand, Africa is portrayed
as a "resource"-poor continent (Africa is suffering from a "resource gap"). Obviously, the term is being
used in two different senses - in the first case, largely as natural and human resources, and in
the second largely as money and technology resources. But the ambiguity allows for a lack of clarity
about why there has been an unfavourable "resource outflow" from Africa. In fact, the imperialist
(and neo-colonial elite) plundering ("outflow") of Africa's natural and human resources has historically
been the consequence of a resource inflow (investments into mines, plantations, railway lines, harbours,
and into cultivating a compliant and oppressive neo-colonial state bureaucracy).
Moreover, Africa's "resource poverty" is not only the result of "outflows". With major oil reserves Nigeria is resource rich, however, an estimated annual $20 billion of oil revenue simply "disappears" from the national budget. Will increased FDI flows to Nigeria address this challenge, or worsen it?
The NEPAD document assumes that FDI will now be qualitatively different, in the above respects, from previous "inflows". The document tends to confine its historical overview of Africa's underdevelopment to the most recent past, arguing that the "credit and aid binomial" has dominated Africa's links to the developed North, and this "binomial" has now exhausted its "potential".
FDI is, indeed, different from aid and credit, in that it is capital investment that is more than money, and, potentially, also involves the transfer (or development) of technologies, skills, and infrastructure. However, FDI is profit-seeking, and major FDI flows are no guarantee that our country and our continent will we propelled out of their current skewed accumulation and dis-accumulation path. It was precisely major flows of FDI in the last quarter of the 19th century, and the first quarter of the 20th century, that set South Africa on its path of racialised capitalist underdevelopment. Or, to take a more recent example, while South Africa attracted a disappointing $32 per head of FDI between 1994-1999, Argentina attracted $252 - yet this more impressive flow of FDI has hardly helped Argentina overcome its structural crises.
A more or less single-minded pursuit of, and reliance upon FDI can:
- Obscure the real causes of "resource outflow" and the consequent "resource gap" - as, for instance, in the Nigerian case;
- Lead to a failure to effectively mobilise domestic and/or African resources. For instance, many of our own measures designed to attract FDI (eg. liberalisation) have, in fact, seen a net outflow of capital - with domestic corporations dis-investing and savings going off-shore; and
- The under-rating of a critical resource - national budgets and the parastatals.
The SACP believes that, while attracting FDI flows is, indeed, a key component of a sustainable growth and development programme for our continent, we need:
- To ensure that these FDI flows contribute to (rather than undermine) sustainable growth and development. There is nothing automatic about this - FDI needs to be unpacked case by case, and FDI flows need to reinforce a coherent, African developed strategic perspective, rather than setting the agenda themselves;
- All resources - domestic, continental and international; natural, human, money and technological; public and private - need to be mobilised and co-ordinated to address the underdevelopment challenge.
NEPAD creates space to take up the challenge of underdevelopment
Notwithstanding its weaknesses and potential dangers, the NEPAD initiative has squarely placed the underdevelopment challenge on our national (and hopefully continental) agenda.
Overcoming Africa's crisis of underdevelopment is a huge challenge. As a Party of communists, who are
South African and African, the SACP will actively engage with, support and help to consolidate the
NEPAD initiative - with and for…the workers and the poor.
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