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“Without good governance, we cannot eradicate poverty; for no corrupt government is interested in the eradication of poverty; on the contrary, and as we have seen in many parts of Africa and elsewhere, widespread corruption in high places breeds poverty”.
Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania
Introduction
Since the discovery and export of oil in 1958, Nigeria has earned in excess of US$350 billion in foreign exchange from the commodity roughly US$100 per head per year. But there is very little to show for it in terms of development. Instead, Nigeria has slipped from being an upper medium income to a low-income country. On the other hand, Botswana which at the time of independence was considered a basket case because of its supposed low resource endowment and desert climate, moved rapidly from a low income to an upper medium income country when it discovered diamonds.
What are the lessons to be learnt from these two disparate cases? The most obvious lesson is that Nigeria has not used its oil wealth wisely to benefit its people. Rather a string of military dictatorships misused the oil revenues to corruptly enrich themselves and to consolidate their hold on power. On the other hand, Botswana has used its diamond revenues prudently to the point of being accused of being miserly and has saved millions in reserves for a rainy day. The benefits from the diamonds have also been spread more evenly across the population resulting in the achievement of a higher human development index compared to Nigeria where it has been falling.
Sadly, Nigeria's case is not unique in Africa. Numerous other regimes have squandered national resources to perpetuate themselves in power - Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Idi Amin in Uganda are examples that quickly spring to mind. Both countries are still to recover from the devastation caused by poor governance in the past. In other African countries, the impact of poor
governance has been less dramatic but equally devastating not only on the economies but on the very survival of the nation states themselves. In several countries, bad governance has fuelled civil wars or has manifested itself in gross human rights violations contributing to worsening poverty levels.
In more recent years, Africa is taking steps to correct its poor governance record. Many countries have grudgingly introduced multi-party democracy, limited presidential terms and are increasingly making past corrupt leaders account for their misdeeds- Chiluba in Zambia and the Moi regime in Kenya. Through its Peer Review mechanism, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) also lays a strong emphasis on good governance and government accountability.
Just how much of these actions are out of the genuine realisation of past mistakes or are mere window-dressing to meet IFIs conditionalities still remains unclear. But they have sent a clear message that bad rulers cannot always get away with it and that sooner or later they have to account for their mistakes.
From that perspective therefore, Africa seems to be getting its act together. But it would be foolhardy for Africa to sit back and expect the good times to start rolling in. There is a lot more they need to do to centre their development agendas on the human person and to internalise the true concepts of good governance.
What makes their job more difficult is the double speak at the international level, where good governance is defined to suit the hegemonic interests of developed countries' governments and their multinationals, where neo-liberalism continues to rule the roost as the dominant economic paradigm despite the havoc it has wreaked on the continent through SAPS.
During the Cold War years, despots such as Mobutu were propped up by the US as “bulwarks” against communism, never mind their atrocious human rights record. At the end of the Cold War, they became expandable, but only if they were replaced by new leaders who would tow the neo-liberal economic line that favours Western countries by opening up their economies to new forms of exploitation through lopsided trade under the all embracing SAPs. Through the WTO and other multilateral agreements, including the EU/ACP Agreement, Western countries continue to extract concessions from developing countries that threaten the livelihoods of their people. Agreements such as TRIPS limit the capacity of
African countries to benefit from cheap technology transfer while attempts to force open public procurement in developing countries also have serious consequences for building indigenous entrepreneurs in the South. The lopsided global trading regime, where developed countries continue to spend billions subsidising their exports is a major violation of the economic and social rights of
people in developing countries by denying them the chance to develop their industries and agricultural sectors.
While African countries are making frantic efforts to clean up their governance act, there have been no parallel attempts by donor countries, including the IFIs to become more accountable and in the process to respect the economic and social rights of people in developing countries. SAPs have been discredited, but they have resurfaced under different guises as elements within PRSPs and as part of
necessary reforms in NEPAD.
In this Africa edition of the Reality of Aid, which follows the global theme of the Rights Based Approach to development, we take some African governments to task for their failure to place the fulfilment of their people's human rights-civil and political as well as economic, social and cultural rights-at the centre of their development agendas. We also analyse the debilitating impact of corruption on people's economic and social rights as well as the insidious role of multinational
corporations in Africa's corruption game.
At the international level, we assess the extent to which programmes of the IFIs are responsible for violating people's economic and social rights through the conditionalities they impose. We question the moral high ground from which the World Bank and the IMF preach good governance to African governments considering the lack of transparency in their own governance structures and their policies that in many instances have worsened poverty in developing countries.
The Edition also looks at the youth, a group that is often sidelined in the development aid discourse partly because their problems are regarded as transitory (until they join the rest of the adult population) and because it is felt that their problems are not unique and will be dealt with through society-wide interventions. But a closer look shows that the youth face unique problems requiring specific attention. Unemployment among them, for instance, is worse than in the adult population and consequently poverty tends to be higher among the youth than in the rest of the population. Sub-Saharan Africa is home to at least 60 million poor youth (living on less than a dollar a day), out of the global total of 238 million. The region also has a disproportionate number of youth suffering from HIV/AIDS 8.6 million out of the global total of 12 million. Given their special circumstances, there is a need to design youth-specific interventions to tackle the most pressing problems they face-poverty, unemployment and HIV/AIDS.
The human rights centred approach to development puts the actions of African governments under the spotlight. It highlights the culpability of developed countries governments and their multinationals in the continued violation of the economic and social rights of people in developing countries and calls for a more balanced view of good governance, which goes beyond the creation of structures that merely facilitate the continued dominance of neo-liberalism under its different guises to the more people-centred approach that addresses issues of equity in the global trade environment.
A human rights centred approach accepts development as a human right and therefore questions the actions of governments and IFIs that deny people opportunities to develop. Rather than a mere focus on GDP growth rates, the human rights centred approach gives equal weight to issues of equity and access to basic social services for the majority of the people as fitting priorities for governments and donors for which they must aim. It also assesses their policies from the perspective of how they serve to fulfil or to deny people the totality of their rights.
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