http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/303/41299.jpgAfrican people continue to remain as the have-nots at the bottom of the world’s pyramid. Even if ‘their’ leaders bath in abundant wealth and privileges. It is fair to conclude that so far neither Nepad, nor its support from the G8 and others who claim to be concerned, have managed to contribute substantive change.

From the beginning of this century, the G8 started cultivating a special intimate relationship with representatives of a ‘new Africa’, in response to their courting.

It is not by accident that the German chancellor Angela Merkel has announced that the further expansion of this link into ‘reform partnerships’ would officially rank among the priorities on the agenda at the forthcoming summit in Heiligendamm on the Baltic Sea.

This however does not necessarily mean that it will actually happen. We have already seen the originally announced focus on Africa be overshadowed by other matters in Kananaskis, where the events in the Middle East replaced Africa as the priority, and in Gleneagles, after the bomb attacks in London; and the African representatives having once again to play second fiddle.

This time, it seems that climate change will once again push Africa out of the limelight- though its people might be among the biggest victims of the effects of unabated environmental pollution; relegating its leaders to the back benches.

But even so, the favoured African heads of state seem to feel somehow comfortable with enjoying the marginal trade-offs from sitting around the dining table with the powerful. After all, since Genoa, lunch was the minimum they got from each G8 summit. Even when that, together with a group photo, was at times the only recognition granted.

Merkel used her speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos to declare that during the German presidencies of the G8 and the EU, emphasis would be on how Africa could be better integrated into the global economy.

Her personal representative at the G8, Bernd Pfaffenbach, confirmed, during a panel debate on Africa at the same Swiss Alpine ski resort, that the summer camp at the Baltic Sea in Heiligendamm would seek to enhance a partnership between the G8 and African leaders.

These declared intentions for the agenda by this year’s hosts should not appear comforting. Rather they should sound warning bells. The two priorities of further integration into the global economy and closer partnership with African leaders in the planned interaction merit the question being raised: where do the interests of the people of the continent lie?

After all, neither globalisation since the days of the slave trade, nor African leaders’ collaboration with the powerful elsewhere, whatever their political or ideological persuasion, have provided meaningful and lasting benefits for the majorities on the continent who struggle daily for survival.

Further integration of African societies and economies into the world market, a process which since colonialism was in any case much more advanced than in most other regions of the world, suggests, in contrast, even more systematic exploitation of the continent’s natural resources, and intensified expansion into local markets.

Under the current ‘liberalisation’ schemes promoted and regulated by the WTO, access for external capital to provide privatised public goods and services, as well as control over so-called intellectual property, add further to the reduction of state autonomy and local capacities to act in the interest of the people.

Privatisation does not bode well for some of the core tasks of a functioning state: namely to provide basic services in the public interest, including that of the poor; and to protect the weakest - not that the people in Africa have ever seen or experienced much of this.

Since 2001, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) became the African trademark for the kind of collaboration that the G8 and other OECD countries favour and support.

In the pipeline as a blueprint since the late 1990s, Nepad emerged as a result of a fundamentally new constellation on the continent. After South Africa – from the mid-1990s, and Nigeria -since the end of the 1990s, the two regional economic powerhouses, had left behind their pariah status. While apartheid, in the one case, and the military dictatorships, in the other case, limited the operational spheres of African regimes earlier on, the new governments represented politically acceptable - if not always praised - success stories that democratisation works.

Considered strategic regional ‘anchor countries’ for the West, these two economies make up some two thirds of the total GDP of all countries of so-called sub-Saharan Africa. Leaving aside the resource-based economies, which through oil, strategically relevant minerals and other natural assets, such as diamonds, stimulate desire for entering deals with local culprits and oligarchies, they are the most attractive potential partners to the outside world.

The South African and Nigerian heads of state Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo were the two main architects of Nepad, together with the Senegalese autocrat Abdoulaye Wade, and the support of Egypt and Algeria. As a matter of fact, all three African leaders in the triumvirate have missed only one of the six G8 summits since Genoa 2001.

But for many critical observers, including within Africa, Nepad mainly symbolises the emperor’s new clothes. It boils down to a recycling of the old conditionality-story, only now under African ownership.

Perceived as a policy of neo-liberal orientation imposed from above, it is questioned and challenged from below as a technocratic approach by elites. Or else as a local version of the Washington consensus.

According to this view, structural deficiencies and imbalances are legitimised, but not questioned. It reflects a coalition between those on the continent and abroad who benefit most from export-oriented market economies, under a trade regime, which is foremost outwardly oriented.

This might add to the relative advantages of a small local elite and the biggest among the junior players on the continent. In particular expanding South African capital, which is successfully penetrating many other African economies. But it offers little to nothing to ordinary people. They remain once again excluded from business. They are unemployed and continue to live in abject poverty.

While some of the rather more harsh critics mutter about dubious conspiracy theories, which may be unfair, or, at least, not the true intentions of some of the new African leaders, it is difficult to dismiss such analysis lock, stock and barrel.

The lack of meaningful material offers little comfort of G8 support for Nepad, which would need to match the almost euphoric welcoming statements ever since the African leaders knocked at their doors in Genoa.

In the midst of the Italian havoc, the G8 heads of state appointed individual ‘sherpas’ to team up and prepare an Africa Action Plan. Its adoption a year later, mid-2002, in the Canadian mountains at Kananaskis, was celebrated as a major break through. Although it was (dis-)qualified by moderate critics such as the then director for justice and peace at the South African Catholic Bishops’ Conference as ‘hot air’ or ‘recycled peanuts’.

In contrast to such sobering conclusions, the South African president returned triumphantly with the message that Kananaskis marked a decisive moment in the birth of a fairer and more balanced system of international relations. In historical context, Kananaskis represented for him the end of the colonial and neo-colonial era. To classify this kind of daring interpretation as ‘wishful thinking’ would seem a mild understatement.

Based on such self-proclaimed ‘success stories’, African leaders used the transformation of the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) into the African Union (AU) directly after Kananaskis at their summit in Durban to integrate Nepad as the new economic programme of the continental body.

They thereby elevated it to an official status for all. Subsequently, in September 2002, the UN General Assembly awarded Nepad the label of being the general framework for international cooperation with Africa, thus allowing Thabo Mbeki to state, unchallenged, that Nepad had emerged as the de facto political-economic point of reference in Africa’s interaction with the outside world.

Even the sobering results of the summit in the French Evian in 2003 and the humble lunch offered at the US-summit in Georgia in 2004 served as further legitimacy for the African Nepad-troika. Although Wade was becoming increasingly less enthusiastic, and in the meantime openly critical.

Their patience was at least rewarded by the personal effort of Tony Blair, who used the UK presidency to initiate his Commission for Africa. Its report, tabled to the summit in Gleneagles in 2005, claimed to present, through increased financial support and debt cancellation, a decisive input into African development. Indeed, a substantive portion of the - already long since paid - debts have since then been cancelled for the poorest among the African countries.

The moral impetus, which is due, in part, not only Tony Blair’s personal flair, but also to the document of the Africa Commission, subtitled ‘Our Common Interest’, should however not be misleading.

As a matter of fact, the fundamental premises of the recommendations rest on the assumption that it is Africans themselves, who must be held responsible for being so poor, and who need - with external assistance - to get their act together.

The suggested reforms neither name and blame the structural inequalities ensuing as a result of historical processes, during which mainly European colonialism and imperialism expanded into Africa's backyard with devastating and long lasting consequences for the societies there. Nor do they challenge the fundamental basis of the currently existing global system and its damaging effects on African economies and people.

But even if the commission – with all due reservations – was considered a major advancement for at least temporarily promoting interest in African affairs in a wider public sphere, and also by means of the celebrity culture resulting in spectacular ‘do good’ performances (which generally excluded African artists from a fair share in the publicity); the subsequent summit of the G8 in St Petersburg in 2006 did not even pretend to follow this up in a serious way.

For the first time since Okinawa in 2000, only three African heads of state were granted the privilege to play a supporting role. Except for being some kind of exotic-cosmetic feature, the summit had absolutely nothing to offer.

According to the German government, things should be different in early June at Heiligendamm. As the stocktaking exercises on progress to achieve the Millennium Development Goals suggest, much is left to be desired when it comes to the implementation of the defined targets.

African people continue to remain as the have-nots at the bottom of the world’s pyramid. Even if ‘their’ leaders – notably in cases such as the Angolan oil oligarchy or individual despots such as Mugabe – bath in abundant wealth and privileges. It is fair to conclude that so far neither Nepad, nor its support from the G8 and others who claim to be concerned, have managed to contribute substantive change.

It should however, at the same time, and despite such reservations, be acknowledged that a fair amount of collective responsibility and willingness to intervene in the matters of member states has fundamentally changed the political agenda of the African Union and its guiding principles.

Whilst, so far, this has had little impact in terms of necessary changes in the socio-economic structural impasses, and has failed to produce any decisive results in several cases – not least in Zimbabwe, also politically, it does affect socio-economic related factors such as security, political participation, transparency and accountability.

While a lot remains to be desired, one should not ignore the fundamental changes, which in terms of the abandonment of the hitherto holy principle of non-intervention was a direct result of the transformation of the OAU into the AU.

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) as an integral, though voluntary, part of Nepad might be more tokenism than anything else. But being on the agenda marks a new chapter in African politics. In times where revolutions are not even on the distant horizon, this still seems to be too pragmatic a view, though probably realistic.

Ironically, with the new multi-polar tendencies, and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and in particular China) through their bilateral partners aggressively seeking to explore and exploit the African continent with little or no concerns about ‘good governance’ - whatever this means, the gains for African economies, as measured in terms of trade balances and GDP growth, are remarkable.

Of course, this does not mean that the African economies and the local people will benefit automatically. Whether and how they might get a modest share out of the new scramble for African resources remains at this stage an open question. But it is unlikely that the G8 summit in Heiligendamm will bring this challenge any closer to a solution.

* Henning Melber was director of The Namibian Economic Policy Research Unit (NEPRU) in Windhoek, Namibia from 1992-2000. He was research director at The Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, 2000-2006. He is currently executive director of The Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation.

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