Given the prevailing economic and social circumstances facing the African continent, exactly how can Africa begin to chart a path for the future? A conference due to be held this weekend in Durban, South Africa, brings academics together to discuss this question and decide exactly how Africa can reclaim the 21st century.

Introduction

The West tried for centuries to impose its models for development on Africa with limited success and without taking into account existing vast differences in culture and politics on the Continent. In this regard, most post-colonial African states adopted Western blueprints in the form of capitalism or socialism with limited trickling benefits to the general populace. It thus seems that Africa is in most cases worse off now than during colonialism despite billions of aid and investment being poured into the Continent. The continent has witnessed the controversy around which agency is more central in driving the development process between state and markets in an environment dominated by foreign actors, especially the Bretton Woods institutions, through their “one-size fit all” policies in addition to a host of imposed conditionalities. While this controversy continues, the socio-economic and political conditions in a number of States continues to deteriorate by the day.

Development paradigms and policies

Since the 1960s Africa has witnessed a contestation or confusion of development agendas, namely, the nationalist agenda of an autonomous development path anchored upon a derigiste economic nationalism in ideological terms on the one hand, and the Bretton Woods institutions propounding a neo-liberal economic adjustment programme premised upon free market enterprise in ideological terms on the other. The former has been and still is deliberately State-centric and encourages State interventionism in economic management. The latter has evolved as a market-driven development strategy and, as such, deliberately set out to roll back the State.

This ideological contestation has forced the Continent’s leadership to embrace several developmental paradigms and policies, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, in support of the two positions. The debate moved towards convergence in 1997 when the World Bank, through the question “Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?” accepted and appreciated the key role of the State in the socio-economic development of their respective countries. In response African leaders fashioned their own developmental paradigms such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) whose central thrust is collective responsibility towards improving the Continent, including getting directly involved in the search for long-term political stability and sustainable development. Assertive leadership of this responsibility is producing democratic fruits in former troubled nations and regions such as the Great Lakes region, where the return to democracy and constitutional route has resulted in positive socio-economic transformation.

Africa’s Challenges

Political conditions

Africa continues to face political challenges including many politically induced conflicts that have, and will, continue to destabilize both the respective member-State and/or the region. Scarce resources are allocated annually to defense, security and military ministerial portfolios in many African countries as a way of dealing with the prevailing conflicts and/or as a precaution to peace, security and humanitarian concerns, especially in those countries not directly involved in conflict. Post-colonial States have fallen prey to the ploy of destabilization, a factor that scares away both domestic and foreign investors. The prevailing socio-economic conditions have deteriorated in some countries to the point of contributing to the unfolding conflicts. As a result millions of people have been killed, displaced or forced into exile. This development also denies Africa access to its resource – human capital – which is now contributing to global capitalism without any compensation being paid to “our” Continent.

Socio-economic conditions

Africa continues to face unimpressive socio-economic conditions characterized by low economic growths; falling per capita income and life expectancy; rising inflation rates, interest rates and infant mortality rates; deteriorating external and domestic debt stocks; worsening poverty situations evidenced by food dependence, malnutrition and the fact that between 65% to 80% of the Continent’s population is living below the poverty datum line; and lack of access to basic social services (health, education, housing and water).

Macro-economic fundamentals

African countries are at different levels of economic development, depicting wide disparities in their macro-economic fundamentals. Such development impacts negatively on regional economic development strategies. In addition, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are yet to persuade member-States to move towards the convergence of their macro-economic fundamentals, which are explained by other factors. Of great concern at this juncture is also the duplicity of RECs which makes them both weak and vulnerable to external shocks and influence.

Production structure and trade

Production structure on the Continent has remained largely primary production-oriented, a trend that renders Africa the largest net importer of goods and services from the industrialized nations. This means that the Continent specializes in the production of raw materials, but has no input to global pricing. In addition, countries have, in most cases, competed seriously against each other since failure to diversify the economic base means the production and exportation of similar commodities. Africa’s contribution to global trade remains insignificant – just under 2%. This poses the question as to how long can Africa continue to remain in this position.

Access to international markets

Throughout the Continent market reforms have failed to develop the productive sectors. This has resulted in the underdevelopment of industrialization strategies. Even the religious adoption of Western driven economic reforms have failed to rejuvenate the industrial base of most countries on the Continent. The industrial base remains largely narrow and characterized by mono-commodities for export to the same market. This is more pronounced in Southern Africa where, for instance, Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Namibia produce and export diamonds to the same market. Other common export products include tobacco, copper, fish, tea, coffee, horticulture and cotton. This unfortunately generates less foreign currency necessary to meet national import requirements since the majority of member-States are net-importers. In the process this serves as a constraint to industrial development. At the same time debt service obligations means the availability of fewer resources to support the social sector; the very foundation for building a sound human resource base which is deemed critical for the Continent’s developmental needs.

The debt burden

At a time when the Continent is grappling with many challenges, member-States have accumulated large, but growing external debt which takes away a significant proportion of available resources for debt servicing. Industrial development requires foreign currency which is used to service debt, while sacrificing social service provisions in the process. In addition, no significant innovation is taking place to improve the future prospects of the Continent. A high debt overhang creates uncertainty for both domestic and foreign investors. It is a situation that adversely affects a country’s credit ratings and perception of risks. Furthermore, it limits potentially viable firms from accessing finance from the international capital markets. Moreover, the qualification of most countries to the highly indebted poor countries (HIPC) initiative, has failed to extricate the Continent from this position. This means that the debt burden is not only retarding economic growth and development, but it has also become economically exhausting and unsustainable, politically destabilizing and ethically unacceptable.

Aid flows and donor-recipient relations

While industrialized economies pledge to increase aid flow to countries with sound socio-economic policies and democratic practices, in many cases this pledge has come with conditions and selective application. Inter-State relations has come to the fore, raising the question of whether aid is a developmental instrument or a vehicle to globalize capitalism, which is in search of markets. It appears that aid flows have gone beyond the realm of economic policies to include new conditionalities of good governance; respect for the rule of law and the environment; and observance of human rights. In addition, foreign direct investments (FDIs) tend to ignore certain regions. In particular sub-Saharan Africa has remained an unfavourable destination of this capital formation.

The current situation in Africa is not promising in terms of crafting sustainable endogenous policy directions, options and space. Despite decades of implementing developmental paradigms and policies on her own and/or in collaboration with global strategic partners, Africa has remained the poorest region in the world. Indeed, of the 53 countries on the Continent, only 7 countries have graduated onto the globally ranked middle income category (Countries include Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Libya, Mauritius, Seychelles and South Africa [World Development Indicators database, World Bank, July 2005]).

The least developing countries (LDCs) category are of great concern which suffer from huge, but growing external debt overhang and limited capacity to industrialize and generate foreign currency necessary to meet national requirements. To date, Africa contributes less than 2% to the total global market, while it attracts only 2% of the FDIs inflows. In addition, the adoption of Western driven initiatives, presumed to offer lifelines to millions of poverty stricken people in the form of debt relief and free access to European markets under “everything else but arms (EBA)” initiatives, has failed to produce positive tangible results. Similarly, the adoption of neo-liberal policies has also failed to produce a success story to act as a model for policy options. Notable also is the failure of developmental State paradigms and policies to produce success stories. Indeed, Africa has remained stuck in the same predicament of an underdevelopment web characterized by unimpressive socio-economic indicators, unstable political environments and conflict situations, while countries in other Continents are making progress.

While Africa is preoccupied with identifying and correcting policy errors of the past, the formulation of its relations with developed regions is premised within the neo-liberal paradigm despite entrenching weak and vulnerable States towards the ambit of global institutions and agendas. A significant number of States have become increasingly vulnerable to the donor payroll, a development that weakens State capacity to offer alternative policy options, policy space and policy directions. This further exposes the same weak State to the dictates of donors, resulting in a vicious cycle of borrowing, harsh conditions, and unavoidable compromises in terms of a State’s responsibility to its citizens.

In this context, The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) and the African Futures Institute (AFI) are holding a two day conference focusing on the question: “Can Africa (re)claim the 21st Century?” In this spirit there are many questions regarding development that remains unanswered which the conference can raise and provide pointers on. A revisit to developmental paradigms and policies requires further interrogation by African scholars, given the prevailing socio-economic and political conditions prevailing on the Continent. Therefore the conference will bring together various scholars and policy makers from the Continent to discuss these issues.

Building sustainable strong state-citizens relationship offers unique opportunity to empower the organs of the states to become truly African with the “strong” belief that “Africa is for Africans”. This is imperative to mould the pillars of states to uniquely guide socio-economic and political transformation in a manner that facilitates development. In this respect, the conveners are expecting the debate to focus on how Africa should de-industrialize the donor sector and all its tentacles, which for long, has undermined the acceptance of “uhuru” developmental strategies and paradigms on the basis that Africans can not kick-start the developmental steps of their territories without externally driven resources and guidance, a development that demonizes the self-reliance concepts as baseless and unsustainable.

Indeed, as conveners, we will be happy to be associated with the creation of the right attitude in which Africans appreciate that poverty alleviation is in our own interest rather than the donor sector; that externalization of Africa’s resources is the main contributor to the growing external debt overhang; that domesticating Africa’s resources provides the basis for native industrialization strategies; that trade negotiations requires African resources to prepare in consultations of all the constituencies; and that demonisation of self-reliance principles is a “defeatist attitude” based on the “blame game” theory.

Africa has all the right signs for claiming the 21st Century. In this regard, it is imperative for her to exploit every opportunity that arises with positivist attitude. Indeed, the time to lament historical injustices and causal relationships for the present “status squo” is over. It’s high time that Africa realizes that globalization has no room for philanthropic and benevolent gestures, hence the expectation for the right attitude and a continent-orientated policy framework.

* Richard Kamidza is a Senior Researcher at The African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD), Durban, South Africa

* Please send comments to [email protected]