Last week witnessed two important events on Africa’s existence and its future. There was the Africa Forward Summit, which took place in Nairobi, Kenya, and the CEO Forum, which was hosted in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The summit was co-hosted by President William Ruto of Kenya and President Emmanuel Macron of France to attract foreign capital, build global partnerships, and drive innovation in production. It is more of using public sector economic policies to promote private sector activities and actions.
The Africa CEO Forum in Kigali was a purely and directly private sector programme. Reports show that it was one of the largest private sector and policy gatherings in Africa as thousands of business leaders and policy makers assembled to discuss the need for regional integration and “shared ownership”. The Report indicates that African leaders pushed what is termed “a strong message of African Agency”. President Paul Kagame of Rwanda emphasised the need for African nations to stop exporting cheap, raw materials to the industrialised countries. Rather, he advocated the imperative of rejecting partnerships that rob the continent of economic sovereignty, but to promote localised manufacturing and processing of the raw materials.
Neither are economic proposals new initiatives. There have been many comprehensive, well-articulated, and sound policy proposals that were never implemented with desired gravity. The home-grown continental economic initiatives in Africa include Import Substitution Industrialisation, the Lagos Plan of Action, the Abuja treaty, and the Agenda 2063, which is a continental economic development blueprint. In between was the Structural Adjustment Programme introduced and enforced by the Bretton Woods institutions – the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These were not just policy discussions like the current Forum and Summit, but well-documented policy programmes.
The home-grown development paradigms were outcomes of research workshops, conferences, and organised meetings by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the African Development Bank in conjunction with the African Union. The African Continental Free Trade Area is equally deeply involved in the current unified continental policies, from Agenda 2063 to the forum and summit.
The problems are not the absence of policy initiatives and programmes to get Africa out of the economic quagmire, but the political will to implement those policies. Many African leaders are not sincere in taking their countries out of poverty. Indeed, they use poverty as a weapon of oppression against their people. They still carry a colonial mentality and colonise their citizens with illiteracy and poverty. Even when they know the right things to be done, their hands are tied, such that they have to obey the directives of the colonial masters. What ties their hands is corruption. Personalised illegal public funds stolen are kept in bank accounts abroad or used to buy property.
They would not want disclosure of such funds or for the accounts to be frozen.
When the World Bank and IMF introduced the Structural Adjustment Programme in the 1980s, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, under the leadership of Prof. Adebayo Adedeji, warned that the foundation of the programme was faulty, and it would leave most African countries worse off. The SAP elements were largely the disputed IMF conditionalities for obtaining loans from the institution. The conditionalities, which are the set of economic policies, structural reforms and targets a country must implement before obtaining financial assistance from the Fund, include total adoption of market forces or deregulating prices; reduction in government spending, including reduction in government employment, increasing tax revenue and subsidy removal; currency devaluation and clean floating of the exchange rate; raising interest rates to curb inflation, and removing trade barriers.
The final assessment of SAP, as can be gleaned from globalinequality.org, was that the “structural adjustment induced a prolonged economic crisis across most regions, with national income stagnating for the rest of the 20th century. SAPs compressed consumption, caused poverty to increase, reduced healthcare access, and slowed progress on other social indicators”. That failure was not unexpected, and some African countries have not recovered till today. Actually, the World Bank, at one point in time, confessed that it did not understand the depth of the structure of African economies before recommending the SAP measures.
The UNECA produced an African Alternative Framework for Structural Adjustment Programme for Socio-economic Recovery and Transformation. The alternative was regarded as a people-centred, sustainable development model. African leaders were given the choice between the SAP and the AAF-SAP or between the World Bank/IMF document and the UNECA document. They chose the World Bank/IMF programme, i.e., SAP. The AFF-SAP did not actually throw out the whole content of SAP, but introduced some modifications that would make the programme people-centred or give the programme a human face.
When they had to choose between SAP and AFF-SAP, African leaders adopted the SAP because of the implications of non-approval of future loan acquisition. We know that African governments hardly leave the loan markets. They steal the domestic revenue and try to plug the holes created with foreign borrowing, which invariably includes some of the stolen domestic funds transferred abroad illegally. Talk is cheap, so goes the adage. African leaders have been told many times over that we must add value to our natural resources before sales, so the idea is not new. They are always eager to earn foreign currencies, which they will eventually use for foreign travels, acquire exotic vehicles, planes, and buy property abroad.
Apart from corruption, many African leaders allow themselves to be used against each other, constituting undeserved conflicts and crises. In fact, the presence of France in the Africa Forward Summit is suspect. France seems to have lost face with the francophone countries and is now trying to parley with the English-speaking countries! What is the motive? Why has the United States just developed an interest in insecurity in Nigeria, if not that it wants to establish a station here to monitor happenings in some countries around, including Nigeria itself? There was a story about a conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo caused by the interests of those foreign countries. Africa must cleanse itself of petty jealousy and backstabbing. The underdevelopment in Africa makes our trained manpower move abroad as cheap labour to further develop those economies!
There have been regional economic communities globally, but ECOWAS, which was created in May 1975 or over 50 years ago, is old enough to showcase great achievements. Thereafter, many such economic communities have been established in Africa without significant degrees of success. Why have these RECs remained underdeveloped like Africa itself? There is enough literature on this question, and when African leaders are ready to work together to free themselves of colonial mentality, they can check research outputs for solutions.
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