NEPAD is a recipe for further losses, says expert

New Economic Partnership for Africa's Development - commonly known as NEPAD - is not the way forward for African economies, says Kenyan trade expert Oduor Ongwen.

By: Anne Mette Nordfalk and Morten Bonde Pedersen

10. April 2006

For several reasons NEPAD will turn out to be a step backward for Africans in stead of the intended tool for improvement. That was the overall message from Oduor Ongwen during a public debate on trade politics Thursday. The debate meeting took place in Copenhagen and was hosted by MS Denmark.

One of Ongwen’s objections against NEPAD, aimed at the very idea of partnership as expressed by the ‘P’ of the NEPAD abbreviation.

The meaning of partnership was recently spelled out by executive director of NEPAD, Firmino Mucavele, in a speech before the Mozambican parliament. Here Mucavele stressed that “if Africa is not to be marginalized it needs to link up its efforts in order to improve its image. Smart partnerships must be established, and credibility created through establishing mechanisms of continual and objective mutual evaluation,”news agency Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique reports.

Oduor Ongwen replies to that by asking: “Who are the partners of the agreement?” In an article published on the website of International Forum for Globalization he refers to a partnership between Africa and rich countries of the North as “a partnership between a cat and a mouse, which is not a partnership.”

Undemocratic agreement

In the same article Ongwen characterises the NEPAD agreement as ‘undemocratic.’ He adds that popular forces in Africa – the farmers through their associations, the workers and their unions, women and their organizations and the professionals and intelligentsia – were not consulted before the agreement was put on paper.

The NEPAD agreement sets that Africa should concentrate on creating an attractive environment for transnational corporations in order to attract foreign direct investments.

”I wonder if our leaders who authored NEPAD asked themselves the question: what are the aims of economic investments?” says Ongwen referring to the lack of economic equilibrium between the aboundance of African natural resources and the ability of Africans to exploit those in international trade throughout the past 20 years.