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Queenstown, SOUTH AFRICA - Now that Tony Blair in the UK (United Kingdom) has been re-elected for the historic third term for the Labour Party, let it be business-as-usual on the global political scene. For Africans this means a careful study of Tony Blair's 'Commission For Africa.'
Mputhumi
NtabeniAfricans were expected to universally welcome Tony Blair's 'Commission For Africa' report. With its use of catch phrases like 'make poverty history,' and the language of humanism, the report, at quick perusal, seems to agree [with the notion] that Africa must be free to shape her destiny with the assistance of the world at large. In practical terms, the help Africa needs is an extra $25 billion (USD) a year in aid from Western donors, a write-off of her debt, and a better deal in global trade relations, declares the report. But Africa not only needs financial but also educational, cultural, and social development.
It is when one considers the means of implementing the Commission's findings that one discovers the flaws of the re port. When one looks beyond the report's self-consciously ambitious rhetoric and Blair's use of altruistic language in describing Africa's plight, there're low horizons about what Africa, through NEPAD (New Economic Plan For African Development) for instance, is striving to achieve. This is perhaps why the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, though welcoming the report, had his reservations.
The new partnership between Africa and the West proposed by Blair's report is more likely to weaken African states still further rather than give them the capacity for state-building. New monitoring mechanisms, ostensibly designed to strengthen African states' 'capacity,' will instead undermine [that capacity] because they compel African states into opening themselves to monitoring by external authorities in return for the promise of greater resources.
The report says Africa must promise true democracy, no more excuses for dictatorship, abuses of human rights; no tolerance of bad governance, no endemic corruption of states; proper commercial, legal and financial systems, in return for aid.
According to the report, the African Union will not be the only body monitoring African States but [monitoring will also be conducted by] Western donors, the UN's Economic Commission for Africa, and 'civil society organisations' (mainly non-governmental organisations from the West,) who must play a key role too in the process. The report advises African states to sign up to the UN Convention Against Corruption and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative pioneered by DFID. All this sounds reasonable in quick perusal.
But the fundamentals of these regulations mean that these new 'partnerships' will, in effect, create parallel structures of government in African states, which will further undermine Africa's already weak nation-states. It means the African states will have to submit to detailed rules that are dictated by outsiders, which will limit the operation of African nation-states and businesses, giving them little autonomy or control over their already meagre resources.
The Blair Commission report argues that a key problem for Africa is weak states and -- wrongly, in my view -- blames this largely on the legacy of African dictatorships bolstered by Western governments during the Cold War. The Cold War ended over a decade ago. A more invidious role has since been played by the Western NGOs, especially those of the Washington Consensus, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The twin forces of the IMF and World Bank measures to roll back the state in order to free market forces, and international donor aid stepping in to provide basic services outside the state sector, caused more damage in undermining African states than the Cold War ever did. If implemented, the Blair Commission's proposals would compound this problem.
The virtual disintegration of such states as Somalia clearly shows that outside interference, with its creation of parallel structures for distributing resources and monitoring state activity, undermines nation-states and ultimately makes it even more difficult for them to maintain their coherence. Not only does external interference undermine the rights of the states intervened in, it also undermines the rights of those individuals who are the objects of the intervention, as they have no mechanism for holding these external bodies to account.
Some are worried that the evangelical zeal by which Tony Blair has taken the cause for Africa after so many years of neglect is the result of his failing political vision in Britain. They argue that the focus on Africa can help give his government a sense of mission. None of that would matter if Africa were to benefit from his Commission. More resources would benefit Africa whatever the motivations of the donors. There have been worse motives for Western aid in Africa than political expediency. The problem is that what is being proposed in the Blair Commission report is unlikely to improve Africa's plight.
Africans are also wary of Blair's report for its intentional or unintentional promotion of the returning tone of imperialism -- couched in euphemistic terms like 'Trusteeship' -- in recent Western discussions.
The US political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, in his book State Building: Governance and Order in the Twenty-First Century, proposes the policy of trusteeship as a solution to the problem of instability in the weak states of the modern world. He makes easier, and obfuscates, the return of one nations' subordination to another by legitimising it in the language of empowerment and capacity-building for what they term 'failed states'.
Another US political scientist, Roland Paris, in his book At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict, starts on a Hobbesian support of a strong state and ends on the opposing note of support for 'sovereignty' held in trust by international administrators acting as representatives of external institutions. For him, traditional liberal conceptions of individual rights are obstacles to the development of a free and just society rather than an indicator of its success. He holds trusteeship as an improvement on previous conceptions of individual and state rights of freedom and autonomy. Just as individuals in the state-building process have to submit to unequal relations of tutelage and dependency, so too do the states being empowered by their trustees, he says.
What this argument amounts to, despite its obfuscating cleverness, is that non-Western states have demonstrated they cannot be trusted with sovereignty and political equality, therefore the return to forms of Western regulation is the only solution. The discourse is even sometimes couched in the language of old-fashioned imperialism's 'obligations of power,' which echoes Klipping's 'white man's burden' -- the moral duty of those with the power/knowledge/civilisation to enlighten and assist the poor and down-trodden to ways of good governance and civil society.
No amount of mystifying cleverness can hide the fact that this discourse is preaching a breakdown of consensual processes of diplomacy and a collapse of international law. It is what gave a specious cloak of decency for invasions of sovereign states like Iraq. It has resurrected the old relations of domination, the 'noble mission of an empire.'
The contradiction between relations of domination and those of equality is played down with the talk of exporting democracy, state-building, human rights promotion and post-conflict peace-building. In the end it achieves the blurring of the line between aid and imperialism, by making the external interference claim on the basis of the perceived interests or needs of those who are seen as unable or unwilling to help themselves.
The lesson the Western hegemony has not learned is that developing local capacity is the only solution to the management of state administration. You cannot impose outcomes from without. The government imposed from outside will always lack popular legitimacy in the eyes of the population it wishes to govern. There is only a limited amount that can be achieved by external technical advisers, regardless of their motivation or capability. The ethics of trusteeship and custody, like those of imperialism, stand fundamentally opposed to the idea comprising the modern belief in moral and political equality of human beings. Therein lies the seed of its failure.
Africa, through NEPAD, has its own peer review mechanism. What we should be concentrating on is finding ways of making it more effective and pressuring other African countries into joining the review mechanism.
© 2005, GENERATOR 21.
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