A Harmony or a Cacophony? The Music of Integration in the African Union Treaty and the New Partnership for Africa's Development

Controversy surrounding the presidential elections in Zimbabwe, and the manner in which this matter has been handled by African heads of state, has cast serious doubts on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) offers a comprehensive and integrated strategic framework for addressing Africa’s development challenges. It was adopted by the Assembly of African Heads of State and Government of the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU), now the African Union (AU), in July 2001, and has been well received by the international community. The United Nations (UN), the G8, the European Union (EU), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the African Development Bank (AfDB), among others, have all endorsed and supported the NEPAD. In fact, the NEPAD framework now forms the basis upon which much of Africa’s donor support is based. Indeed, the work of the Commission for Africa (CFA), established by the UK’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, has as one of its objectives “To support the best existing work on Africa, in particular the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Union, and help ensure this work achieves its goals” (CFA nd:1). Indeed, the CFA Report (2005), entitled Our Common Interest, provides an analytical summary of Africa’s needs and the resource requirements to meet them based on NEPAD priorities (CFA 2005). Moreover, literature is beginning to emerge on the NEPAD, including some criticisms from sceptics and Afro-pessimists. 1 Those critics are echoing a chorus from the same song sheet and, one might add, a seeming desire, that the NEPAD will fail as previous African development initiatives did. This view, though significantly a minority one, should not be allowed to come true. The overwhelming national and international support for the NEPAD must be utilised to good effect in order to regain the momentum for development achievement that is being pursued through moving the NEPAD forward. The NEPAD potentially constitutes the most important advance in African development policy in the past four decades (Hope 2002a). Undoubtedly it is an ambitious programme and represents perhaps one last hope for Africa to reverse its slide into complete marginalisation and irrelevance. In that regard, the major challenges in moving the NEPAD forward need to be recognised and confronted. This paper is concerned with one of those challenges – the problem of capacity deficits. Ownership without capacity must be regarded as meaningless. The existence

Good governance is a value-laden concept that is characteristically nebulous; it can mean different things to different people, depending on the context in which it is used. The same applies to leadership. Concepts, as Pauw (1999a, 465) puts it, are ‘tools of thinking’ and contexts are ‘the environments or frameworks in which they [concepts] operate’. Lucidity in the meanings of concepts is fundamentally important for shaping debate and enriching discourses. To maintain their power, concepts must be used in their proper contexts. This necessitates an understanding of the art of contextual discourse. Good governance is used in NEPAD as a principle and emphasised as a sine qua non for sustainable development in Africa. On the other hand, NEPAD premises Africa's re-birth or Renaissance on good governance and leadership, with a vision and commitment to repositioning the continent in global power balances. In this article good governance and leadership are considered as concepts. NEPAD is a textual context within which the two key concepts are used and should, consequently, be engaged. The article attempts a critical review of African scholarship engagement with good governance and leadership within the NEPAD context to determine the extent to which contextual discourse is practised. It further grapples with the immediate historical background to scholarship on Africa's development between the 1960s and early 1990s. The exercise reveals that much of the accumulated body of African scholarship and scholarship on Africa's development reviewed does not suffciently contextualise discourse on good governance and leadership within NEPAD, and its key assessment and monitoring device, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), and offers an alternative framework.

This chapter examines the current political tendencies in Africa as reflected in the crafting of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). It attempts to show the deeper ramifications of NEPAD in terms other than a superior-subordinate or intermediary relationship. Neo-Gramscian concepts of hegemony, civil society and passive revolution are deployed to make a case for NEPAD as a conscious African agency that is part and parcel of a global hegemonic bloc. The chapter introduces the content of NEPAD and the political reaction it engendered in Africa. It evaluates the validity of national interest to account for the emergence and decline of NEPAD. The chapter offers an alternative explanation based on Neo-Gramscian concepts of transnationalism, hegemony, counter-hegemony and civil society. It suggests the causes for the current decline of NEPAD and the prospects for the future of hegemonic politics in Africa. Keywords: Africa; hegemonic politics; Neo-Gramscian concepts; new partnership for Africa's development (NEPAD); transnationalism

This article provides an overview of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) in the context of Africa’s current economic and governance crises, the attempt to establish an Africa Union, and the interest in Africa displayed by the G8 leadership and in particular by the UK’s prime minister Tony Blair. NEPAD has to be seen simultaneously as a ‘big idea’, a new way of doing business, and a comprehensive development framework. The ‘big idea’ is to put Africa’s concerns on the table of the G8 and seek a much better deal for Africa in terms of international aid, debt relief and access to markets. The new way of doing business is a new form of ‘enhanced’ development partnership that makes both donor and recipient mutually accountable for development outcomes. The development framework is a long—and expanding—list of programmes and projects, akin to those that have been tried before. The heart of NEPAD is a commitment to good governance, operationalized through a radical plan for ‘peer review’ of governance performance. This promises a radical new approach to development partnership, but it also faces political hazards. The governance component is also analysed in the context of the pan–Africa institutions envisaged by the African Union. There is a need for coordinating and rationalizing peace and security initiatives. NEPAD may unlock additional financing for development, but it should not be seen as a cash cow. The challenges for NEPAD include opening up the process to make it more participatory, including greater focus on HIV/AIDS. NEPAD faces the real danger of being over–sold and of raising unrealistic expectations among Africans. It is, nevertheless, an outstanding opportunity for Africa’s development.

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) suggests a new trend in the strategies of relevant African political leaders compared with previous, exclusively socio-economically focused initiatives. The article summarises the origin of NEPAD vis-à-vis the African Union, offers a short overview on its substantive aspects and raises the issue of acceptance within the continent and the critical responses to the initiative. It deals in more detail with the notions of democracy, good governance and human rights as new elements of NEPAD in contrast to earlier strategy papers and blueprints for Africa's development. Emphasis is put on the contrasting paradigms of collective responsibility and peer review as possible means of intervention defined in NEPAD versus the postulate of national sovereignty so far maintained by the African governments as an ultimate guiding principle. The recent controversies around the presidential elections in Zimbabwe are used as a reference point and case study, displaying the underlying conflicting approaches. It is argued that the current efforts to gain credibility and achieve external material support for NEPAD have not yet passed the test phase.

Wars and armed conflict continue to be a consistent impediment to the growth and development of warring states and bring with them untold human suffering and much destruction in their wake. This is also true for wars in Africa including the five major Civil wars in Africa being, the Nigerian Civil War (Biafra War) (1967), the Somali Civil War (1991), the Rwandan Genocide (1994), the Second Congo War (considered “Africa’s World War”) (1998-2003), the Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972), (1983-2005) (2023-present), and the Eritrean-Ethiopian War (1998). Given the devastating effects of war, the early detection, prevention and mitigation of such conflict as well as post-conflict reconstruction is a major concern for governments and international actors, including the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). The importance of peace building and conflict resolution is therefore amply recognized across the regional and international spectra, hence its incorporation into global agencies and regional agencies including the World Bank and the United Nations, and regionally through the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). The African Union, being the umbrella body that encompasses 55 African countries into its membership divided into five regions being Central Africa region, Eastern Africa, Northern Africa, Southern Africa and Western Africa, holds a large presence in matters African politics, and given its expansive reach has partnered with other organizations, majorly the United Nations (UN) with the view of partnering in peace building and conflict resolution. This has been achieved through putting in place several frameworks, including the Joint UN-AU Framework for Enhanced Partnership in Peace and Security, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2018), Agenda 2063, the AU Post-conflict Reconstruction and Development (PCRD) Policy framework, and the extended AU’s Silencing the Guns Initiative. ...

Post-independent Africa is riddled with failed skeletons of development initiatives. Trade regionalism offered the potential for Africa's economic renewal on the presumption that it would consolidate intra-African trade and extra-continental exportation. Under the new trade regionalism, Africa's Regional Economic Communities (RECs) increasingly faced paradoxical trade development philosophies with extremes of outward orientation and inward orientation. Whereas Africa's RECs were, by design, inward-oriented with formal obligatory treaties, the ascendancy of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) entailed outward orientation, and global openness practices. NEPAD established direct contacts with member states to enforce unilateral action outside existing RECs' treaties to deepen national structural adjustments at the RECs scale, through the Most Favored Nation principle. This study argues that NEPAD failed to enhance intra-African trade or extra-continental exportation. Standard and global principal component analysis were applied to the 2000 and 2006 trade regimes of five RECs, recognized by the African Union as building blocs for the African Economic Community. Summary statistics have demonstrated that NEPAD improved neither intra-African trade nor extra-continental exportation. It concludes that NEPAD trade regionalism perpetuated the importation-biased colonial production structure and vertical external trade relations.

During the last half century, the economic performance of the developing world has been far from uniform. Developing countries were polarised into those that made great progress in catching up and those that were mired in stagnation. Many African countries belong to the second group. Therefore, what could be done in order to help these countries to move from the stagnation to sustainable growth and development? During the last five decades, many attempts were explored and undertaken without any remarkable results. In 2000, 189 states endorsed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), covering an array of targets with aspirations of reaching these goals by 2015. One year after, ironically, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), a vision and strategic framework for Africa's renewal was launched as a driver for African countries to move from long severe poverty, and consequently in reaching the MDGs. In this paper, we would like to share how economic development and cooperation among African countries, actions develop within the NEPAD strategic framework are key elements in achieving the MDGs. The first part of the paper analyses the whole vision behind the NEPAD programme, with the emphasis on the role that must play various African governments. The second part discusses the Millennium Development Goals and their targets. The third part develops the importance of trade and economic cooperation for a sustainable development in the continent. The last section focuses on the roles of various African governments to achieve the various targets developed within the Millennium Declaration.

African leaders have undertaken several initiatives to put the African continent back on the path of sustainable development. Among these initiatives, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was established as a catalyst for alleviating the challenges of African development. This paper aims to evaluate the differential effect of NEPAD on the four objectives of NEPAD to establish if NEPAD has had significant differential effects within the years of NEPAD compared to the years before NEPAD. This will help to understand the priorities of NEPAD policy better. The paper relies on and expands existing research on NEPAD and African development. The research applies a mix of review and quantitative approaches. Proxy data on four of NEPAD's target variables of development were collected from the World Bank Economic Indicators. The data were analyzed using the paired sample t-test for means at an alpha level 0.05. The results of the study show mixed effects of NEPAD. On the one hand, two variables, namely GDP and women in tertiary education in sub-Saharan Africa over some twenty-one years of NEPAD, significantly surpasses the GDP and women in tertiary education in sub-Saharan Africa for twenty-one years before the inception of NEPAD at a p-value of less than 0.0001. On the other hand, another variable, namely merchandising export to higher-income countries from sub-Saharan Africa during the years of NEPAD, is significantly lower than merchandising export before the inception of NEPAD at a p-value of less than 0.0001. In addition, CO2 emissions are found to be significantly lower in the years before the inception of NEPAD than during the period of NEPAD at a p-value of less than 0.0001. These results provide insight for improved public administration policies to bolster merchandising exports. Therefore, this paper is an academic case study on sub-Saharan Africa's economic growth that offers a new agenda for future researchers.

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Janis van der Westhuizen is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. He is the author of the recently published Malaysia, South Africa and the Challenges of Ethnic Redistribution with Growth (Praeger, 2003).Earlier incarnations of this paper were presented at the Studies of Development in the Era of Globalization Research Workshop, 9-10 August 2002, Halifax, Canada and the 2002 Research Colloquium of the South African Association of Political Studies, Hammanskraal, Pretoria, South Africa. I am indebted to Philip Nel for very useful comments on an earlier draft.IN A CONTROVERSIAL EDITORIAL three years ago, The Economist lamented that the bottom places in the world league tables are filled by African countries, and the gap between them and the rest of the world is widening.(1) Describing Africa as a hopeless continent, the article cited that 45 per cent of Africans live in poverty, that large parts of the continent are afflicted by ethnic and resource-driven conflicts, that corruption is often endemic with the rule of law thwarted, and that people are deeply vulnerable to malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Finally, it argued that, while official aid dwindled from $32 per African in 1990 to $19 in 1998, developed countries' farm subsidies amounted to over USD$360 billion a year--some $30 billion more than Africa's entire GDP.(2)The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is an ambitious, long-term project aimed at overcoming these tremendous obstacles by eradicating the continent's poverty and continued marginalization from the global economy. For Africa, however, the post-9/11 world makes the task of selling the continent's significance to the global economy more complex. Selling or framing NEPAD is as important now as the outcome the project seeks to achieve.(3) Failure to convince both African states and the West of NEPAD's significance could cause a idea to fail.It is, therefore, in the realm of ideational power that NEPAD faces its first and most crucial test. Nearly all analyses of NEPAD have failed to addres how (and with what level of success) the partnership's proponents have sought to mobilize ideational power and convince skeptics of its goals. Significantly, it is not so much the content of the NEPAD plan, but, rather, the way in which the value of the has been argued that remains largely unexamined.Change in world politics is increasingly being tied to successful argumentation processes and the significance of persuasion. Accordingly, this article is a preliminary assessment of the way NEPAD's proponents have sought to make the case for the partnership. Although the process of arguing the merits of NEPAD is ongoing, conditions favouring and constraining popularization of the idea can be identified through the broader view of the challenges posed by translating big ideas into new expectations of behaviour. Specifically, this article draws on constructivist accounts about the interaction between identity, role expectations and social norms to highlight how these issues have helped in the process of selling NEPAD. Unlike neo-realism and neo-liberalism, both of which emphasize material power, constructivists underscore the potential for dynamism and change in the international system by focusing on ideational power. They contend that the nature of actors and the international system is not pre-ordained, but rather determined by social context. It is the social context in turn that is shaped by the actors (their identities, interests and behaviours).(4)After a brief theoretical introduction to the argument, as the basis of ideational power, this article will focus on NEPAD advocates' successes. Specifically, the relevance of good governance and partnership is examined before addressing how the program's interlocutors--Canada, as a traditional middle power, and South Africa, as an emerging middle power--assisted in getting NEPAD on the agenda of global governance. …

This paper reviews major issues involved in achieving the objectives of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). Using a simple framework for evaluation, the analysis highlights considerations relevant to policymakers in the areas of poverty reduction, macroeconomic policies, trade promotion, attracting capital flows, and governance and institutional reforms. The analysis also identifies risks involved in achieving NEPAD's objectives. To minimize these risks, it will be important to make some goals more operational, to further broaden and deepen stakeholder participation, to establish a sound basis for monitoring progress, to prepare contingency plans, and to harmonize the role of regional institutions with NEPAD initiatives.

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) is a fairly recent African programme aimed at both general renewal and economic recovery through strategic endeavours by African governments with identified development partners. The author argues that NEPAD has already made significant progress in reaching some of its aims, particularly in the area of African ownership and leadership, and debt cancellation. However, NEPAD also faces formidable challenges: forging new partnerships, dismantling trade barriers, political dictatorships, the role of the African Peer Review Mechanism, possible polarisation, human resource investment, development and diversification of industries, and the eradication of a foreign aid mentality. Nevertheless, the author concludes that NEPAD is firmly based on clear principles, which are mandatory to its success in future. Africa Insight Vol. 36 (2) June 2006: 25-34

This article begins with a brief introduction on monitoring and evaluation concepts, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and challenges of its performance evaluation. It is indicated that NEPAD has not prescribed any internal or external monitoring and evaluation of its projects and programmes, and therefore calls into doubt the level of professional competence in its delivery strategies. The article also examines selected monitoring and evaluation strategies such as the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) and others, which are embedded in the NEPAD workplan, but not suffi ciently applied in its operations. Monitoring and evaluation mechanisms such as the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and a few benchmarking evaluation techniques are recommended as possible introductory tools that could assist in the monitoring and evaluation of the NEPAD projects and programmes. Africa Insight Vol. 37 (4) 2008 pp. 61-74