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President Abdoulaye Wade's constant bashing of NEPAD

[ Posted On: 2006-07-18 ]

IS PRESIDENT ABDOULAYE WADE REALLY SERIOUS IN HIS CONSTANT BASHING OF THE NEPAD OR IS THERE MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE?

Two long articles in the East African; one by Special Correspondent Fred Oluoch and the other by Zachary Ochieng, Associate Editor of NewsfromAfrica have prompted me to write this article.

Whereas Oluoch continued his commentary on the just concluded Kenya review, Ochieng picked on Wade's contributions during the NEPAD closed door meeting which, as usual, was closed to the press and observers.

I can understand Oluoch's analysis; which was balanced and objective most of the way but, I wasn't sure of some of the conclusions Ochieng made in his article, some of which were outrageously inaccurate.

Fred Oluoch had the benefit of talking to me soon after I returned from Banjul.

More importantly, he had the presence of mind to ask for a copy of the Kenya report and the country response; which I readily availed to him since it was no longer sacred after President Kibaki had defended it.

Having said that I think it would be prudent to state that writing about the NEPAD, APRM or the AU and any other international organization like the EU or the UN is a challenging intellectual journey. It requires in depth understanding of the issues involved. Like every intellectual discourse it requires extra effort to read extensively, research and talk to different players. It is not the kind of responsibility you can treat like writing a love letter to a girl- friend or the editor of a village newsletter.

It is against this background that I would like to examine Fred Oluoch's latest commentary on Kenya's performance at the Banjul AU forum last month.

It is true some responses to the Kenya country report appear vague especially on areas where analytical minds like Oluoch's expected explicity. And nobody can fault them on that.

If anything, in this era of peer reviewing, even the Kenya report and response must be taken to task by all well meaning friends of Kenya. And on this score, none other than Prime Minister Meles of Ethiopia had to interrogate a lot of assumptions made by the international team that visited Kenya as impracticable in Kenyan situation; especially how to close the development gap between the arid nomadic North and Central Kenya.

Fred Oluoch had three issues he thought Kenya was rather vague on. One such issue was how to decisively deal with high level corruption beyond just passing laws and putting institutions like the Kenya Anti- Corruption Commission. Whereas Oluoch certainly has a point and in fact confirms the feelings of many Kenyans, the truth is; what Kenya pleaded at the forum was that it needed time to let institutions and enacted anti- corruption laws mature and take effect. In three years of NARC, it has at least created two or three anti-corruption institutions and passed at least two legislative laws on corruption; some of which are due for amendments to make them stronger. If five years down the line, Kenya cannot be more explicit in dealing with this vice then we shall definitely have moral authority to pass the no- success verdict.

The other points that Oluoch raised were the unresolved issues of land-grabbing and past crimes that have gone unpunished yet the review just glossed over them. The same issues were raised by another East African columnist, Lynne Wanyeki. Other than Wanyeki and Oluoch, the same were raised by another human rights activist at an APRM evaluation workshop in Nairobi a week after the Banjul forum.

Yes, the review was not specific on past crimes; something that human rights activists would like to call the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission along the lines of the now famous Desmond Tutu Commission of South Africa.

But it is also true that soon after NARC came to power, it hired a human rights activist based in the US who came and chaired a task force whose mandate was to examine the viability of such as commission. But due to the rapid and dynamic nature of Kenyan politics, even those who appointed Prof Makau to the task force have since left the scene.

However, there is even a larger danger of trying to make Africa feel that NEPAD or its APRM are the solutions to every imaginable ailment on this continent. There is also the danger that sectoral interests may begin to interpret NEPAD and APRM successes or failures in terms of their narrow sectoral interests. If today all lawyers lumped all their judicial complaints at the door of NEPAD, human rights activists did the same, followed by teachers and tea pickers, NEPAD would never know the end of its list of things to do.

It is true there is need for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission in Kenya but I certainly don't agree that this is an APRM docket as long as we have the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Kenya National Human Rights Commission.

I say this because these are the two watch- dogs that are paid to bark and they must bark until the government wakes up to do something about it. What APRM must do is to raise it as an item for discussion as a challenge to good governance in Kenya at the national level and at the AU forum. The APRM must also stress that the issue needs urgent attention. Beyond that, it is the duty of the two human rights bodies to carry on with the struggle.

Another issue that Lynne Wanyeki, Fred Oluoch together with Kenya Human Rights Commission have raised as a weakness with the report is landlessness.

The concerns they have raised are genuine but they were not honest enough to have delved into the land issue in the report. But again, we have the Ndungu' and Njonjo Land Reports that have yet to be dealt with. We have the land policy that has yet to be implemented.

Have our writers and activists really educated us and our landless brothers and sisters on their contents? Do we know what else is missing in these reports? Is it enough to scream on behalf of landless Kenyans without offering lasting solutions to their problems? In the new Kenya we need minds with solutions; not those that are ready to pass the back at the slightest opportunity.

At the risk of appearing to be too repetitive, the APRM is not a police department.

It is not a law enforcement agency. It is not even a court of law. The Review Forum is two-country-audits in one. The nation has a chance to self- critique itself. Then it has a chance to be critiqued by outsiders. Thereafter the Eminent Persons of Africa look at both and recommend the way forward to African Heads of State and Government. At that level, the elders say, "Hey brother, what's going on here? Look at what your people are saying! What are your plans of making life better for them? Do you need help or you can manage on your own? If you can manage, show us your plan of action. If you cannot, let us know how we can help!"

Like President Olusegun Obasanjo says of the APRM in his NEPAD annual report of 2002, "For the first time we have a structured mechanism that is going to enable us learn from each other instead of being dependent on information provided by others." Others here could mean The World Bank, IMF, the European Union and other traditional development partners of Africa that have for decades produced damning reports on Africa.

This, in my humble opinion, is the role of the African Peer Review Mechanism.

Turning to Zachary Ochieng's claim that NEPAD is a talking shop, I read the folly of picking bits and pieces of information in workshops and seminars and making them the base of reaching dangerous conclusions.

President Wade of Senegal has been complaining about NEPAD's ineffectiveness for the last two years. Now, if one has no background information why Wade talks like that at every opportunity about NEPAD, one can make many grave mistakes in a public debate.

The first problem with Ochieng's article is the accuracy of simple things like when NEPAD was conceived and created. Some of this information is readily available on the internet.

It does not need rocket science to access them. Therefore it becomes worrying when an outstanding journalist on African Affairs can fail to know that NEPAD was founded in July 2001 and not 1999 as Ochieng would love his readers to believe.

Missing a birthday of your child by two years is too wrong to be excused even in heaven.

It means you can celebrate your child's sixth birthday when in fact she is four years old!

It is true that Wade helped found NEPAD, but it is also true that he was not the only one to come up with the idea. It is also true that Wade has good reasons to be unhappy with the initiative for more reasons than one. But, unfortunately that is as far as the President is right. The rest are offline.

As African commentators, it is our duty to face up to our leaders; Abdoulaye Wade included, if they are wrong or propagating inaccuracies.

First the world needs to be reminded that NEPAD was founded in Lusaka, Zambia in July 2001, exactly five years this month. Since then it has produced three annual reports, the first one being in July 2003.

NEPAD was formed specifically to tackle the challenges facing Africa then and now and these challenges included persistent political conflicts, civil conflicts, governance problems, poverty, underdevelopment and declining investment levels.

To tackle the above problems, the African Heads of State, Abdoulaye Wade included, gave NEPAD the following gudelines to tackle Africa's myriad problems:

It was expected to formulate, create and promote policies and programmes to eradicate poverty and inequality, place the continent on the path of growth and development, halt the continent's marginalization, accelerate women's empowerment, harness African ownership and leadership, accelerate regional and continental integration and create new partnerships among Africans and between Africa and the rest of the world.

No where in the NEPAD Charter is there a place where NEPAD was mandated to build roads, bridges and dams across the continent as proof of its success. If Wade wants NEPAD to join the construction industry, then he must go back to his peers and convince them to amend the charter.

The trouble with Africa is its ability to think up new initiatives very fast but somehow along the way, renege on them! The very initiators of the same initiatives start being impatient with the idea if they don't see the results the following morning. We never give our ideas time to grow and evolve into reality.

Some one should tell President Abdoulaye Wade that it took the European Union sixty years to get to where they are today and took the OAU forty years to do nothing.

And coming closer home, Wade should tell us what the ECOWAS has achieved in the West Coast all these years it has been around. Can Wade tell Africa and the world how many kilometres of road the EC has built in West Africa?

Because ideas take time to grow, it is the height of hypocrisy and short- sightedness for founders of an idea to expect to realize their dreams in their life- time. It sometimes takes three to four generations of leaders to make an impact.

President Wade has been complaining about the delay in moving NEPAD to the AU. He is right there. He has also not been happy with the management of the NEPAD Secretariat. He may be right also. But the fact that NEPAD has not moved to Addis Ababa as Wade and most African leaders would prefer, the fact that Wade has a more or less permanent gripe with the Secretariat Management team, for whatever reasons, does not give him the right to talk down his peers at the AU summits as if he is the all knowing president of Africa.

There are avenues and machineries to deal with these issues in a more diplomatic way than yelling at every body in every Summit.

Watching Wade take the floor at the Banjul summit, it was interesting that he entered the hall just when the debate was starting and plunged into it headlong. From his utterances, it appeared as if his contributions were well rehearsed in advance. He had only two points to make on the debate; the same points he made in Khartoum six months earlier; that NEPAD had an ineffective Secretariat; that NEPAD had not been absorbed into the AU as proposed adopted in earlier meetings of the AU.

At the end of it all, it was a two- horse race between Wade and Mbeki. And one did not have to be a genius to detect that Wade was reading the inability of NEPAD moving to Addis Ababa as the work of Mbeki who probably would like to see NEPAD head office remain in Midrand for some unexplained reasons.

Although not talked about openly, Wade does not think much of the present CEO of NEPAD who hails from Mozambique, a Southern African. He succeeded Wiseman Nkuhlu who also hailed from South Africa. If one puts two and two together, it is possible that Wade sees Mbeki's unilateral hand in keeping NEPAD in South Africa and influencing the appointment of its key managers at salaries far beyond those of the AU staff!

Looked at another way, may be Wade's real problem may not necessarily be with NEPAD Secretariat staff or its inability to implement an AU decision to move to Addis Ababa in time.

It may have to do with sibling rivalry between two heads of state; one a powerhouse in the South; the other, the would be king of French West Africa! It is these minor inconsequential differences at the leadership level that may cause the demise of every African initiative. The same silly differences killed the East African Community in East Africa in 1977.

The good news is that Wade has asked for a brainstorming session in Abuja some time this year where hopefully all these misconceptions about NEPAD will be sorted out.

The most that we can expect of President Obasanjo is to invite African journalists from the six corners of the continent so that they can be witness to the debate rather than giving Wade a field day to lambaste African initiatives in European capitals using the ever hostile foreign press to feed his anger back to unsuspecting African media.

Finally, the only overriding principle of both the APRM and NEPAD is reform in all its forms. If Africa reforms its way of managing politics, its economy and service delivery, it will have succeeded beyond expectation.

If we reform our way of politicking, managing our economies and the way we govern our people, we shall not lack food, will not go to war over water, have ethnic conflicts, overthrow our governments or fail to deliver food to draught stricken areas!

Article Source: http://www.afroarticles.com/article-dashboard

Jerry Okungu is a freelance political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. Jerry also serves as a Board Director at The Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. Jerry has written extensively on issues affecting Kenya and the rest of Africa over the years. Other articles written by Jerry Okungu are available at this location

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