An Open Letter to Prime Minister Tony
Blair
The
Rt. Honourable Tony Blair
Prime Minister of Great Britain
10 Downing Street
London, England
Re:
The Commission for Africa
Dear
Sir:
We, the
undersigned, would like to present our compliments to you and Sir Bob Geldof for the convening of The Commission for Africa. We commend you for the plan to draw
special attention in 2005 to the plight of Africa and to garner increased support for
the G8 Africa Action Plan and the New Partnership for African Development
(NEPAD). We applaud as well your decision to invite the international community
to get involved in the debate.
Ethiopians are
extremely appreciative of Sir Bob�s tireless efforts on behalf of the
downtrodden. We also fully share his sentiment that �this Commission should
arrive at a holistic response to the totality of the African misery.� Please
forgive the inescapable scepticism that, given the
time frame and the composition of the Commission, this new initiative will be a
crowning success in paving the way for the attainment of the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs). We are nonetheless grateful
for the planned elevation of Africa
in the global trade and aid agenda.
AID TO AFRICA MUST BE CONSISTENTLY PRO-POOR
OECD data show that
some US$500 billion (in 2000 dollars) of official loans and grants was extended
to Africa south of the Sahara in the past half century. The region
has also been a site of donor-designed and donor managed experiments that
reflected changing geopolitical interests and development fashions: big
projects, structural adjustment, sector programs, and, now, budgetary grants.
In the political arena, projects related to good governance, demobilization of
combatants, and training of new security forces have
been funded. A veritable army of domestic and foreign NGOs as well as the
thousands of itinerant expatriates siphon off over a quarter of the US$14
billion annual aid flows�a sum equivalent to the annual remittances from the
African Diaspora.
Yet, Africa continues to suffer perennial terms
of trade shocks, weather-related shocks, political shocks, and horrendous
pandemics. Growth has been episodic and fragile�easier to initiate than to
sustain. Real per capita income has tragically declined or stagnated since 1970
for all but a handful of countries. Although the global governance system
remains largely rigged, Africa
has not been able to take full advantage of even the trade concessions it had
received. It has instead become a net exporter of both skill and capital. Its
leaders continue to misuse the continent�s own scarce resources and, when they
can get away with it, aid funds. All these point to a troubling erosion of the
capacity as well as the legitimacy of the African state. The recent decline in
aid flows and the growing realization that aid has not been effective when channelled in insufficient amounts or in bad policy
environments have triggered insistent calls by pro-poor groups for greater
mutual accountability. Some have gone so far to advocate donor disengagement,
save relief aid, in order to allow Africans themselves to sort of their
political future. The inter-governmental paradigm of patrimonial aid clearly
needs revamping, if not outright reinventing.
Notable international
commissions (Pearson, Brandt, and Meltzer) and grandiose regional initiatives
(African Union and NEPAD) notwithstanding, the root of Africa�s economic debacle remains well below the radar. The voices of the African
poor�despite the recent lip service of the international financial
institutions�have yet to be heard especially by the taxpayers of the donor
countries.
Reasonable people have
come to recognize that African development is hampered primarily by
political failure, at the domestic as well as international level, to tailor
the application of sound economic principles to the unusual circumstances that
prevail in Africa.
This failure has less to do with incompetence than with the narrowness with
which self-interest is defined by donor countries as well as by African
leaderships including many of those waiting in the wings to replace them.
Ultimately, it reflects the powerlessness of Africans to influence events that
affect their lives so profoundly. Those without boots cannot, after all, lift
themselves up with their own bootstraps.
Mr.
Prime Minister,
As you know, Africa has been a pawn of Western
competition for global hegemony for well over a century. As the Cold War ended,
Africans had high expectations that democracy and development would be very
prominent in the global agenda. Sadly, these hopes are rapidly giving way to
despondency and a crisis of confidence in international law. An apparently new
scramble for Africa
is giving rise to unholy alliances between myopic big powers and the usual
assortment of murderous despots. Foreign aid has ironically boosted the
economic prize that comes with successfully shooting one�s way into the
presidential palace. The logic of feeding the greedy to reach the needy is
perpetuating a cycle of violence and political fragility in Africa. It bears noting here that the AU
and NEPAD are clearly inspired by foreign models. They embody unacceptably low
representation of African civil society. And the fact that their success is
premised on heavy external financing belies the lack of a strategic vision for
African self-reliance. To make matters worse, duly �elected� African dictators
who pay more attention to their paymasters in Brussels and Washington, D.C., are audacious enough
to present themselves to the international community as reincarnated reformers.
The complicity of donors in this morbid political dance never ceases to astound
us. As the Ethiopian saying aptly puts it, �those who feign sleep will not heed
wake-up calls.�
It is no wonder, then,
that the voices of African civil society are no longer willing to accept at
face value that the authors of the current quagmire can be expected to devise a
people-oriented vision. This scepticism, for example,
finds confirmation in the representation of Africa in the Commission itself. For one
thing, the Commission is not broadly representative of the fundamental
interests in African society. Conspicuously absent are representatives of civil
society, opposition parties and chambers of commerce from Africa. For another, even those who are on
the Commission are decidedly uninspiring. One such member is the head of the
U.N. Economic Commission for Africa,
a sterile bureaucracy that has miserably failed to provide the much-needed
intellectual leadership in charting out an Africa-centred
development strategy. Another member is Ato Meles Zenawi, the Prime Minister
of Ethiopia, whose record is exemplar only with respect to what the Commission
for Africa purportedly
seeks to rectify.
As Sir W. Arthur Lewis,
a member of the Pearson Commission rightly put it, �The case for foreign aid is
basically moral: the obligation of the rich to help the poor.� When provided
under the right circumstances, such aid alleviates poverty directly and enables
the poor to mobilize their own resources. By limiting its mandate to the
inter-governmental realm, we are afraid that the Commission may have
inadvertently sent the wrong signal that the African poor will continue to be
treated as pitiable subjects rather than as key stakeholders worthy of being
masters of their own destiny.
The United Kingdom
is not a big bilateral donor to Africa.
However, it is our sincere belief that your government can provide the visionary
leadership in the G8 and the EU that is sorely needed for raising the size as
well as effectiveness of development assistance. What ordinary Africans say
they want are so basic that the endless academic debates on Africa�s needs are patently farcical. The villagers� wish list typically includes:
peace, food security, universal primary education, protection from easily
eliminable diseases and devastating pandemics (such as HIV, malaria and TB),
freedom of mobility within one�s country, security of ownership over one�s hard
earned assets, and, yes, bicycles and plastic buckets. Are these really too
much to ask for? It is our belief that foreign aid has done some good in Africa, albeit in providing palliatives in
the social sector. It certainly can do even more to spur African productivity
by pushing politicians to get the basics right. As the Economist (January 17, 2004)
rightly puts it, the predatory African political class must be compelled by
citizens and donors to �govern well, spend money on schools rather than
soldiers, allow space for peaceful dissent, and avoid inflaming ethnic
grievances.�
It is our fervent wish
that the Commission for Africa
will seriously search for effective ways of converting donors into judicious development
partners and political allies of the African poor. We, therefore, urge the
Commission to go beyond issuing yet another glossy report on the lofty MDGs to formulate realistic programmes
for achieving them. In the spirit of more aid for basic needs and trade, we
hope that the Commission will explore effective trade, investment and migration
regimes that meet Africa�s
glaring needs. With respect to aid, we trust that it would explore novel
approaches towards a stable and adequate funding of aid (including your
initiative for an International Financing Facility, and creative taxes on
humanity�s common resources), establishing a sensible division of labour among aid agencies, linking the allocation of pooled
aid to a pro-poor and well-prioritised development
agenda, investing in research on tropical agriculture and diseases, channelling a good deal of the money to credible local
NGOs, and devising a mechanism by which the beneficiaries can bring to bear
their invaluable local knowledge on result-oriented aid programmes.
ETHIOPIA IS A CASE IN POINT
As the twentieth
anniversary of Live Aid approaches, Ethiopia stands as a
cautionary tale of wasted potentials and wrecked hopes. Ethiopia has the sad
fortune of emerging out of the stranglehold of a socialist dictatorship only to
fall in the hands of ethno-Marxist insurgent movements. While Eastern Europe received Western
support to complete its transition to a market economy and a democratic order,
Ethiopians saw the United States
and Europe providing
short-sighted support to the new regime. The regime, even as a transitional
government, orchestrated the break-up of the country in a manner that left
Ethiopia landlocked; recklessly led the country to a costly war with Eritrea;
instituted a pernicious political system based on the atavistic and polarizing
ideology of tribalism; and built up a one-party system that has corrupted both
the state and the fledgling market economy through party-owned companies. Never
in Ethiopia�s
history, even during the dark days of the Derg, has
the country�s sovereignty been trampled upon.
Despite the hollow and
tiresome donor rhetoric of no-democracy-no-aid, the regime has received a
billion USD annually, mostly from the EU and the World Bank. None of the
promised democratic reforms have, of course, materialized except in name. The
mandated consultations with respect to the poverty reduction papers have been
utterly perfunctory. The two national elections, held in 1995 and 2000, were
rigged. As the 2005 elections approach, draconian press laws have been
proposed. Opposition political parties, trade unions and civic groups have been
targeted for renewed harassment. As the 2004 Report of Amnesty International
puts it, the Ethiopian Government routinely uses �malicious prosecution,
arbitrary arrest and excessive force against demonstrators as tools of
political repression.�
To stem the potential
political threat from chronically unemployed school leavers, the police
(trained with U.K.
money, we might add) have recently been handed a Vagrancy Law which is being
used to imprison innocent school leavers. Reminiscent of the red terror of the Derg regime, parents in Addis Ababa today go from police
station to police station looking for bits of information regarding the
whereabouts of their disappeared children. In the economic sphere, the urban
and rural lands that were nationalized by the previous regime continue to be
state owned. Small farmers, who enjoy neither tenure security nor food
security, are being threatened by the regime�s cadres with eviction and jail
for voting against government candidates or for failing to service loans for
fertilizer and seeds even after being hit by successive drought and collapsing
markets.
The adversarial
relationship between the government and the private sector, including the
growing diaspora, has made Ethiopia distinctly unattractive
for private investment, much less for the repatriation of the substantial
capital flight or remittances. The regime, as with much other African
leadership, has instead polished up its skills for soliciting more aid by
cynically parading the starving, or engaging in reform mongering in tune with
the latest international rhetoric of good governance.
Dissatisfaction with
the misrule of Ato Meles�s
government is currently taking several disturbing forms. The ruling party seems
to be in an early phase of implosion. A number of insurgencies, ranging from
the jihadist to the secessionist, are rearing their
ugly heads. Students at the much-neglected universities are presently on strike
demanding academic freedom. The European Parliament has been calling in vain
for impartial inquiries into serious and credible allegations of massacres and
genocide in a number of districts. The long-suffering citizenry, whose
political consciousness has been raised by decades of mass education and rising
literacy, are fast triumphing over the life of quiet desperation by being
receptive to opposition parties that embrace its causes. There is nothing that Ato Meles dreads more than a
repeat of 1999-2001 which saw the suspension of significant aid in response to
the reckless Ethio-Eritrean war. Since then, the
reform program has stalled just as it entered its most critical stage. Due to
the combination of a fading bounce-back effect from post-war recovery, policy
uncertainty and plummeting coffee prices, the economy�s growth rate has since
remained unacceptably low. The country clearly lacks a viable internal growth
engine.
Needless to say, Ato Meles Zenawi
is an ethnic entrepreneur, not a statesman. His government has predictably
rebuffed all offers of negotiation by the opposition, apparently counting on
continued external support. As a result, Ethiopia is backsliding instead
of deepening the democratization process. Lending respectability to such failed
leaders, much less rewarding them with additional and less restrictive aid, would only perpetuate the aid trap in which Ethiopia finds herself.
PARTNERSHIP IS ABOUT PEOPLE, NOT
GOVERNMENTS
Freedom from tyranny
and material want is a universal human ideal. It is also a product of
collective struggles by courageous people within and across national
boundaries. We believe that a genuine people-to-people partnership is essential
for nurturing durable local institutions of accountability in Ethiopia. This is indeed
a multi-generational project. Aid programs aimed at long-term development will
have to be reinvented to provide unstinting donor support for fledgling civic
and professional organizations as durable agents of Ethiopian development and
democratization. There is much more that the West can do to save one of the
oldest states in the world from failing. A window of opportunity has now opened
for well-meaning donors to exercise their enormous leverage by devising an
�exit strategy� for autocrats, and helping to engineer a peaceful transition to
a legitimate and pro-development government.
Mr.
Prime Minister,
As far as Ethiopia is concerned,
the bold vision that may emerge out of the Commission�s deliberations should
endorse the cultivation of free and competitive economic and political systems
in the country. That would mean pressing harder with the call by the Department
for International Development (DfID) for restoring
full ownership of land to smallholders. In this regard, we are heartened by the
announcement at the current G8 Summit: �What we are trying to do this year
[2004] is to break the cycle of the famine in the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia, where there are
5 million people who are really on the edge of starvation at any point in time.
We're working with the Ethiopian government on a comprehensive agricultural
reform program, including land reform.� The widely reported mismanagement of
the large resettlement project�a major component of the government�s Food
Security Program�however, does not inspire much confidence in its capability to
meet these ambitious targets.
We also strongly urge
the Commission to call for disinvestment with respect to the numerous
party-owned companies, for regional equity in the allocation of aid, and for
the replacement of ethnic-based federalism by an inclusive form of political
devolution. Just as importantly, it is imperative to vigorously insist on free
and fair elections involving the full participation of all political parties.
Since the 2005 Ethiopian national elections coincide with the final report of
the Commission, Ethiopia
provides a great test case for the new vision. As to the future, we can assure
you, Mr. Prime Minister, that Ethiopia has the natural
and human resources to be a dynamic and prosperous nation. Its resilient people
are asking only for a helping hand of genuine friendship as they struggle to
extricate themselves from the twin grips of abject poverty and a corrupt regime
that, even after thirteen years at the helm of the state, unrepentantly calls
itself a liberation front. Wishing you and the Commission
success in this noble endeavour.
Respectfully,
Ambassador Imru Zelleke (Ret.)
Ambassador Ayalew Mandefro
(Ret.)
Professor Alemante G. Selassie
Dr. Teketel Haile-Mariam
Dr. Fekadu Fullas
Dr. Alula Abate
Dr. Tsehai Berhane-Selassie
Mogus Brook, Engineer
Diana K. Mariam, CPA
Dr. Mesfin Genanaw
Professor Berhanu Abegaz
Dr. Asfawossen Asrat