Umrabulo,+Commissioning+the+custody+of+nations



=Commissioning the custody of nations=

Umrabulo, No. 23, June 2005

 * Mphuthumi Ntabeni**

Though couched in the language of well-meant assistance, the recommendations of the Commission for Africa are likely to weaken, rather than strengthen, African states, writes Mphuthumi Ntabeni.

Africans were expected to universally welcome United Kingdom prime minister Tony Blair's 'Commission For Africa' report with its use of catch phrases like 'make poverty history', and the language of humanism. The report seems to be saying Africa should be free to shape her destiny with the assistance of the world at large. On practical terms this help translates to about an extra $25 billion a year in aid from western donors, a write-off of Africa's debt, and a better deal for Africa in trade relations.

Africa needs not only financial support, but educational, cultural, emotional, spiritual and social development as well. But we've to start somewhere.

It is when one considers the means of implementing the Commission's recommendations that one discovers the flaws of the report. When one looks beyond the report's self-consciously ambitious rhetoric and use of altruistic language in describing Africa's plight, there are low horizons about what Africa, through the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), is striving to achieve. This is perhaps why President Thabo Mbeki, though welcoming the report, had his reservations.

The new partnership between Africa and the West proposed by Blair's report is likely to weaken African states still further than give them capacity for state-building. New monitoring mechanisms, ostensibly designed to strengthen the 'capacity' of African states will instead undermine it because it compels African states into opening themselves up more 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 Western donors, the UN's Economic Commission for Africa and "civil society organisations" - mainly non-governmental organisations (NGOs) - 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 the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). All this sounds reasonable in a quick perusal.

But the fundamentals of these regulations mean that this new 'partnership' 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 nation states and business, 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 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 Washington consensus, in the 1980s and early 1990s. The twin forces of International Monetary Fund (IMF) measures to roll back the state 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 states such as Somalia clearly shows that outside interference, with the creation of parallel structures for distributing resources and monitoring state activity, undermines nations 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 of holding these external bodies to account.

Some are worried that the evangelical zeal with which 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 has 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 weak states of the modern world. He makes easier, and obfuscates, the return of one nation's subordination to another by legitimising it in the language of empowerment and capacity-building for the 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 on 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 sometimes couched in the language of old-fashioned imperialism's 'obligations of power', which echoes Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden" - the moral duty of those with the power, knowledge or 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 the consensual processes of diplomacy and collapse of international law. It is what gave a specious cloak of decency to the invasion 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 out in the export of democracy, state-building, human rights promotion and post-conflict peace-building. This achieves the blurring of line between aid and imperialism, because external interference claims to act 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 world has not learnt is that developing local capacity is the only solution to the management of state administration. You cannot impose solutions 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 modern belief in the moral and political equality of human beings. There lies the seed of its failure.


 * Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a freelance writer based in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape.


 * From: http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/pubs/umrabulo/umrabulo23/commissioning.html