The State of Africa
December 3, 2004 - Africa Action Baraza 2004
by Muthoni Wanyeki
Introduction
· Thank you for inviting me back to share with you as you analyse and debate how best to individually and collectively move on American foreign policy vis a vis Africa
· Obviously, with the results of your recent elections, this kind of analysis and debate is even more critical than it was a year ago
· My task is to give you an overview of the issues that my network, its members and partners across the continent feel are critical to the analysis and debate
· These issues are not, perhaps, significantly different than those I shared a year ago—questions of development financing, trade and investment remain crucial
· But, this year, I thought I would begin by reminding us of why they are still critical
· In doing so, I want to refer the findings of the United Nations (UN) interim report on the state of implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
· As you are aware, almost five years ago, member states of the UN—with the exception of the United States—committed to specific development targets in around eight goals, including: the reduction of poverty by half by 2015; the reduction of maternal mortality (which, until the advent of HIV/AIDS was the most prevalent cause of death of African women); universal primary education for both boys and girls; and gender equality
· The MDGs were, of course, criticised by civil society around the world—including African civil society
· For they were seen as an over-simplified précis of the many development policy commitments and targets UN member states had committed to over the past decade of international policy negotiating processes—from Beijing around women’s development, equality and peace, to Cairo around women’s reproductive and sexual rights, to Copenhagen around social development, to Durban around racism, to Monterrey around financing for development, to Rio around sustainable development and to Vienna around human rights
· Beyond being over-simplified, they were also seen as making correlations that do not hold in the absence of structural changes at both the national and the international levels
· Education, for example, can improve people’s capacities to defend their human rights and move themselves out of poverty, but only in national level contexts where human rights are broadly defined and protected and where economic growth strategies are implemented in tandem with economic redistribution strategies enabling public investment in education, health and so on
· And, obviously, many national level contexts—in Africa as elsewhere—both constrain themselves from protecting human rights in their broadest sense as a result of internal contestations over these rights and are constrained from concerning themselves with economic redistribution beyond the minimal targeting of public expenditure for education, health and so on now demanded by the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers
· Equally obviously, economic redistribution must not just take place at the national level—it is an international imperative particularly considering that Africa actually is a net exporter of capital
· That critique of the MDGs aside, however, they have become the framework through which the UN system—including the international financial institutions (IFIs) that we continually forget to hold accountable as being are part of the UN system—will measure development progress during the five year review taking place in New York next year
· They have also become the framework through which most bilateral development cooperation agencies—with the exception again of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—are channelling development financing
· And so, to remind us of why the analysis and debate we are doing here is so important, I want to highlight what the UN’s interim report on the state of implementation of the MDGs said—bearing in mind that the MDGs were meant to accelerate development progress
· The interim report concluded that, if we continue to move at the pace that we are moving, far from achieving the MDGs in 2015, Africa can only expect to achieve the MDGs in 2169—a staggering one and a half centuries later than anticipated
The State of Africa Today
· The question that therefore presents itself as we look at the state of Africa today is whether we can afford to wait another one and a half centuries—taking into account that we would be waiting not for the elimination of poverty, but merely its reduction by half
· We cannot
· We must therefore hold that overall picture, that refusal to wait in our minds as we contemplate all of the contradictory and disparate images that seep through about Africa
· I want to focus on images around just two critical African development concerns—HIV/AIDS and conflict
· With respect to HIV/AIDS—let us consider the consensus recently reached in Bangkok that the face of HIV/AIDS today is that of a young African women, for infection rates of young African women between the ages of 15 and 24 are between three and four times those of their male counterparts. At the very same time, the Abstain, Be Faithful and Use a Condom (ABC) approach to prevention is being thrown out in favour of the Abstain (A) approach favoured by the bilateral development cooperation agency now pouring the most money into HIV/AIDS—no prizes for guessing which this agency is. If the ABC approach was already inadequate with respect to the inability of most young African women to negotiate sex, the A approach makes a complete mockery of the new recognition that prevention hinges upon African women’s reproductive and sexual rights
· With respect to conflict—let us consider the renewed sabre-rattling by Rwanda over the failure of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the African and international community to substantively address the extreme human rights violations of and persistent security threat posed militia organisations in the eastern DRC at the very same time that Africa and the international community are insisting that the DRC’s internal peace process can and will hold. Or we could consider the forced removals, mass rape and violence in Darfur, the Sudan at the very same time that the peace process for South Sudan is being forced to conclusion
· Africa has tried to respond to both situations—the AU has stood firm in its insistence the Rwanda respect the territorial integrity of the DRC while demanding a larger presence of international peacekeepers in the eastern DRC and a continuation of the electoral process. In July, the African Union (AU) committed peacekeepers to Darfur. And, in September, its African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights received its report on human rights violations in Darfur, which was tabled to the AU to inform its negotiations with the Sudan on Darfur
· But, it has to be admitted that Africa’s position has been made difficult by the impact of the flagrant American disrespect of international law defining the right to defence—America’s illegal intervention in Iraq was on the basis that defence could be defined pre-emptively as offence, as Rwanda is arguing now
· It has also to be admitted that Africa’s own resources to intervene under regional mandates is limited—the AU could only initially commit 300 peacekeepers to Darfur although more are expected. The UN is itself stretched while the Americans are too busy with their own misadventures to be helpful—although, of course, conveniently strong condemnations of the Sudan have been and continue to be made
· For, with respect to security in general—the Bush administration still in effect, together with its so-called ‘War Against Terror.’ Iraq remains unresolved, Yasser Arafat is dead, together with an era of the Palestinian struggle and the man best placed to be his successor is in jail on account of several life sentences and it is still unclear what this will mean for the peace process
· As for Africa, the spin off effect of these events is a growing acceptance to view our worth as being primarily geopolitical/military and increasing tendencies towards the religious right—both Christian and Muslim—resulting in the fanning of communal tensions from Kenya to Nigeria
· Worse, we are also witnessing a new retreat from secularism by African government, a willingness to negotiate away African women’s reproductive and sexual rights—upon which all religious nationalisms ultimately hinge—in favour of the new bilateral development financing and trade deals being calculatedly put together as part of the so-called ‘War Against Terror,’ compromising Africa’s common position in the face of the World Trade Organisation (WTO)
· And too in favour of the new military assistance deals unseen since the days of the so-called ‘Cold War,’ compromising internal efforts to expand recognition of civil and political rights, heightening our own forms of militarism and thus undermining regional efforts to broker peace
Conclusion
· In conclusion, we need to be clear about what the erosion of secularism here in the United States means for Africa
· An anecdote—a friend of mine works with a UN agency on south Sudan. She recently told me, in a stunned fury, about a battle she had had to fight to stop an American evangelical television team from trying to enter south Sudan using her agency to film a reality television show about…missionaries. The story is complicated and long. But, bearing in mind the nature of the conflict in south Sudan and the difficulties of access to the south Sudan not only for south Sudanese organisations working out of Nairobi, Kenya, not only for international human rights and humanitarian organisations, but also for UN agencies themselves, the request—and the attitudes that underlay it—was utterly irresponsible
· We need to be clear how the so-called ‘War Against Terror’ is being fought at the levels of hearts and minds as well as at the development cooperation, trade and investment levels and military/security levels and what this means for Africa
· We need to be clear about the need to reinstate genuine multilateralism—welcoming the new proposals on Security Council reform and continuing to seek greater coherence between the UN system and Development (UNCTAD)—and the WTO, with the UN taking supremacy with respect to development and peace
· We need to push our respective governments—here and in Africa—towards more democratic global governance with the institutionalisation of gender-balanced civil society access and participation in economic and financial as well as military and security decision-making and norm-setting
· We need to continue to focus on the imperative to change power relations within and among states—inclusive of the impoverished, the majority of whom continue to be women—and redistribute resources within and among states
· We need to make sure that we do not wait until 2169 to do so
· I thank you
*L. Muthoni Wanyeki is the Executive Director of the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (FEMNET), a pan-African network working towards African women’s development, equality and other human rights through advocacy at the regional and international levels, training on gender analysis and mainstreaming and strategic communications.
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