SUNS #4293 Friday 2 October 1998


AFRICA: RENAISSANCE DEBATE GAINS MOMENTUM

Johannesburg, Sep 30 (IPS/Gumisai Mutume) -- As talk of the African Renaissance gains momentum, academics say there is need to pause and reflect on why the continent needs to be reborn.

Ghanaian academic, Peter Ewang, says among the factors responsible for Africa's collapse are international development programmes that were not relevant or geared towards the need of the continent.

"... these activities ignore the fact that in African countries the constraints of development are not caused solely by economic factors but by institutional weaknesses, low level social awareness, education and healthcare," he says. "Development is a term that means something distinctly different to those being developed and those doing the developing," he adds.

The economic structure of Africa has been geared not to feed its own population but meet import needs of industrialised nations that have reduced the continent to recurring famine and unserviceable debt.

An example is how Sudan evolved from being food self-sufficient for centuries before independence but was encouraged to grow cotton after 1956 to supply British textile mills. And when the world
cotton market fell, so did Sudan's economy.

Ghana touted by the World Bank as one of the success stories of structural adjustment is in decline because of the fall of coffee prices. Coffee is the country's most important cash crop, accounting for 70 percent of exports.

The World Bank is now advocating Ghana shift its emphasis to large-scale commercial fish farming for export -- and cheap fish the primary source of Ghanaians has begun to disappear from the local market.

"At best the aid programmes of the past were not effective, at worst they have been part of the problem," argues Ewang in a paper prepared for the African Renaissance conference held in
Johannesburg this week.

Because of development programmes that have failed to get off the ground, many African countries today owe much more money to the international community than they did 20 years ago.

Africa's debt increased from $6 billion in 1970 to $243 billion in 1994.

As a percentage of gross domestic product (gdp), sub-Saharan Africa's debt is the highest of any developing region. As a result, Africa has lost all its credit-worthiness and ratings on which
foreign investors rely.

The exponents of the African Renaissance are pushing for the continent to break away and emancipate itself from the choking hold Western countries and institutions continue to exert, in order to avoid a cycle of unsustainable development.

When in 1993 the World Bank introduced a four-tier classification of sub-Saharan countries in order to assess the adjustment experience, it identified 15 countries thought to have been able to put in place 'fairly good" economic policies. But as UNCTAD's Trade and Development points out, five years later, only three of these 15 find their place among countries of Africa classified as "strong
performers."

However the Bank is now realising that the contribution of the majority of these countries to the current economic recovery on the continent fell short of expectation.
"... most of the countries that were thought to be pursuing relatively sound policies at the time are not among the strong performers today," notes the UN Conference on Trade and Development.

Bad advice, notes Ewang, but the real problem is that African governments continue to follow these prescriptions.

"The major problem about the debate about the African Renaissance is not really coming from the Africans themselves, but from aliens trying either to discourage the concept or attempting to define
what Africans are or should be," says William Makgoba of Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand.

The parley, held on Sept 28-29, brought together leading academics and intellectuals from the continent to examine the origins of the renaissance, its objectives and its implications.