Addisvoice.com is AnswerTips-enabled. Double-click any words for dynamic dictionary and reference. |
|
||
|
Food Crises resolution in Africa
Requires Building an Integrated African
Economy
Prof. Mamo Muchie
Network of Ethiopian Scholars (NES) |
June 25, 2008
Inspiring Quote!
“The elevation of an agricultural
people to the condition of countries at
once agricultural, manufacturing and
commercial, can only be accompanied
under the law of free trade, when the
various nations engaged at the time of
manufacturing industry shall be in the
same degree of progress and
civilization; when they shall place no
obstacle in the way of the economical
development of each other, and not
impede their respective progress by war
or adverse commercial legislation.”
(Friedrich
List, the National System of
Political Economy, Trans. By G. A.
Matile (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott
(Translation of: F. List: Das
nationale System der Politischen
Oekonomie, 1841): pp.72-73)
1.
Introduction
2.
Africa is so rich but also so poor!
A brief overview of the African economic
picture reveals a paradox where the
continent that has rich mineral
resources, nearly a billion people and a
land mass which includes the sizes of
China, USA, India, Western Europe,
Argentina (see map below) together and
still is larger than the sum of these
regions is in the an unacceptable state
of being an object of aid, debt and
loans despite the vast resources both
known and yet to be explored in it for
the whole post- colonial period.
Africa should have been a production and
innovation centre not a charity and aid
centre of the world where currently
‘donorship’ has sadly replaced African
national ownership’ of not just Africa’s
resources, but even worse Africa’s own
agency, autonomy and independence to
shape and determine policy and
direction to undertake national
development. The main thrust of the
African quest to unite such key ideas,
projects, programmes and infrastructures
connecting its politics, knowledge and
the economy flows from a recognition
that Africa must organise a production,
economic and innovation system by
integrating consumers with suppliers,
producers with users, users with other
users in Africa and for Africa. This is
both desirable and possible and
knowledge of how to do it- know-how- can
be cultivated so that the continent
emerges fully as a region free from the
‘donorship’ gaze it suffers from so
cruelly at the moment under the enormous
burden of a crippling fragmentation and
dependency myopia.
This is no exaggeration to state that
African political and economic
arrangements today are characterized by
internal pervasive and schizophrenic
disconnections, mismatches,
fragmentations and external dependence.
Nearly 70 % of Africa’s overall
population exist in subsistence and
primary resource and agrarian condition.
Where a region has the overwhelming
portion of its production as
agricultural, that region invariably
remains vulnerable even to feeding
itself, conversely where a few
percentage of a nation’s population is
working on the land and is engaged in
knowledge, manufacture and services for
the most part, that nation is more
likely to feed itself whether it rains
or not.
The main pattern of Africa’s economic
relations with the world economy is
through what makes Africa permanently to
remain vulnerable unless it changes its
conditions through continued unequal
primary agriculture
and
mineral exports for the products with
knowledge, technology and innovation
value added manufactured elsewhere.
African countries produce similar
primary products for the same market and
compete against each other thus
accentuating and deepening their
fragmentation. A key example is the
horticulture produced by many East
African countries today!
Africa faces a true dilemma: if it is
able to insulate itself from the world
economy, it can incur possible welfare,
income and knowledge losses. If it
continues to integrate as it does now
based on current dominant patterns of
relating on the basis of primary
commodity transactions with the world
economy, it faces continued economic
dependence and fragmentation and lack of
structural transformation of its
fundamental economic, social and
knowledge infrastructure.
Africa’s current pattern of insertion in
the world economy comes at the cost of
fragmenting the African economic,
knowledge and political space. It
appears the continued cost of
fragmentation is supposed to be offset
by Africa being in the international aid
system. Whether African fragmentation
can be offset by dependence on aid or
national development should be a genuine
issue for deep reflection and foresight
for the AU and others with broad
commitment to African freedom and unity.
3.
Where is the African Strategy?
An African national project is necessary
for launching the infrastructure for a
comprehensive structural transformation
of African economy, state, society,
communities and people. What seems
lacking is exactly what is most needed:
an African national project and national
spirit first and foremost to anchor the
evolution and dynamics of an African
strategy!
Africans continue to experience
fragmentation that reproduced dependence
on outside powers. But they have not
tried a unified African national project
yet that inspires their self-
composition, self-organisation and
self-definition and self-recognition as
Africans in order to undertake
challenges together, deal with those
that they have to deal with and respond
to opportunities together. Their
‘advisors’ provide hundreds of reasons
why Africans are different from each
other. Why they cannot come together.
The fact that under conditions of
fragmentation and dependency, the
existing fractured states have not
succeeded to transform structurally and
undertake a credible national
development strategy is very often
conveniently ignored. Strategies that
accentuate fragmentation continue to be
devised.
No one says or counsels that going on a
path of fragmentation that leads to
nowhere is even more unrealistic and
utopian than a united strategy that can
work which has not been tried yet in
spite of the compelling recognition over
half a century now that either Africa
unites or perishes!(Dr. Kwame Nkrumah)..
Instead the search for a united African
national alternative gets castigated for
being futile and utopian. But when too
many fragmented states scramble for
resources carefully doled out to them
from an international aid regime to
pursue goals they can hardly meet, no
one dares to say this path is even more
utopian than the alternative African
national project that has never been
tried. Where there is no African
national project in place, means a big
void and vacuum at the heart of Africa’s
confident march to the future where
there will be no clear African national
strategy to guide policy and practice!
Africans are now treated to
admonishments from the likes of Bono and
Wolfensohn, who are now calling openly
for African unity.
At
the Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Lecture in
Accra, Ghana under the title “Africa in
the Global Century: Partnerships for
Success”, the former World Bank
President, James Wolfensohn, argued for
Africa to unite:
“Africa can make the best of the
opportunities and wealth available to it
to grow its people and economy if it
unites.” (Wolfensohn quoted in Dogbevi,
2008)
The World Bank has also begun to echo
the ‘integration line’ by recognising
that
the flow of goods, capital and people
are so limited that inter-African
collaboration and integration remains
largely untenable
also.
It has produced:
New Development Strategy Focuses on
Regional Integration in Sub-Saharan
Africa: see
http://go.worldbank.org/VJ7PSXVTP0
In addition a number of countries far
and near to Africa appear to develop
their own Africa strategy based on their
understanding or mis-understanding of
what they think Africa is and may or may
not be or become. The list continues.
The EU has an Africa strategy since
2005. The Chinese have theirs. The
Indians had a Summit in March 2008. The
Japanese held a summit on May 28, 2008.
Even a small country- Denmark, has set
up an Africa Commission like the Blair
commission before to organise its own
mode of intervention into Africa. It
looks more countries will develop
strategies on, for and to Africa and
probably not with Africa despite the
abundant talk of partnership, national
ownership the Paris terms and such like
rhetoric and discourse.
What seems to be lacking in all these is
the African strategy for Africa and the
combined African strategy on those who
make strategies for Africa and others
that are involved and continue to do
their business to, for and on Africa.
The time is long overdue to make each of
the nearly billion Africans in the
continent to develop an African national
spirit and unite on the shared
experience, challenges and a grand
national project to transform Africa
from an agrarian economy to a
knowledge-service and knowledge-
industrial economy to achieve food
security and improve the health,
education and well being of all the
people, and not just a few elites. Only
then can Africa achieve the freedom,
security and stability to emerge with
its own voice and act with policy and
practice to secure its independence
without fear or favour in a complex
world.
4.
National spirit necessary to offset
pervasive fragmentation and donor
dependency
The problem is that after nearly 50
years of post- colonial independence
African economies continue to be
fragmented in spite of the AU/NEPAD
salutary processes. The more the
fragmentation amongst African economies
deepens the harder for each of the
fragments not to be supplicants to the
aid system. Africa thus also faces
another critical dilemma of being an
unequal ‘partner’ with the burgeoning
aid industry that has created a business
of what is known as ‘technical
assistance,’ where those who provide the
aid consume a sizeable portion of the
resources allocated, and the recipient
Africans continue to be in a vulnerable
position as long-term the aid receivers
are unable to get out of this dependency
situation.
In general, it may not be easy to
disprove aid is not useful to some
within the recipient countries, this
does not validate, however, aid or the
international aid system per se, since
it is not also difficult to show, that
the long term impact of aid is negative,
if we proceed from the normative
preference that the recipient countries
options to plan their development free
from conditions imposed that often do
not take the specific context of the
countries can be misdirected by the
international aid system. In the long
term, it is better to take the suffering
to learn how to fish rather than receive
fish. Recently Tanzania announced to all
the donors that they want time to think
and cope with the influx of hundreds of
donor inputs. They said they needed time
to work out what this all means and made
a moratorium on donors’ visits to
Tanzania!
It is thus no exaggeration that a
country relying on aid is most likely
not to develop a national strategy
without the interference and the
factorings of the interests and policies
of the aid system. Being a recipient in
an international aid system for many
African countries has not brought
development but corruption and poverty.
It undermines a given state in Africa
from making mistakes and learning from
the routines and practices of creating
an integrated African national economy.
Africa cannot afford to continue to
suffer the opportunity cost from
continuing to receive aid only to defer
building the much needed ability to
create the capacity, capability,
competence, learning and innovation to
transform the largely agrarian and
subsistence economic system.
5. Concluding Remarks:
Over half century has passed; Africa
suffers from myopia of a particularly
pernicious 'fragmentation-dependence'
situation. The root problem for its
unchanging African predicament lies in
the state of fragmentation that invites
dependency and conversely dependency
that continues to prevent the evolution
of an African national spirit, purpose,
project and strategy.
There is a need for a fresh approach, a
new departure to embark on a roadmap to
convert the 'fragmentation-dependence'
dilemma into an enabling
'integration-self-sustaining, learning,
innovation, capabilities building'
national system, national project ,
national spirit and national strategy
to re- launch African development on a
secure pedigree with confidence and
inspiration.
Mammo Muchie, DPhil
Professor
Coordinator of DIIPER
Research Centre on Development
Innovation and IPER and also
NRF/DST SARCHI Chair Holder, TUT, South
Africa
Aalborg University
Fibigertraede 2
9220-Aalborg East
Aalborg, Denmark
Tel.no. 00-45 9940 9813
fax.no. 00-45 9815 3298 "" |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
|
|||
