If conferences ever developed a continent or helped solve its most pressing problems, Africa would be one of the most developed continents and its problems would long have been solved.
At bilateral, multi-lateral, regional and continental levels, one conference or another is being staged at any given moment, with some of the most knowledgeable experts and policy-makers participating.
They are staging yet another conference, the World Economic Forum on Africa, in Abuja this week, from Wednesday through Friday, with the bombed-out remains of Nyanya still smouldering and a full accounting of the casualties yet to be rendered. They are staging while the authorities are yet to summon the will and the resolve to locate, to say nothing of rescuing, more than 100 female students abducted from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, in Borno State.
They have not disclosed the cost of the conference, but it won’t be cheap. They are shutting down Abuja for three days, not on account of what the elusive Boko Haram might do, they say, but to ensure that the visiting political officials and, most especially, all those irritable and disobliging investors, would not be incommoded in the least by the gridlock that often paralyses vehicular traffic in the city.
There is no need to worry about the loss to productivity during the shutdown. The new rebased economy that will be a major talking point in President Goodluck Jonathan’s opening address and a theme that Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister for the Economy Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala will insinuate into every aspect of the proceedings can easily absorb it.
A communiqué bristling with diplomatic gobbledygook will be issued at the end of the conference. Grand intentions will be proclaimed and affirmed, and ringing resolutions will be passed. Another Plan of Action will be formulated to replace previous plans of action.
But the problems will remain, and in some cases grow more intractable. Rarely are the agreements reached at these conferences followed up and followed through. Several years later, the same officials and experts convene at another venue to make the same proclamations and pass the same resolutions.
I was reminded of this unproductive summitry the other day when I stumbled upon the notes I had taken at the Conference on Africa on the Eve of the 21st Century held in Maputo, Mozambique, from September 9-11, which had in attendance some 65 senior political figures, policy-makers and academics from 31 African countries.
The deliberations were prefaced by a background paper detailing where Africa stood in the scheme of things on the eve of a new millennium. The profile was sobering, grim even.
One-half of the continent’s estimated population of 720 million subsisted on less than one U.S. dollar a day. Africa’s children were the most likely, in comparison with children in other parts of the world, to die before age 5, and its adults least likely to live beyond age 50.
On the average, Africans were more malnourished, less educated and more likely to succumb to fatal diseases. Of the 24 countries at the bottom of the United Nations Development Programmes Human Development Index – the so-called Misery Index – 22 were to be found in Africa.
Africa had the highest population growth rate in the world; at an annual rate of 2.61 per cent, it was set to reach 1.05 billion by 2010 and double 25 years later. But in most African countries, economic growth lagged behind population growth. More than 50 per cent of African youths under age 30 were unemployed. Where physical infrastructure existed, it was in disrepair.
In the face of the growing population, agricultural production was declining as a result of wars and conflict which made farming hazardous, if not impossible, and also as a result of environmental degradation.
Africa accounted for 12 per cent of the world’s population but only 2.4 per cent of global GNP, and more than one-half of this figure was contributed by South Africa and Nigeria. Africa continued to be almost entirely an exporter of raw materials. It also accounted for only two per cent of global telephone density.
In the health sector, the picture was just as grim. Malaria continued to send some 2.7 million Africans to premature deaths every year. Some 14 million Africans, constituting more than 50 per cent of the total number of HIV- positive persons, most of them children, were to be found in Africa. One in 13 women in Africa died during pregnancy or childbirth, compared to one in 3,200 in Europe and one in 35 in Asia. More than 60 per cent of drugs sold across the counter in Africa were fake and quite possibly harmful.
Despite all the talk about economic cooperation and regional integration, intra-African trade accounted for only 7.5 per cent of the continent’s total. Capital accumulation and saving rates stood at less than one half of Asia’s 30 per cent and fell considerably short of the level required to attain and sustain a rate of growth that would have any significant impact on the economy.
And all his was happening as the flow of private capital into emerging markets had almost entire bypassed Africa.
The commitment to regional integration was weak. With the exception of Senegal, no African country could boast of having a ministry of regional integration or a designated agency with sufficient authority to deal with the subject.
African heads of government – and their wives — were well integrated, but not the people, not the infrastructure, not the economic operators and not the markets.
Very little seems to have changed in the 14 years that have passed since the Maputo Conference. Inter-regional trade has ticked up, accounting for between 10 and 13 per cent of Africa’s trade. This figure probably does not take into account trade in the informal sector which, judging from the commercial traffic from Nigeria to ECOWAS countries as well as Cameroun and going so far south as Zaire, is considerable. Still, it is puny compared with comparable figures in Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Africa’s telephone density has grown dramatically since the introduction of GSM phones. The continent’s emerging markets are being touted as hot destinations for foreign capital, but that is more hype than actuality.
During his first term, President Olusegun Obasanjo appointed to his cabinet a minister for regional integration. I can claim some responsibility for that appointment. Drawing on the Maputo Conference, I had sent him a memo urging him to give practical effect to his well-known commitment to regional integration by making it the subject of a cabinet-level appointment. To rule myself out of contention, I recommended that the appointee should be bilingual in English and French.
Unfortunately, the position – and the appointee — did not survive Obasanjo’s first term.
One of the key resolutions of the Maputo Conference bears re-stating. The time had come, it said, to try a new approach to tackling the problems of the continent. That approach would emphasise the integration of production and infrastructure and include business and economic operators as well as social formations, not just heads of state and their wives and top officials.
A good starting point, the Conference said, would be to streamline and rationalise some 40 existing intergovernmental organisations performing tasks related to integration.
More than two decades after the Beninois statesman and former Minister of Information, Professor Albert Tévoédjrè proposed un jour sans frontières(a day without borders) as a first step toward giving concrete expression to the movement of goods and persons in the ECOWAS region, it has remained that: a proposal.
The World Economic Forum on Africa will most likely take a global perspective on the African condition. But it will do well to consider the internal dimensions as well and urge a return to basics.
