Global Policy Forum

By Victor Mallet and Richard Lambert

African leaders will present an ambitious program to rescue their continent from poverty to the governments of developed countries by the end of the year, says President Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki said at the weekend that the plan supported by the US, the European Union and Japan would be issued in draft form within weeks and launched next year.

The program, tentatively called the Millennium Africa Recovery Plan, is being prepared by SA, Nigeria and Algeria, three of the continent's biggest economies. It aims to link hitherto uncoordinated efforts to promote foreign investment, trade concessions and further flows of aid for Africa and to push for more debt relief, described as "too slow and miserly" by Mbeki. "It has to deal with these matters of debt, trade, market access and attraction of capital into these African countries. We are looking at all of these things to see if we can't elaborate a new program for African development." Mbeki emphasized that African governments would be expected to show support for peace and democracy and fight corruption if they wanted to benefit from the plan.

His outline of the plan suggests there will be "conditionality", but this time imposed by African leaders themselves instead of by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. The starting point had to be "a consistent and credible demonstration by ourselves as Africans" of a determination to deal with questions of peace, stability and democracy, he said. He was determined to boost investment in SA itself to increase real annual economic growth from less than 3% now to more than 5%, he said. "It's clear that we are not generating the necessary levels of new investment to achieve much higher levels of growth than we have managed to do so far." His government, in spite of opposition from its trade union allies, is pressing ahead with the privatization of the state-controlled Telkom monopoly and other state companies.

Government, having successfully slashed the budget deficit since 1994, planned to "radically raise" spending on infrastructure to create more jobs. Mbeki also held out the possibility of tax incentives to encourage companies to hire extra workers instead of buying more machinery and becoming capital intensive.

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