Quote of note:
In addition to a code of standards, benchmarks and institutions endorsed in March last year as a roadmap to the review process, the Kigali Summit agreed on the meaning of "good governance" in the African context, which is in itself a critical step.
Despotic Leaders Beware, Peer Review is Here
The East African (Nairobi)
COLUMN
February 23, 2004
Posted to the web February 25, 2004
By Peter Mwangi Kagwanja
Nairobi
The recent African leaders' summit in Rwanda finally adopted a unique peer-review system that has the potential of irreversibly changing the face of governance in Africa.
The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) sanctioned by nine heads of state and several ministerial delegations meeting in Kigali from February 13-14, will serve as the linchpin of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), itself a grand recovery project launched by African leaders in 2001.
The APRM is a collective response to bad governance, mismanagement of public funds, graft and conflict, poverty, disease and Africa's marginal status in the world economy. The African peer-review is designed to reverse this trend by moving Africa to a culture of good governance as a precondition for recovery and growth.
In addition to a code of standards, benchmarks and institutions endorsed in March last year as a roadmap to the review process, the Kigali Summit agreed on the meaning of "good governance" in the African context, which is in itself a critical step.
The peer-review obliges countries to open up their social, political and economic books for audit by fellow members (peers). The system not only allows countries to voluntarily submit to collective scrutiny, but also to take part in judging the behaviour of fellow African states.
In a continent previously crowded with despotic leaders, the idea of peer review is a remarkable innovation of the "new generation of progressive African leaders."
The novelty of the APRM, however, lies in the fact that it is a comprehensive audit of the performance of a country by other countries on issues, spelt out in Nepad's 2001Declaration on Democracy, Political, Economic and Corporate Governance.
While all the 53 members of the African Union are welcome to join the APRM, only 16 have so far acceded to the mechanism. These are Algeria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda. Angola is ready to join the review club as its 17th member.
Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda and Mauritius will be the first to face the peer audit, according to the calendar approved by the summit. After the first evaluation, which consists of five intricate stages, each country is expected to face a second appraisal in 18 months. Reports of these voluntary assessments will be made public after each mission, opening the countries to non-peer pressure from the media, civil society and other non-state forces to implement the recommendations of reviewers. Appraisal of countries that have joined the review club is planned to be complete before March 2006.
The Summit appointed the Senegalese academic, Marie Angelique Savane, to chair the seven-member Panel of Eminent Persons steering the review process. Also on this panel are Professor Adebayo Adedeji (Nigeria), Bethwell Kiplagat (Kenya), Dorothy Njeuma (Cameroon), Chris Stals (South Africa) and Dr Graca Machel.
In conducting the reviews, this team will be supported by a powerful APRM Secretariat based in Pretoria, and assisted by experts drawn from a spectrum of institutions, including some in the African Union.
Meanwhile, Senegal and Burkina Faso have unveiled a plan to back up the review process by jointly launching a Pan-African Institute of Good Governance to "train Africans from all levels of the private and public sectors in good governance."
The Kigali Summit resolved that countries under review would bear the cost of in-country review. However, given the weight donors have attached to the review system, the Pretoria-based Nepad Secretariat will have little difficulty in mobilising resources.
The Group of Eight industrialised countries, during their June 2002 Summit in Canada, acclaimed the peer-review as "an innovative and potentially decisive element in the attainment of Nepad objectives." In fact, many donors consider the peer review as an acid test for Nepad itself.
Already, some leaders have voiced their misgivings regarding pressure from the West to hasten the review process. President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, in talks with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Berlin in September 2003, suggested that: "Reviewing and rating how African leaders perform should be left to fellow Africans. The African peer review, he cautioned," will take longer - but the results will be more lasting."
The suspicion of external pressure carries eerie echoes of the frightful governance conditions that the International Monetary Fund prescribed to African countries in return for balance of payments aid. Tanzania is, instructively, one of 37 African states yet to accede to the peer review process.
The peer-review is seen in some circles as a strategy by African leaders to institute good governance in return for foreign investment and relief of the huge debts Africa owes external creditors. Beyond the donor factor, however, African citizens and civil society have concertedly brought moral and political pressure to bear on leaders to expand the scope of issues and range of participants in the peer appraisals.
Critics of the review mechanism point to its lack of punitive sanctions. Experts counter that peer reviews are "non-adversarial, relying on the trust and understanding between the country being reviewed and the reviewers, as well as their shared confidence in the process."
However, it is widely felt that in the absence of punitive sanctions, the peer review process faces the danger of becoming another cosy club where African leaders pat each other on the back. In spite of this, APRM could come in handy to deal with political mayhem in such countries as Zimbabwe.
It is time to jettison the once-sacrosanct principle of non-interference in the affairs of fellow states, which lay at the heart of Africa's failure to stem poverty and chaos.
Peter Kagwanja is a researcher based in Pretoria, South Africa
Posted by P6 at February 25, 2004 12:05 PM
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