Africa Beyond Aid and Bono

Africa. South Africa. Nigeria. Darfur. Swaziland. Côte d’Ivoire. These are not places we can leave behind. We live there. Bono’s great, but he is your wake-up call, not ours.

Africa is too big for soundbites and too complex for generalisations. Imagine that Europe should be thus covered:

“The Hopeless Continent. Its economic heart [Germany] is broken; the mafia is threatening a fragile new government [Italy]; and London is being bombed as Tony Blair refuses to let go the reins of power. Strikers control the streets [France]. Growth is anaemic and Islamic fundamentalism is wreaking havoc from Amsterdam to Istanbul, where a judge was shot and killed by a terrorist last week. The Red Dragon’s breathing fire; the Bollywood beast is catching up. Europe is a hopeless continent. How shall we save it?”

This is nonsense, of course -- as it is nonsense to speak of an African dilemma or an African solution.

You know the story. But often I wonder if you know the whole story.

A few months ago, South Africa held a congress of the people. In Kliptown, hundreds of delegates from government and civil society met to give our country a national assessment. How do we do on governance? What is our democratic temperature?

It was the system called peer review in practice. Ordinary people had an opportunity to say what they think of everything from judicial independence to their welfare payments. When last did many of you have such a say outside of an election? Peer review is precedent-setting on our continent. Enshrined in the African Union, it ends the absolute sovereignty that allowed so many abuses to go unchecked in old Africa.

Yes, the system of peer review can be swaddled in red tape; yes, it is slow and the government has a big say. But this notion that we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keeper is new and it is happening.

There are African solutions beyond Bono and beyond Bob.

The winds of change also blew through Nigeria this year, when senators told President Olusegun Obasanjo, in no uncertain terms, that he should not stay for a third term. If only Gordon Brown had as much luck.

Not everybody has felt the winds of change, of course, as the mad ramblings of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and the mass arrests of opponents by Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi attest.

One makes no pretence that all is well. It is not. But our continent must be the architect of its own destiny.

What does this mean? Tony Blair is a well-meaning guy, but the Commission for Africa can be only one part of the solution.

With Afghanistan exploding again, Iraq on the edge of a civil war and Iran now in United States President George W Bush’s periscope, it is no surprise that Africa will fall off the radar. It will not work to annually assess Gleneagles and dab tears as we find that aid promises have diminished in the face of that oxymoron called Iraqi democracy.

It is my view that we must begin to see an Africa beyond aid.

The Brenthurst Foundation has calculated that post-colonial Africa has received $580-billion in donor funds to no great effect. Of course, war, corruption and instability will always militate against aid effectiveness, but with African well-being hardly inching up the development indices, is aid the answer?

Increasingly we must realise that aid is not the answer -- or at least not all of the answer. There is no argument for immediate self-sufficiency. Not for the hungry people of Zimbabwe. Not for the displaced people of Darfur. Aid for humanitarian purposes is and will be necessary in Africa for the foreseeable future. But securing stability and sustainable wellbeing must come through other means.

What might those be? Fair trade and debt relief offer a far more sustainable path towards security and development.

African economic growth is steady near the level of 5% a year, but it will take growth of 7% a year to meet the challenges of the Millennium Development Goals for decent living standards.

This will require much better terms of trade. The oil rush is aiding investment, but not enough oil revenues are reaching the people. In agriculture, we stand a real chance. If the barriers to entry into wealthy markets are lowered, investment could increase and employment could grow.

In addition, our continent needs to harness its diaspora as India has done. In a global age, there is no use decrying the fact that there are more South African nurses in Dubai than there are in Soweto, more Ugandan doctors in San Francisco than in Uganda.

Remittances should be leveraged: every year a whopping $100-billion is transferred by migrants to their home countries. In some areas, these remittances are paying a development dividend.

From a call centre in Cape Town, where Africa can find a spot in the global growth in services to Kenya’s flower farms, the solutions are different. From Darfur’s intractable peace talks to Congo’s election later this month , so are its problems.

Be sure that the continent maintains its place on your news diaries and that you cover it all in all its complexity, and we will have no need next year to decry another forgotten year.