workshop of the African Monitor, Cape Town
2 May 2006
The Most Reverend Archbishop Ndungane;
Invited guests from the religious sector, NGOs, academic institutions and the
private sector from around the world and our continent;
Good morning.
We are honoured to welcome you to our shores and we hope that you are
enjoying your stay in our country. For me personally, it is a singular
privilege to exchange views with you as you prepare to launch the African
Monitor.
As you know, there is global consensus that humanity needs to join hands in
search of a better life for all. The world is at one that we can no longer
countenance the duality of prosperity in one corner of the globe and poverty in
another corner. Within and across nations, we know too well that poverty,
disease and ignorance are not only inhuman; but they also breed insecurity for
the rich and the poor alike.
It is on this account that the United Nations, taking up the cudgels of
leadership expected of it, took the historic step of setting out the targets
that all of us need to pursue in order truly to say that we have improved the
human condition. And so, led by this august body, the world has moved beyond
pious words and declarations of intent. In very concrete terms, the Millennium
Development Goals define what each one of the nations of the world has to do in
order to lay claim to the assertion that it is indeed a humane society.
Necessarily, attached to these Millennium Development Goals have to be key
indicators of progress, the better to measure the progress we are making in
concrete terms. Attached to the targets that we have set ourselves have to be
concrete measures that the developing nations should take in order to meet
their obligations to their citizens. Attached to the goals elaborated by the
United Nations have to be performance indicators for the developed world, to
measure the realisation of the commitments that they have made to assist the
developing countries to attain the ideal of a better life for their peoples,
the majority of whom are poor.
And so, Archbishop Ndungane, let me congratulate you and your colleagues for
this initiative, to fashion a monitoring system for all these programmes, so
word in actual practice turns into deed.
Africa in particular faces a long road ahead in trying to deal with the
plethora of challenges thrown up by a legacy as much imposed by the history of
colonialism as it was aggravated by the many years of neglect that our own
weaknesses spawned.
When the United Nations identified 2015 as the year by which we should have
significantly reduced hunger, child and maternal mortality, unemployment,
ignorance and disease, it was expressing more than a hope about what could be
done. It was inspired by the conviction that humanity had it within its power
to meet these targets. If at the midpoint of that journey, some of us are
anxious that Africa may not meet these objectives, this is not because we seek
to counsel caution and even despondency. Rather, we wish to assert that the
efforts can and must be intensified.
This is not the time to throw up our hands in despair. Rather, what makes
the African Monitor initiative propitious is that it is going to help
governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) alike to identify the
constraints to faster progress, and indeed to point the way forward in clearing
the logjams. What we are looking for now, are processes that will assist us to
accelerate the rate of implementation, so that within the next nine years we
mobilise the peoples of the continent and the globe to meet the targets we have
set.
Why we should evince such confidence, you may ask
The answer is to be found in the commitments that Africa has made in
adopting the Constitutive Act of the African Union. It is to be found in the
continentâs resolve to eliminate conflict and its root causes. It is to be
found in the new generation of leaders who have committed themselves to put in
place an environment in which people-driven and people-centred programmes of
development can be implemented. It is to be found in the New Partnership for
Africaâs Development (NEPAD), which sets out concrete projects in
infrastructure development, human resource preservation and development,
harnessing of communications and other technology, and taking full advantage of
comparative advantages that various regions of the continent possess.
Indeed, the answer is to be found in the unfolding process of Peer Review
that NEPAD has put in place for each one of us to learn from one another from
our mistakes and our successes in fashioning societies that care. South Africa
is in the process of completing the first leg of its African Peer Review
evaluation. As we speak, our Peer Review council is preparing for yet another
consultative conference, which will take place on the fourth and fifth of this
month in Soweto. In this process, we have ensured as a country that all
stakeholders are involved in assessing development programmes. Many things that
we took for granted are up for deliberation and interrogation. And we are
confident that we will emerge from this process even better placed to harness
the energies of our nation for the common good.
Africa, ladies and gentlemen, has asserted that it is not making a special
plea for sympathy. Nor are we stretching out the hand of a beggar for handouts.
We know that such an approach is not only humiliating; but also self-defeating.
What we have said and continue to declare, are that opportunities exist on the
continent for partnerships of mutual benefit to be built with the private and
public sectors in the developed world.
Indeed, when the Group of Eight (G8) countries developed their Africa plan
of action with our input; when the Commission on Africa set out the concrete
things that needed to be done; when the developed countries individually
adopted their own concrete initiatives to partner Africa in its own development
efforts they all did this proceeding from the premise that a new era had dawned
on the continent, and they will put in a special effort to help Africa
succeed.
Because we are not so conceited as to believe that we can achieve our
objectives all on our own, we do value the partnerships that have been and are
being forged to meet the objectives of NEPAD and the United Nation Millennium
Development Goals. And in as much as we need to measure the progress we are
making within the continent, we also have to measure the practical expressions
of the commitments the developed world has made to Africa.
This is what lends the African Monitor its special significance. On the one
hand, it is an instrument that Africa and its partners can use to assess their
joint efforts on the continent. On the other, it adds to the arsenal of
monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that African governments are putting in
place to gauge their own progress. In this sense, you are adding what we hope
will be an independent voice, bringing into play an additional arsenal of
indicators, early warning mechanisms and evaluation procedures, the better to
ensure that nothing is missed in the chain of input, output, outcome and
impact.
We hope that as governments on the continent we will be justified in looking
up to the African Monitor to be one of the voices that informs the debate on
development implementation in Africa. We trust that such information will be
based on sound research. In the same breath, we trust that the research
findings will be used to encourage good practice and eliminate weaknesses.
It is particularly refreshing to see that the African Monitor intends to
roll out a community monitoring programme that will enable communities to speak
on development implementation.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is in that intersection between âpartnershipâ and
âindependenceâ that the true value of African Monitor will play itself out. And
I dare say that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.
Indeed, in some instances the pursuit of one extreme, in the name of
âindependenceâ can render a good intention irrelevant. That is if such
independence is understood to mean distance from government, which is otherwise
the primary agent of implementation. Everything is then done to demonstrate an
arms-length relationship characterised by confrontation and attempts to prove
the other party inept and always in the wrong.
On the other hand, if âpartnershipâ means that African Monitor should become
an instrument of governments on the continent or further field, it will
inevitably flounder unable to add value to what governments are already doing,
and susceptible to being used either by governments of the North or those in
Africa as proxies in battles that have very little to do with development.
You will, I am confident, find the right balance, a balance that hopefully
will be informed first and foremost by the aspirations and voices of the poor
who, we are all agreed, should be the primary beneficiaries of our good
intentions.
In executing this responsibility the African Monitor will need to be as
thorough as it is fearless in pointing out issues such as unfair conditions
that often accompany assistance from the developed countries. At times,
governments in the developing world do not want to be seen to be looking the
gift horse in the mouth; yet not raising sensitive issues may defeat the very
purpose aid, debt forgiveness, trade and investment are meant to achieve.
On the other hand, the developed countries may feel constrained in bringing
to light weaknesses they have identified and investors may not wish to
jeopardise opportunities when faced with malpractices of all kinds. Yet if
there were no one like African Monitor to raise these issues, the consequence
will be that, in time, Africa will revert to the same cycle of good intentions
that flounder on the rocks of poor governance.
So in closing, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to call on you to roll up your
sleeves and join in an endeavour which for us as Africans, cannot but succeed.
You have a busy year ahead. And our high expectations of this, your courageous
initiative, derives from our conviction that you are yet another brick in the
edifice of Africaâs renewal. Together, we have it in our power to make this,
truly, an African Century.
Thank you.
Issued by: The Presidency
2 May 2006
