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26 DPMF Occasional Paper No. 1311. Negotiations can be better handled to reduce tension betweenconditionality and national sovereignty;12. Multilateral institutions should accept greater responsibility forfailed programs 19 .The African critique of SAPs was loud and clear from the beginning i.e.since SAPs were introduced in the early 1980s. That the WB came outwith these criticisms openly by 1988 meant it had known about themmuch earlier. Yet, despite such prior knowledge, the WB/IMF proceededwith the implementation of SAPs, with only slight technicalmodifications.The adverse and negative impacts of SAPs are now well known, as are thestrong reactions of African officials and intellectuals against SAPs. Themost important formal reaction to SAPs was the ECA’s 1989 AfricanAlternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes (AAF-SAPs), already discussed in the context of African Initiatives. Amongstother sharp and serious critiques levelled against SAPs by Africanintellectuals (starting with SAPs genesis in the Berg Report) is ThandikaMkandawire’s book “Our Continent, our Future” (1999).By the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, externals’ perspectivefor African development had become the dominant, if not the onlydirecting principle of development in almost all African countries. Indeedthe practical power of the WB/IMF and the Donor community, oftencollectively referred to as the international community, to intervene anddirect plans, programmes, projects and actual decision making by Africangovernments has become established and accepted in government circlestoday.In the meantime in 1989, the WB came out with another report labelledLong Term Perspective Studies (LTPS) that proposed a global coalition ofDonors and Africans to effectively direct the intellectual framework andstrategies of long-term development in Africa. The Global Coalition forAfrica was thus established and remains an institution that is stilloperating today. In the 1990s, however, the international communitybegan to intensify its coordination at different levels, without theparticipation of Africans. The WB/IMF, the EU, the DAC, individualdonor countries, the Paris and London Clubs etc. started to coordinate and19 Ibid, p. vii and viii.
Abdalla Bujra. Pan-African Visions of Development 27standardize their strategies and policies with regard to loans, debt, aid,trade, technical assistance etc. They insisted on African governmentsaccepting conditionalities, which turned out to be the revised andelaborated conditionalities of SAPs, with the added political conditionalityof Good Governance, later adopted by the UN System as a whole, butmore particularly by the UNDP.Thus, during the 1990s and the new millennium, African economic andpolitical developments were being diplomatically but firmly guided by the“international community”. At the more formal level of treaties, the EUcontinued with its Lome (now Cotonou) Convention (renewed andrenegotiated every several years) in guiding unequal trade relationsbetween African and EU countries. More recently, the Americans havecome up with their own programme i.e. the Africa Growth andOpportunity Act (AGOA). Interestingly, the British and French (the twolargest and most powerful former colonial powers) have also recentlydecided to synchronise and coordinate their African policies, to the extentthat their African Ambassadors hold joint meetings annually orbiannually.And once again, in the year 2000, the WB in association withinternational community partners, has come up with yet another document– this time appearing in the form of a book – entitled Can Africa Reclaimthe 21 st Century? 20 . This book essentially articulates long-term strategiesof African development, from the perspective of the WB and the rest ofthe Donor community. It is expected to provide the intellectual inspirationfor African policy makers to formulate their development strategies.And indeed, according to the recent CODESRIA-TWN Africa ConferenceDeclaration 21 , NEPAD, the latest African vision and initiative for AfricanDevelopment, derives its intellectual inspiration and strategies from thisrecently published WB book. Similar arguments and statements, as thoseof the CODESRIA-TWN Africa Conference, were made at anotherconference of African scholars held in Nairobi at about the same time (26-29 April, 2002) 22 .20 World Bank. 2000. Can Africa Reclaim the 21 st Century? Washington, D.C.21 CODESRIA-TWN Africa Conference Declaration on Africa’s Development Challenges,Accra, 26 April 2002.22 African Forum for Envisioning Africa ‘Focus on NEPAD’. Conference Organised by theMazingira Institute, the African Academy of Sciences and the Heinrich Boll Foundation,26-29 April 2002, Nairobi (Kenya).
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