ABSTRACT
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) is, to all appearances, an initiative by Africa’s Heads of State and Governments to reverse, for good, the beggarly global image of the continent through a ‘sustained engagement’ with the developed world. Among its many objectives, Nepad seeks to halt the growing poverty of Africans by altering the basis of the relationship – creating a partnership for development – between the rich North and the poor South. The initiative seeks a new global partnership based on shared responsibility and mutual interest through the good governance conditionalities of democratic reform and economic development on the continent. Put differently, the global partnership is premised on a shared acceptance of political and economic liberalisation. It also aims to institute peoplecentred development via market-oriented economies that can be competitive in the global village. Nepad as a political and economic blueprint of action is also meant to strengthen the capacity of the state with a view to making it a more effective at developing and implementing people-friendly programmes and policies. Where various Lomé European Union-African Caribbean and Pacific countries (EU-ACP) agreements have virtually condemned Africa to the unenviable role of producing primary commodities for Western industrial consumption, Nepad proposes a frontal attack to alter the continent’s integration into the global economy as an extremely weak partner and a peripheral player. Nepad is a quest to lay the foundation and building blocks for a new socio-political and economic order, one able to permanently reverse the old cliché that ‘Africa is rich but Africans are poor’.
