08/05/2007 17:00 MIDRAND, South Africa, May 8 (AFP)

African lawmakers lament NEPAD's lacklustre performance

African parliamentarians on Tuesday bemoaned that an ambitious homespun
plan for economic growth and good governance had failed to improve the lot
of most in the world's poorest region.

"The implementation of the NEPAD programme is problematic. African
populations wait for concrete actions from NEPAD," Senegalese MP Ibra
Diouf told the Pan African Parliament (PAP) in a debate assessing NEPAD's
performance.

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was launched amid
great fanfare and hope in 2001. It created with the aim of attracting
private investment in return for evidence of improved governance.

Sidia Jatta, a Gambian parliamentarian, said 340 million Africans lived on
less than a dollar a day, three million others were refugees and 20
million were displaced by war or economic hardship.

"These are crying statistics. What is NEPAD as an instrument doing to
bring about African development?" he said.

But the chief executive of the NEPAD secretariat, Firmino Mucavele,
stoutly defended the body at the seventh ordinary session of the PAP, an
African Union body, which is currently in session at its headquarters near
Johannesburg.

"It is not true that we have not made progress in NEPAD. We have created
an investment climate in Africa. We are working hard and we have made
advances," he told a news conference on the sidelines of the parliamentary
debate.

The lawmakers also stressed the need for governments to submit themselves
for assessment under the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM).

Set up to further the goals of the NEPAD, the mechanism is a system of
"self monitoring" by which African countries review each others'
governance.

Only 26 African nations have ratified the APRM convention so far, with
South Africa and Algeria due to be reviewed next month. The heads of state
of both countries, Thabo Mbeki and Abdelaziz Bouteflika, are architects of
NEPAD.

"We need to encourage our countries to embrace APRM. We need to look into
our politics which interfere in our development programmes and prevent us
from leaving the quagmire of poverty," Toscin Bartile, an Ugandan
parliamentarian said.

©2007 AFP

Source:
http://www.africasia.com/services/news/newsitem.php?area=africa&item=070508170043.81yy1q8j.php

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