G-20 will again fall short with Africa plan
The Group of Twenty (G-20) met at the weekend in the German port city of Hamburg. This is a grouping — with SA as the only African member — that represents two-thirds of the global population, 85% of its economic output and 80% of world trade. It has pretentious ambitions to co-ordinate the global economy, but in fact, has no secretariat or implementing committees and none of its resolutions are legally binding.
G-20 summits between 2008 and 2010 focused on the global financial crisis, stressing growth, financial regulation, bail-outs and the need to avoid protectionist trade wars. Since 2010, the group has focused on green growth, energy security, finance, trade, structural reform and development. Debt has increasingly dominated debates as the euro- crisis deepened. In a bout of “euphoric planning”, G-20 leaders pledged in 2014 to raise global growth by 2%, as if they wielded magic wands.
In Hamburg, the grouping has again acted like European alchemists seeking to turn lead into gold, with empty slogans and high-sounding resolutions that will surely meet with the same fate as that of their medieval ancestors. It grandiosely describes itself as the “premier” institution for global economic governance and patronisingly talks about giving Africa a place in the global economy and providing emerging countries a greater say in global economic management. Yet much of the G-20’s 34 commitment to Africa issued since 2009 could simply have been ditched in the rubbish heaps of the various G-20 capitals almost before the ink had dried on the pieces of paper.
On issues of sustainable development, conflict resolution, the refugee crisis and climate change, the G-20 has been long on talk but short on concrete action and even shorter on providing significant resources.
At the G-20 Africa Partnership investment conference in Berlin in June, Germany bizarrely invited the leaders of Rwanda, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Egypt. Both Rwanda and Egypt have horrendous governance records and it was strange that SA and Nigeria — accounting for more than 60% of their respective subregional economies — were not present.
Germany’s much-touted “Marshall Plan with Africa” — seeking to promote growth, jobs, security, democracy and human rights — is an absurdity that surely makes a mockery of the $100bn US plan of 1948 that catalysed western Europe’s reconstruction.
The current plan lacks substantive resources and has been widely criticised as having been devised in Germany’s ministry of economic development in Berlin, with no meaningful input from its supposed African beneficiaries.
Germany’s “Marshall Plan”, in fact, appears to have more to do with stabilising the migration crisis that has seen more than 1-million refugees (over half from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan; as well as others from Ethiopia, Nigeria, and North Africa) entering Germany since 2015. This has hurt Chancellor Angela Merkel domestically and forced her to embark on trips to the Sahel, North Africa and Ethiopia in a bid to find ways to keep migrants at home.
The G-20 “Compact with Africa” — co-ordinated by Germany’s finance ministry — largely recycles many of the failed experiments of the World Bank and IMF: macroenomic stability; private sector investment; financial liberalisation; privatising state-owned enterprises; securing property rights and deregulating markets.
The plan thus fails to focus sufficiently on African priorities of how to promote genuine regional integration on a continent with just 12% of intraregional trade, how to create sustainable employment for the youth, who now account for 60% of Africa’s population, and how to manage conflict and build effective developmental states.