Africa To Use Private Sector Capacity To Implement NEPAD
 19th JUN 2007

The 17th annual World Economic Summit (WEF) on Africa ended on Friday in Cape Town with a consensus to use the abundant capacity in the private sector to implement NEPAD and other public sector programmes in the continent. Delegates at the closing plenary, including South African President Thabo Mbeki and former finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, recognised that Africa is facing capacity problems which can only be solved through partnership with the private sector.

“The private sector has lots of capacity governments can use to build their own capacity. What remains is the necessary incentive to attract those capacities while governments train their own,” Okonjo-Iweala told over 800 delegates at the conference. The former finance minister, now a fellow of the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said that Africa’s public sector needed enough capacity to be able to negotiate with the private sector which have upper hand in terms of capacity.

Okonjo-Iweala said that lack of capacity to implement public sector programmes can also be solved by involving multilateral agencies, such as the World Bank as  “honest brokers in negotiating deals”, citing the West African Gas Pipeline project as an example of such success stories. Speaking in the same vein, President Mbeki said that more partnerships between the public and private sectors would minimise risks because the public sector needed to build its own capacity in getting into such partnerships.

“There are many examples of such partnerships across the continent that failed because they were not equal,” Mbeki said. Mbeki said there was need to “disaggregate” Africa’s growth rates because it varies from country to country and between regions. The SA president said that there are lots of positive things happening in Africa, including gradual breaking down of barriers isolating member-nations and “we should not convey a message of global disaster about the continent”.

On this, Okonjo-Iweala said Africans should be part of developing methodologies measuring Africa’ s socio-political and economic indicators to show the world  what Africa was doing right.
Okonjo-Iweala also called for a “shift in the nature of growth to include younger Africans below 24 years and by engaging the emerging African middle class to make them own the development process thus giving them a stake in the system.  Mo Ibrahim, chairman of telecoms giant, Celtel, stressed the need to improve governance across Africa. “We need a debate in Africa about governance. We measure everything - why not governance,” said the Celtel chairman whose foundation is spearheading an index to measure the quality of public governance in African countries.

Issues raised at the WEF included the need to harmonise the different policies and regulations governing business in various African countries and adding value to Africa export commodities to create more jobs and increase incomes. Other panelists at the closing session included Economics Nobel laureate, Michael Spence of Stanford University. The theme of this year’s forum is “Raising the Bar on Capacity Building in Africa”

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