Panel Question #1
1) What are the
current challenges to promoting
democratization and development in
Africa?
I’d like to start by
reaffirming what you suggest in the
question itself; there is an
inextricable relationship between
democratization and development
across the world. In Africa, as in
most places in the developing world,
with perhaps the exception of Cuba,
the standard of democracy in any
given country normally defines the
standard of living for its citizens.
Put simply, the authoritarianism,
despotism, and unlimited rule
demonstrated by a number of African
leaders, has done little to improve
the lives and dignity of the
nationals of their respective
countries. Without the freedom to
speak out, to write, to protest, and
to vote, citizens are denied a forum
to question government spending and
demand the basics of access to food,
education, and healthcare.
Today, we see a
number of countries in Africa, where
the basic standard of living
continues to plummet as a direct
result of misrule and corruption.
Take Zimbabwe, formerly one of the
most stable and economically sound
countries in Africa, that had one of
the highest HDI ratings in
sub-Saharan Africa in 1985, and
whose population is now almost
entirely dependent on food aid.
Economic mismanagement has created
400 percent inflation and
80-per-cent unemployment, compounded
by shortages of basic foodstuffs,
fuel and agricultural inputs.
Roughly 5,000 people a week die from
AIDS in Zimbabwe.
In contrast,
Botswana, with a government that is
widely accepted as having maintained
a stable and democratic electoral
and governing process, shows
positive social indicators and that
despite its own enormous struggles
with HIV/AIDS.
We could spend all
day giving examples, but let me to
get to the question at hand; what
hinders us from promoting
democratization and development?
Speaking as a
Canadian and an elected public
servant, I think it fitting to
address Canada’s failures to live up
to our human rights and development
commitments.
As you all know, our
own international policy review has
spent the last year addressing this
very question, or at least it’s
hoped that it will be discussed in
the soon to be released policy
statement which provides a critical
assessment of how little we actually
give in aid, who we give that aid
to, and the way, i.e. the
problematic “ties” with which it is
given. We have, indeed, failed in a
number of ways:
At the most basic
level, we’ve failed to live up to a
commitment given almost 35 years ago
by Prime Minister Pearson to
increase ODA to O.7% of GDP. With
our current ODA as percentage of
Gross National Income at 0.28%, we
pale next to countries like Norway
at 0.89% and Denmark at 0.96% and
rising.
As we heard just
hours ago from witnesses in the
Subcommittee on Human Rights and
International Development, there is
a consensus among development and
justice organisations that more
accountability and an integrated
international approach. This
approach, they argued, should be
based on and driven by the existing
human rights agreements that nearly
all countries have singed on to.
I’ll discuss that a bit further in
the second answer.
And yet, although an
increase and redesign of the way in
which we provide aid is greatly
needed, one area we don’t address
nearly enough is how we’ve failed on
the diplomatic level. This is
equally important as it addresses
the crucial relationship between
democratization and development.
“Diplomatic
Complacency”
Our negligence and
inaction can be characterized as
“diplomatic complacency.”
We continue to meet
with, welcome, and have elaborate
dinners with leaders that condone,
and take part in grave human rights
violations, widespread corruption,
and in some cases even genocide.
Our failure to
criticize regimes guilty of funding
and orchestrating widespread
violence, mass murder and corruption
is unacceptable to most Canadians.
The fact that we
spend tax payers money visiting and
welcoming dangerously corrupt
political leaders, while civil
society groups and oppositions
leaders from these same countries
are denied such royal treatment,
denies the better of angels of our
country.
That we continue to
trade with such regimes, essentially
investing in the same human rights
abuses that we are so quick to sign
up against in declarations and
charters, is unacceptable.
Arguments that
stopping trade with regimes guilty
of widespread human rights abuses
will only hurt their already
disenfranchised citizens are
inconclusive at best. There’s a
great wealth of recent studies that
provide realistic ways in which
countries like Canada can better
lever their trade relationship and
influence within international
organizations such as the UN, the
World Bank, and the IMF.
Darfur
I’m sure many of you
have seen the recent report by Errol
Mendes, a professor of International
and Human Rights Law and Adviser to
the Office of the Secretary General
of the UN, in which he outlines the
theory and strategy behind a
practical way for Canada to take a
leadership role in stopping the
genocide in Darfur. He notes that
Canada’s approach could take a
number of forms, including military
logistical support, travel bans for
NIF officials, and an arms embargo.
Mendes urges the use of what could
be one of the most powerful levers
against the Khartoum government,
their enormous international debt,
as a force to stop crimes against
humanity and genocide in Sudan.
In a recent exchange
of ideas about “diplomatic
complacency” with Professor Pablo
Idahosa, program coordinator of the
African Studies program at York
University, he offered an insightful
way of looking at this concept. In
the context of Canada, it has an
historical element in that Canada
can be implicated in a number of
obvious examples, among them Rwanda,
the DRC and Sudan. And conceptually,
in the sense that there is now this
repository of what we have and have
not learned from these events. Not
least of which, he notes, is the
relatively small cost of having
grounded early warning systems.
Civil society groups,
humanitarian organizations, and even
everyday citizens, foresaw what was
going to happen in Rwanda well
before April 1994. Today, these and
other groups foretell what has and
what will continue to happen in
Sudan, and yet we either ignore them
entirely and invest vast sums of
money sending delegations and peace
envoys instead of relying on already
established local networks of
information and planning.
This problem, of
course, is endemic not only to our
peacekeeping efforts, but our
development efforts as well.
As we all know, the
challenges that much of Africa faces
today in democracy and development
are great. So are the challenges
many of us here face; as
politicians, policy makers, and
promoters of democracy, to try to
find ways in which Canada can have a
more meaningful, coherent,
integrated, and in some cases a more
constructively critical interaction
with African governments, in the
hopes that our foreign policy begins
to show more transparency and
reflects our commitments to human
rights, fair trade and peacekeeping.
Panel Question #2
(Due to time constraints the
response to question 2 was not
delivered.)
2) What is
required to ensure successful
democratization and development in
Africa for the future?
Indeed, this question
is as huge and as complex as the
first, and again, I will try to
answer it by focusing on just a few
key areas, namely accountability,
commitment to the human rights
charter, and support for existing
civil society groups and pan-African
organisations.
If we’ve learned
anything from the last 50 or so
years of post- and neo-colonialism
in Africa, it is that, to put it
bluntly, foreign intervention in
Africa has done little to calm the
instability and civil conflicts
established and/or exacerbated by
the colonial powers and it has, in
many cases, increased dependency and
failed to invest in the
reconstruction of local systems of
government, and civil society.
Again, even our own
recent policy review has pledged to
address Canada’s often irresponsible
lack of direction, continuity and
focus in dispensing aid over the
last few decades.
In Professor
Idahosa’s words, “While there's much
vacuous talk of good governance and
capacity building, the real issue is
the need to operationalize genuine
distributive notions of sustainable
democracy and of building up
welfare, that is, the quality of
democracy, which is NOT the same
thing as poverty reduction, which is
at best a palliative of localism.”
I would hope that
that’s one of the goals in our
government doing the IPR; to stop
throwing money, often tied money, to
superficial, unsustainable projects
in countries whose own governments
often work to undermine the efforts,
and in many cases feed off of aid
revenues and manipulate its
distribution to further their own
agendas.
In today’s
Subcommittee meeting, Kathy
Vandergrift of World Vision
elaborated on what a rights-based
approach to development could look
like. She rightly questioned why
rights charters are not incorporated
into development plans, and she
encouraged the linking of rights
with responsibilities, using that as
a basis to assess current
development programs and trade
relations. For example, we could be
asking what the linkage is between
the right to food and Canada’s trade
policies in food and agriculture,
thus assessing the impact of our
trade, particularly with the South.
Clearly, supporting,
funding, and encouraging
African-based solutions is key, as
is looking at the examples, both in
Africa, and in other areas around
the world, for creative solutions.
Despite increasing conflict in areas
of Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo,
support for democracy has grown in
many areas. Increased freedom of the
press and new communications media
such as the internet have expanded
public access to information, and
citizens are now more aware of their
basic human rights. According to
Freedom House, over the last decade,
the number of free democracies in
Africa has more than doubled from
four to 10 and more than half the
countries on the continent are in
the transition process. The
successful 2002 elections in Kenya
and the anti-corruption drive in
Zambia further underscore this
trend.
The mechanisms and
strategies that have led to
constructive development in these
countries should be examined and for
applied into regional strategies.
In a chapter from the
book, “Peace In Africa—Towards a
Collaborative Security Regime,” the
authors compare security
arrangements in Latin America and
Africa and argue that the OAS offers
an applicable model for promoting
regional security and development in
Africa. They argue that because the
OAS relies heavily on democracy and
trade to promote peace and security,
it emphasizes and, for the most
part, has succeeded in building
confidence in its member states.
Furthermore, that the OAS’
institutions, that is, its
committees, commissions, working
groups and declarations, which were
created to manage security concerns
and relations between members, may
help provide a plan for a
collaborative security effort for
the continent.
This, of course,
should become the primary concern of
the AU.
As you know, the
Security Council of the AU, founded
last May, has laid the legal
framework for resolving disputes
among member states. Yet, following
in the disappointing footsteps of
the OAUs mere five peacekeeping
efforts in it’s 40 year history, the
obstacles it faces, whether they be
externally imposed or
self-inflicted, are great; a
limited mandate, a lack of political
will among its members, capacity
problems, the lack of financial
resources, and the chasms endemic to
the international political
environment.
At present, the AU
can not be expected to operate
adequate peacekeeping and security
forces in Africa. Western
governments, and particularly
countries like Canada that do not
have colonial ties to Africa, should
be at the forefront of supporting
and developing a more powerful and
operational AU.
Indeed, many have
lauded the AU in light of the UN
Economic Commission for Africa’s
reports last May stating that the
economic growth rate of the
continent was expected to reach 4.4
percent in 2004, compared with 3.2
percent in 2002 and 3.6 percent in
2003.
The role of the AU in
promoting regional cooperation and
pushing forward economic development
is mainly manifested by its actions
to include the New Partnership For
African Development (NEPAD) into
its framework and take measures to
implement the program as the
organization’s creed.
Again, this should be
Canada’s role to aid and encourage
existing regional strategies and
partnerships. With the proper
investment and management, the AU
has the potential to become a
powerful, cohesive body in Africa,
and a voice of peace, security and
development to the region.
We should also
recognize that democracy cannot be
imposed from the top down. Building
a stable democracy requires a firm
foundation, nurtured from local and
regional civil society groups. The
desire for democracy in Africa is
there, what is still lacking is a
strong apparatus through which
democratic values and ideals may be
diffused and applied. By lending
greater support for the facilitation
of interactions between Canadian
civil society and African civil
society, Canada can make a
significant contribution toward
strengthening the capabilities of
African civil society to
institutionalize democracy.
Of course, I’ve only
just touched on a topic that
certainly merits more discussion and
support. If any of you are
interested, I encourage you to
contact my office to get the
transcript from today’s very
relevant Subcommittee hearing, where
the witnesses from World Vision, the
CCIC and Rights and Democracy
succinctly and clearly made the case
for a new approach to promoting
democracy and development; an
approach that Canada should consider
if we truly want to have a more
significant and beneficial impact in
the world.
Thank you.
