Professor ’Jìmí O. Adésínà, Department of Sociology, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.

This paper explores Africa’s experience with regional development programming before the crafting of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. This is in the light of prevailing amnesia on Africa’s efforts at regional development programmes; something that contrast with memory of Africa’s more political project: the OAU. The paper focuses on the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA, 1980) and Africa’s Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programme (AAF-SAP), as a corrective to this ‘silence’ and invention of history.

The paper examines the discourses central to LPA and AAF-SAP; their diagnoses of the crisis of dependent capitalism in Africa, and prognoses for shifting to a path of sustainable development. The paper examines some areas of strength and weaknesses in these efforts at crafting a continental development programme. The paper concludes with some notes on the continued relevance of diagnoses of Africa’s development crisis at the heart of the LPA and AAF-SAP, and their agenda for overcoming the crisis of dependent capitalism in Africa.

Introduction

The construction of a hegemonic project is not always only about affirming the validity of its stated objectives and the pattern of relationship embedded in it. It is also about silences and closure; it is often about (selective) reading of history and forms of memory. Silences regarding a people’s history and closure (of debate) about alternative paths are salient to how a hegemonic project affirms itself as inevitable. Such silences and closures do not require a deliberate attempt to forget—indeed, ‘involuntary’ amnesia may signal success of a previous hegemonic project into which the new is locked. I will argue that the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development are two contrasting cases. While there is an affirmation of institutional memory of a political history (to both inspire and teach), the reverse is the case in the document of the economic project, NEPAD. In contrast to the af-firmation of history and memory, we encounter closure and silences. While there is a mention of the objective of having a Common Market on the continent and “sub-regional and regional approaches to development” there is silence and closure about its antecedents and the economic development con-text that gave birth to the idea. In Para. 42 of NEPAD we are told that there were “attempts in the past to set out continent-wide development programmes,” but this is quickly dismissed as having been “less than successful.” We have no record of what they are and no discussion of why they ‘failed’. The new discourse invents history; an invention rooted in silences and forgetting, and distinct for its crisis of historicity. If in falling we must look back to see why we fell; it is necessary to negate silences and involuntary amnesia in the desire to meet Africa’s development challenge.

This paper engages with earlier Africa’s experiences of developing regional development frame-works. The objective is not merely to serve as a corrective to a new generation of Africans or an attack on the prevalent silence and closure as an end in itself. Memories that shed no light on the jour-ney ahead may be of little relevance. This paper delves into these experiences and their continued relevance. Are there silences and closure in current discourses of global economic and options for re-gional development? Can these serve as a corrective to current diagnoses of the crisis and overcoming it?

In the absence of repossessing our collective memory, it is easy to assume that crafting a “devel-opment framework” that is compliant with the request of the rich nations (the ‘global compact’) and their endorsement will guarantee financing and therefore success. Until we recollect that in 1986 the OAU adopted Africa’s Priority Programme for Economic Recovery 1986-1990 with the assumption that compliance is the key factor. As Cheru has noted, the African countries held up to their end of the bargain by complying with a range of liberalisation policy prescriptions; the ‘rich’ countries did not. It easy to be jubilant at the “priority status” that the UN and G8 are according NEPAD; until we rec-ollect that APPER was not only endorsed by the UN but converted into the United Nations Pro-gramme of Action for Africa’s Economic Recovery and Development (UN-PAAERD, 1986). The UN New Agenda for the Development of Africa in the 1990s was established by a resolution of the General Assembly in 1991—with mechanism for monitoring and evaluating its implementation.

In an effort to construct the hegemony of the new agenda, the impression is often created that it is the first time that African leaders are affirming their willingness to accept responsibility for their own devel-opment or seek to develop a compact with the rich countries, but it is not. As Adedeji noted, “while African leaders can be faulted in many ways, they have made heroic efforts since the early 1970s to craft their own indigenous development paradigms in the light of their own perceptions.” The first ef-fort produced the LPA in 1980. The critical issue about avoiding silence and closure on memory, and understanding current dilemma is to answer the question of why in spite of these efforts development crisis turned into tragedy.

In this paper, I focus on two regional development frameworks: the Lagos Plan of Action and the Final Act (LPA 1980) and the African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programme (AAF-SAP, 1989) . The LPA, because it set the stage for subsequent efforts at finding alternatives to dependent capitalism; and AAF-SAP because it came in the middle of a development tragedy and after what seemed like the futility of APPER and UN-PAAERD. LPA was driven by the sense of impending crisis yet the feeling that a new world was possible. AAF-SAP was a product of an effort to create something out of the milieu of despair and disillusionment.

In the remaining parts of this paper, I will examine the LPA and AAF-SAP in sections 2 and 3, respectively. In these discussions, I am concerned with a critical engagement with their antecedents, discourses, and content. In section 4, we examine aspects of the enduring relevance of LAP and AAF-SAP. In transposing ideas that originated in LPA (regional development and the AEC) we consider the degree of consistency within the NEPAD framework.

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