The centerpiece of this month’s G-8 summit in Kananaskis will be an initiative called the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NePAD). Based on a proposal from three African leaders – Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdelaziz Boutreflika of Algeria, and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, NePAD has the support of Prime Minister Chretien and other G-8 leaders.

These leaders want to use NePAD to counter criticisms of the G-8, which has become "globalization central" in the eyes of much of the world. Adoption of NePAD is intended to show the good intentions of the G-8 and to deflect media attention from the protests that will surround the Kananaskis summit.

Already, however, critics are questioning whether the substance of NePAD lives up to the hype G-8 spin doctors are producing. The plan has lofty goals, including average economic growth in Africa of over 7% per year over the next 15 years. Achieving this goal will require the injection of very substantial resources into the African economy. The price-tag for the initiative has been estimated at US $64 billion per year, but it is doubtful that contributions from the G-8 countries will raise more than a small fraction of that amount.

Nor is funding the only problem. Critics are already charging that if NePAD is short on resource commitments, it is equally starved for new ideas. Many of the concrete initiatives proposed so far are simply new versions of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) already imposed on African countries by the International Monetary Fund. These SAPs, which emphasized fiscal austerity, privatization, and "trade liberalization," devastated African economies over the last two decades.

If NePAD turns out to be more of the same, it is unlikely to receive the support of the African public. As critic Trevor Ngwane of South Africa argued at a recent AntiPrivatization Forum in Johannesburg: "NePAD seems to follow the logic and values of the world’s economic and political elite and as such can never take forward the cause of ordinary Africans."

Criticism of the World Bank, the IMF’s structural adjustment policies, and the overall thrust of NePAD isn’t limited to Africa. Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist at the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, has warned that the simplistic application of trade and investment liberalization policies will not help Third World countries escape from poverty and debt.

In the end the NePAD proposal’s biggest flaw is that, like all G-8 programs, it’s a top-down initiative. It was originally the brainchild of three African leaders operating with no public or parliamentary consultation. It was then modified at the urging of the G-8 leaders at the Genoa summit. Most Africans, like most Canadians, don’t even know of the proposal’s existence, much less its contents.

So once again a handful of rich and powerful men operating behind closed doors will come up with a plan to "save" Africa. Never mind that these are the same governments and the same policies that created much of the problem in the first place.

It was the industrialized West that colonized Africa and left it, on decolonization, without the social infrastructure necessary to support a modern democratic state. It was the West that inflicted murderous dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko and Jonas Savimbi on Africa. It was the IMF and the World Bank, acting on behalf of the West that imposed economic policies that further impoverished these already poor countries.