Nepad to merge with African Union; leadership wrangle allegations cited

BY GEORGE KAGAME

The highly acclaimed New Partnership for African Development program has been merged with the African Union but remains with its office in South Africa.

Speaking to The New Times, Francis Gatare President Kagame’s permanent representative at NEPAD who also happens to be the director general of Rwanda Investment and export promotions agency Riepa said Nepad’s working structures will be merged will be with the existing African Union but what remains are the technical issues like human resource personnel, he also said the Nepad will ask the South Africa to host its secretariat.

Formed in 2002, Nepad was seen as a development initiative among African leaders to promote service delivery from governments to their citizens and alleviate poverty.
The initiative was highly supported by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki, Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, President Paul Kagame and Senegal’s Aboudalaye Wade.

The proposal to merge Nepad within the African Union comes amid allegations of a leadership wrangle between the President of Senegal and that of South Africa in a Nepad consultative meeting ahead of the AU heads of State summit in June. The meeting held last week brought together heads of state from Senegal, Algeria, Ethiopia and South Africa in Dakar.

A high level meeting involving the mentioned countries, Nigeria, South Africa and Egyptian delegations were meeting in Dakar on Tuesday for Nepad and AU leaders. The meeting comes only one month after AU heads of state summit to be held in Cairo Egypt.


The heads of state, who were joined by Nigeria's foreign minister and the Egyptian economy minister, agreed to put forward all the proposals discussed on Tuesday to the next African Union heads of state summit.

President Paul Kagame has among African leaders that have supported the Nepad initiative and was the first to endorse the peers’ leaders’ assessment program. In this program African leaders agreed in principle to assess each other in terms of service delivery to their populations, good governance principles and respect for the rule of law.


It is reported in the media that disagreements about leadership between South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki and Senegal’s Aboudalaye Wade was the main reason Nepad merged with the AU. Gatare said Nepad’s merging was not a failure; “Nepad was born at the same time the Organization of African Unity was transforming into the African Union. It was formed as a programme for African countries to drive their own development destiny. Both organizations therefore grew simultaneously; the leaders have therefore decided to merge the two because they have the same principles.”

Gatare said Nepad will remain with its based South African secretariat but work with the same structures as AU, he said Nepad had succeeded in fulfilling its objectives with a good measure.

The disagreement between South African President Thabo Mbeki and Senegal’s Aboudalaye Wade about the leadership of Nepad caused reports that talks between the leaders had caused the failure of the talks.

Gatare said Nepad had been efficient in fulfilling the principles for which it was formed even if the AU also existed at the same time. “Nepad has increased among African leaders to take care of their solutions to African problems instead of waiting for action form elsewhere. We have been able to create a growth and development structure for Africa, Nepad has promoted regional integrations in all regions on the African continent that are actively benefiting Africans. In East Africa there’s the East African Community, ECOWAS for West Africa and SADC for South Africa.


Gatare said that Nepad had promoted regional and continental development programs for infrastructure like linking the entire continent on the transport network and plans were underway for Information Technology to penetrate the continent. He said that when projects like the EASSY and east African marine cables were launched Africa will be more advanced in the use of ICT.

EASSY or the East African Sub-marine Cable System (EASSy), is an ICT system that will connect the African continent with the rest of the world and Rwanda has also been one of its most vocal supporters.
The African marine cable is another ICT cable that seeks to link Africa on the broadband technology from Cape Town in South Africa to Cairo on Africa’s north most tip.

President Paul Kagame has asked beneficiary states to forge concerted efforts towards the effective implementation of the venture.



Gatare said the next heads of state summit will be held in June and the proposals put forward on Tuesday will be endorsed, the summit will be held in Cairo
But currently both organisations are dealing with harmonizing personnel details, and signing a host agreement with South Africa to host the Nepad secretariat which will effectively be working under the African.

Those proposals include Senegal’s Aboudalaye Wade demanding changing the structure of the current AU organisation to hand more decision-making power to the heads of state, rather than technocrats as has been the case.


The African dream has moved from brand name to another, beginning with the Organization of African Unity in 1963 for African independence, which has transformed into the African Union which also has political and economical African unity and having Libyan Leader Colonel Muamar Gaddafi as its most eloquent promoter.