Will NEPAD succeed?
Will Alexander, Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil and
Biosystems Engineering, University of Pretoria. Email alexwjr@iafrica.com
It is imperative for the welfare of the people of the African continent that
NEPAD should succeed. Unfortunately there has been a lot of woolly thinking,
particularly by well-meaning scientists, that could endanger its implementation.
This is even more critical in the light of the forthcoming World Summit on
Sustainable Development.
What is meant by sustainable development? More than 300 million people on the
African continent live in conditions of sustained poverty. Why does the word
sustainable have to be used at all? The target is simple - these people have to
be lifted out of poverty. This can be likened to climbing out of a valley onto a
plateau. The problem lies in climbing out of the valley, not in sustaining
livelihoods once the plateau has been reached.
The original meaning of sustainability referred to development without
long-term detrimental effects on the environment. It is still used in this
context. There is a widely held belief that a healthy environment will sustain a
healthy population and consequently if the environment is sustained in a healthy
state, the population that depends on it will also be healthy. This is a utopian
view that is at variance with reality. Poverty exists precisely because the
natural environments can no longer support the rural populations that depend on
them. It is naive to assume that the overloaded environments can somehow be
improved by legislating control measures that will lead to sustainable support
to growing population. Legislation to protect the natural environment has been
in force in South Africa and a number of African countries for several decades,
but there is no evidence to suggest that this has resulted in an improvement of
the lot of the poor communities in these countries, on the scale required to
reverse the trend of increasing poverty.
The objective of the much-lauded Agenda 21 of the 1992 Rio Summit was to
maximise economic and social welfare without compromising the sustainability
of vital ecosystems (emphasis added). This is an unacceptable order of
priority. There should be no environmental impediments to the maximisation of
economic and social welfare. For example, if the current legislation regarding
the need for ecologically healthy river systems had been enacted fifty years
ago, South Africa would now be dependent on desalinated seawater and our
coalfields would have been depleted to provide the energy required for the
desalination. The desalination costs would have comprised a sizable portion of
the national economy. This is an intolerable situation where poverty exists. It
is unfortunate that there have been no concerted moves by scientists to correct
this misapprehension.
Towards a solution
There are no easy solutions and no single solution for all aspects of poverty
alleviation. It will require a sustained multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional
approach to generate a range of plausible, implementable solutions to a
particular problem for the consideration of decision makers. The following are
some personal views.
States can be divided into three broad tiers of government. The upper tier is
the administrative component. This is an essential component of society but it
imposes a large economic burden on the national budget. The second tier is the
productive component, which generates the wealth that supports the
administrative component. The third tier is the unproductive and financially
poor communities that also have to be supported by the financially active
component. National prosperity can be enhanced either by decreasing the
administrative and poverty burdens, or by increasing the productivity of the
financially active component.
Reducing the administrative burden
The administrative burden increases directly with the degree of
democratisation of society. For example, the devolution of authority from
national to provincial, and from provincial to local authorities may be a
democratic imperative, but it often results in the duplication of services and
in a lack of capacity at lower levels. This in turn results in inefficient
administration and inefficient expenditure of available funds. Pumping more
funds into this tier of society will not lead to a reduction of poverty.
Autocratic forms of government are more efficient, but are politically
unacceptable, particularly by those who consider that the right to vote is more
important that the right to survive. The optimum for national prosperity lies
between these two extremes.
Increasing productivity
Increasing the productivity of the financially active component is the target
of most proposals for poverty alleviation, yet it is difficult to see how this
can be done on a scale that will relieve the hardships of millions of people on
the African continent. Experience shows that increasing the wealth of the few
usually widens the gap between the rich and the poor (nations and individuals)
instead of closing it. In South Africa, the rate of unemployment continues to
grow despite claims of increased national prosperity.
Directly decreasing poverty
Decreasing poverty directly on the scale of millions of people is the road
that will have to be followed. It is also the most promising route for
scientific innovation. The first task is the removal of obstacles to progress
along the road. Here are some of them.
The most important obstacle is the unfortunate linkage between sustainable
development and environmental conservation. Contrary to popular belief, these
are non-commensurate objectives in that one can only be achieved at the expense
of the other. The following is an example from a recent policy statement.
Hopefully, it was written by the public relations office and not by the
Minister's professional advisers.
The Minister said that a primary area was the development of the country's
large State dams, which was now based on a sustainability plan that integrates
the environmental, social and economic elements through consultation with local
stakeholders, to find the optimal approach to unlock the full resource potential
of the dam.
Is this procedure achievable in practice? In technical terms this is a
multi-objective optimisation procedure involving non-commensurate objectives, in
that all objectives cannot be satisfied concurrently. Which components will have
to be sacrificed to achieve the others? Who makes this decision - the
stakeholders, or their elected representatives, or the Minister? What role will
political expediency play? For example, one Minister proudly stated that he had
carried a proposal in his satchel for 14 months before making a decision. This
may have satisfied the concerns of the environmental lobby, but not those of the
less articulate beneficiaries of the proposal. Scientific methods are available
for solving these problems.
Multidisciplinary approaches.
The need for multidisciplinary approaches can be illustrated by several
examples where well-meaning scientists made recommendations to governments on
matters that were beyond their areas of expertise. One of these is the
unsupportable claims that climate change will result in increases in floods and
droughts, and that political decision makers should make financial provision to
avoid the consequences. More than 1000 papers have been written on this subject,
which is an average of one per day. It can be demonstrated without difficulty
that these fears are groundless.
Another equally damaging obstacle is the imposition of northern hemisphere
solutions to African problems. There are examples where overseas institutions
have financed development projects in Africa, but the money has ended up in the
pockets of appointed planners and contractors from the donor countries. The
local communities were saddled with the unaffordable operation and maintenance
costs.
There are many examples of successes and failures that could be studied
before embarking on new projects, but these do not appear to have been collated
to from a basis for future studies.
Finally
Few scientists are likely to waste their time on what they perceive as lost
causes, but it is these lost causes that desperately need scientific attention.
The publish or perish (now publish overseas or perish) requirement for
advancement in academic institutions can be counter-productive. Research on
large-scale poverty alleviation measures requires several years of patient
multidisciplinary studies that have little likelihood of complying with the
requirement of one publication per year in recognised journals.
No quick-fix solutions are likely to be found. Multidisciplinary studies
require coordination, but no national scientific coordinating body exists in
this field. It is easier to be critical of existing approaches than to propose
alternatives. However, these must be found if NEPAD is to succeed.
Footnote
Will research on waterless toilets ever come to an end?
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