Addis Ababa - Sixteen comprehensive country reports of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) over a decade have added great value to the understanding of governance in Africa, experts said here on Tuesday.
But a thorough assessment of the reports by analysts of South Africa’s Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy (EISA) also concluded that the lessons of the reports had not been properly applied by governments, private corporations or societies in general.
The evaluation of the APRM reports comes at a crucial time, on the eve of a summit here on Friday of the African Peer Review Forum, representing the leaders of the 35 countries which have volunteered to be peer-reviewed.
Peer reviews entail a very thorough scrutiny of the political, economic, social and corporate governance of each country by other countries in the programme.
The summit is being seen as critical for reviving the fading interest in the APRM which was launched with such promise and fanfare in 2002, as EISA and the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) said in a seminar here.
Grant Masterson, head of the APRM programme at EISA said it had done a thorough analysis of 16 of the 17 country reports done so far by APRM (one report was not included for technical reasons).
This analysis was aimed at determining if the reports were really adding value to the understanding of African governance. “This question is of critical existential importance,” he said, because of the fading interest in APRM in Africa itself and among international donors.
“If we are to re-energise the APRM, the value these reports add must be high.”
The EISA analysis had focused on the main governance issues which all the reports had identified - electoral conflict, extractive industries, land, gender and youth.
Masterson said one of the insights gleaned from the reports was that there was no evidence of an inevitable “resource curse” in Africa, contrary to popular perceptions. The reports had found a range of governance of resource-rich states, from well-governed to poorly governed with some average governance in between.
But the EISA analysis also found a surprising lack of discussion in the APRM reports about the impact of mining on the environment. The focus of the reports was on the political and economic aspects of mining.
The analysis of elections found a high coincidence of polls and political violence, mainly in countries already experiencing ongoing civil discord or war after disputed elections. Examples were Lesotho in 1998, Ethiopia in 2005 and Kenya in 2007. Violence was also most likely to occur in countries with a history of recurrent electoral violence, such as Nigeria, Kenya, Lesotho, Uganda and Tanzania.
Common causes of electoral violence across many of the countries reviewed included ethnic enmity, high youth unemployment, nepotism, cronyism and patronage, partisan politics, land disputes, competition for access to state and mineral resources and inequality.
One of the surprising results was that the second most violent election in Africa between 1990 and 2010 was South Africa’s first democratic poll in 1994 which caused 239 deaths - though this was well short of the 1 502 deaths in Kenya’s infamous December 2007 elections.
But Masterson said the EISA analysis had also found that the APRM country reports failed to make a clear enough distinction between violence caused by elections and other violence.
Though the gender issue was the most common one discussed across the reports, it was mostly rather superficially handled, with mere admonitions to countries to include women’s empowerment in various other endeavours.
Land rights and land tenure were identified as a common African problem, though the experience of different countries varied widely.
Land was often seen as a proxy for other issues, such as race, class, gender or even youth - the latter for example in Mauritius where land scarcity was depriving young people of the ability to buy land.
Land was also discussed mostly in a socio-economic context with very little discussion about the need for government financing of land acquisition.
Masterson said in general there was not enough analysis in the APRM reports about the intersection of the four major themes of governance which the APRM examines – political, economic, social and corporate governance.
So the Mozambique country report did not mention the human rights abuses committed by mining companies in throwing people off their land.
EISA and SAIIA have been complaining about Africa’s flagging interest in the APRM for some time. They have noted that it published its last country reports in 2013, many member countries had not been paying their financial dues, 18 countries had volunteered to join the programme but had not submitted themselves to its scrutiny and most of the 17 countries which have been peer-reviewed had not implemented the recommendations of the APRM.
Last year the African Union began to show signs of reviving the APRM as Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta took the chair of the APR Forum. The long-delayed review of Djibouti’s governance was revived after the United Nations Development Programme provided financing.
Djibouti’s leader was expected to defend his country’s performance before his peers at Friday’s APR Forum summit.
APRM officials were also promising that Chad and Senegal would be reviewed during the first half of this year and Sudan and Cote d’Ivoire during the second half of the year.
However, Steven Gruzd, who heads the governance and APRM programme at SAIIA, remained sceptical and said on Tuesday he would “believe it when I see it”.
Kenyatta promised an extraordinary summit of the APR Forum in Nairobi in September last year to revive the APRM, but then cancelled it at the last moment without explanation, EISA and SAIIA said.
Kenyatta though insisted he had merely postponed it to this Friday, though the two NGOs fear that because it was now being jammed into a tight slot among many other events preceding the general AU summit, the APRM would not get the attention it deserved.
But they said they had been assured the leaders would at last appoint a permanent CEO for the APRM secretariat, the first since 2008.
ANA