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Of Credible Policies and Driver Seats
By Alejandro Kirk
Sitting next to Mozambican prime minister Pascoal Mucumbi in Hall XIX Wednesday, the Dutch minister for Development and Cooperation, Eveline Herfkens, declared that Mozambique is a country worthy of international financial support, because it has a ''credible policy”.
So much so that ''I will transfer 50 million dollars directly into the Mozambican Central Bank and will try to persuade Sweden and the UK to do the same,'' she announced.
''An Enabling Environment and Resources for Social Development,'' was the issue on debate at the first of a series of three ''Chairman's Panels,'' chaired by Uruguayan activist Roberto Bissio.
Non-governmental organisations clearly outnumbered official delegates in the panel, which was meant to bring them together. But most delegates could not be there because they were busy downstairs, negotiating the many bracketed paragraphs of the meeting's draft resolution, due to be adopted on Friday.
''Passionate,'' as Bissio described her, Herfkens presented her country and herself in a manner different from other industrialised nations of the North, more outspoken and critical, giving the impression that she was not really carefully weighing each word as most politicians do and Herfkens is a veteran Labour Party politician.
She took pride in the fact that the Netherlands is one of a handful of industrialised countries which have honoured the United Nations target of 0.7 percent of their gross national product allocated for development assistance.
Herfkens criticised the United States Congress for approving last week an ''insignificant'' debt relief package worth 75 million dollars for poor countries, while last year the leaders of the Group of Seven (G-7) most industrialised countries announced a debt-relief initiative worth 100 billion dollars.
To the audience's delight, she also said that her country was abandoning the old habit of providing ''tied aid,'' by which the recipient countries are forced to use the money to buy goods and services from the donor country, thus converting the aid into a form of export subsidy. By such mechanisms, she added, one-third of all development assistance in Africa goes to finance ''foreign experts,'' while thousands of African specialists are forced to emigrate every year to richer countries.
Only two countries of the 29 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are blocking a decision on the matter, she added. Those countries are known to be the United States and Japan.
When everybody was getting the cosy feeling that she was an NGO official in the ritual task of convincing the already convinced, she turned to the issue not only of rights, but also of duties by developing countries, from good governance to sound macroeconomic policies.
She had started her informal speech by saying in the first place that when she visited a Dutch-funded project in Uganda, the country's vice -president, Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe, told her that no matter how poor a country is, it should be able to build its own schools and hospitals, by setting priorities right. Uganda, she stressed, is an example in this sense, and not by chance. As it is not a mere coincidence that the Mozambican Finance minister has international credibility: they are both women.
And yet another woman, Mamphela Ramphele, the South African managing director of the World Bank, intervened in the panel to stress that her institution and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), not exactly popular among NGOs, are learning and changing. Moreover, she said, the World Bank is willing to ''transform itself'' in the process of fighting poverty through strengthening public-private partnerships and empowering local communities.
It is not true, she argued, that developing countries cannot make a macroeconomic decision without consulting Washington first. ''There are several developing countries who have acted irresponsibly on their own,'' she added, in irony.
The Dutch minister said that financing for development was comparable to a bus, in which someone has to drive and others are to be the passengers. Aid recipients, not donors, ought to be on the driver's seat, she said, but passengers must have the right to check the driver's license, while not disturbing him/her.
In other words, the driver must comply with some of the passengers' standards, so that he/she doesn't get his/her license withdrawn and hence be unable to conduct the economy. In exchange for such credentials, Helfkens said, passengers must be willing to clear the road for the bus by scrapping protectionist barriers and care for the bus' suspension system by relieving it from the debt burden.
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