Africa Renewal (United Nations)
30 November 2011
interview
Amos Sawyer is a member of the Panel of Eminent Persons of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM), established in 2003 by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the continental development plan. Mr. Sawyer is no novice on governance issues. During the early 1980s he chaired Liberia’s constitutional commission and in 1990-94 was interim president of the country, during one phase in that West African nation’s long civil war. He currently chairs Liberia’s Governance Commission, which recommends political and institutional reforms to consolidate peace and advance democratic practices.
Since the APRM’s formation, 30 African countries have joined the voluntary arrangement. Members have their governance practices reviewed through national consultations and discussions with APRM review panels and African heads of state. How well has this process been working, and what lies ahead? In this exclusive, full-length interview, Mr. Sawyer responds to Africa Renewal’s managing editor, Ernest Harsch. (A shorter version was published in the magazine’s December 2011 print edition.)
Since the democratization wave of the 1990s there have been many different governance initiatives in Africa. What’s unique about the Peer Review Mechanism? What does it add?
It adds several things. First, it is a self-assessment, done by the country itself, in an all-inclusive way: government, civil society, the business community. Second, it is a peer review. It is held by the African governments themselves. Peers from outside sit together with the leadership of the country. That engagement involves constructive criticism, illustrations of best practices. But it doesn’t end there. A programme of action is formulated, and the head of state being reviewed has an obligation to come back to his colleagues every two years to report on the progress that has been made.
It is slow. It is not confrontational. But a country that does it right has windows opened for the international community to support its development programmes. It strengthens its systems of governance, because the very methodology compels countries to engage with their own constituencies.
You have spoken about the peer review as putting into practice the spirit of the Arusha Declaration of 1990.*
Yes, I think so. The 1990 popular participation conference urged bringing out the human potential in the developmental process, that trade unions, farmers’ groups, all should be involved in governance. We should move beyond thinking about “the government” and start thinking about “governance,” which admits the interaction of various constituencies of people. The peer review is giving some practical implementation to that.
The Arusha conference was organized by the UN, but also had civil society involvement. NEPAD was initiated by some African heads of state. The peer review seems to combine the two. You have people on the Panel of Eminent Persons who come from civil society, but at the end of the process the review goes to African heads of state for approval. Do you see any tension there?
Yes. In fact we are working on that. One of the issues suggested by civil society groups in Africa is that the review process at the level of the heads of state should either take place with the involvement of civil society or there should be a concurrent process where civil society would have its own take on the report. I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few more years we see some changes.
In some countries that have gone through a peer review, civil society groups complained that those who were able to participate were mainly government-approved.
You have a mixed bag of cases. There are some countries in which civil society is not only well organized, but has demanded and therefore achieved a presence in the political process. In other places civil societies are still fighting to get a seat at the table and organizing themselves to build their capabilities. Where there is weak civil society input, we note that very strongly in all of the reports. And in the programme of action we will note that civil society empowerment is a major project that should be undertaken.
There are controversies about what civil society is. We encourage governments to engage the various groups and associations and come up not only with a working definition, but a space for participation of non-governmental organizations within the policy process.
The most recent accession to the APRM is your own country, Liberia. Do countries coming out of war need a little time to settle before a peer review would be useful?
I think it’s just about the right time for Liberia. A country coming out of conflict needs to put its institutions right. And it’s good when you are newly establishing your institutions for them to conform to the standards that are required by the peer review process. The legislature, for example, should be free from executive control. Legislators should undertake their constituency responsibilities seriously. The judiciary should be independent and well funded, giving people access. Civil society participation should be respected. And [the peer review] can help us correct whatever we are doing that may not be done properly.
Some issues, like corruption, gender and climate change, affect many countries.
Many of these issues are cross-cutting, not only because they touch everything in the national agenda, but some of them cross borders and are of continent-wide concern. Especially corruption, which is due to a lot of factors, including how institutions function, patrimonialism and the system of governance. Every African country has a little bit of this, so it’s an issue that everybody wants to talk about. Land grabbing is becoming a problem, the lack of land access for women and vulnerable groups, the struggle between plantation agriculture and small food production – every country has this problem to deal with. The extent to which we can address such issues together and form ideas is very helpful.
What we are also discussing is that the governance arrangements in some of these areas have to be designed differently. Sometimes you have to think outside the box, beyond the nation-state. If you have a pastoral group moving seasonally to where the greener lands are, that requires a different kind of governing arrangement, an authority that can look after them whatever country they come from. We have to learn to talk about an authority that might cross two or three borders.
How thorough is the implementation of the national programmes of action that come out of the peer reviews?
The programme of action is constituted not only by the government alone, but also with civil society and private sector involvement. It speaks directly to the challenges identified in the self-assessment report, so it’s targeted. The problem is that you also have the poverty reduction strategy or the medium-term development plan, which sometimes look to other priorities. We shouldn’t be talking about separate compartments. We should be talking about doing this together. Some have done it another way, using the programme of action as their development programme. Mauritius is doing that right now.
How do you know the APRM is having an impact?
How do we know the APRM is working? Sadly, we know all too soon when it is not working. At the 2006 review of Kenya, four or five critical issues were singled out in the report. Those came back to haunt us, with the electoral violence [in 2007-08]. Now, from the office of the president down to civil society, they all say that if they had followed the report they could have avoided many problems. Now Kenya is following the plan and a good deal of progress has been made.
In South Africa we raised the issue of xenophobia. I was not a member of the panel, but a consultant in the preparation of that report. At first there was denial. At many sticking points the South African government felt that we were wrong. But the panel member who was in charge of the process stuck to the report and it went through. South Africa has now come around to the problem [of xenophobia], unfortunately after it blew up [in violence in 2008].
In normal cases we follow the implementation of the plan of action and every two years the country has to write a report. Some countries are behind in coming forth, but the reports that are made are taken very seriously. Countries may be asked for special reviews if problems are continuing to occur. We are still perfecting the mechanism for monitoring, and we will get that over time.
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