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Blair's Commission for Africa is said to be an initiative for Africa, led by Africans. However let's be clear that the commissioners from the continent have been carefully selected for their neoliberal perspectives, representing neither African authorities, nor civil society. Blair's Commission is imposed from outside.

A fundamental purpose of the report is to separate, and isolate, Africa from Asia and Latin America. Progressive forces in Africa reject the separatist agenda because cancellation of the debt and alternative development plans, are the basis of a collective battle across the South.

The analysis offered by the report is nothing new. It fails to question neo-liberalism, though this model more than anything else lies at the root of growing inequalities and therefore poverty. It concludes with two real recommendations: an appeal to development aid (familiar from all reports in the last half century) and the cancellation of debt.

Let's be clear, the cancellation of debt is a right for the South, not a concession from the North. When, following the First World War, Germany was ordered to pay reparations amounting to 7% of its exports, liberal economists of the period concluded that the burden was unendurable. Today, economists of the same school have no compunctions about suggesting that Third World economies bend to debt servicing requirements that are five or even six times more onerous.

Such debt servicing amounts to plunder, in which dominant capital (in lending countries) is freed from managing production. It is the responsibility of the borrowing states to extract the necessary work from their populations.

The North would like to believe the debt is the responsibility of borrowing nations, riddled with corruption, complacency, irrationality, extreme nationalism, and so on. But much debt derives from utterly offensive and immoral loans, for example those made to the former apartheid government of South Africa to purchase weapons for use against the African resistance. Others involve widespread corruption on both sides, and were either not invested in projects, or were invested in absurd projects imposed by lenders, especially the World Bank. These would be judged illegal by any court worth its name. Finally there are legitimate loans, used for their intended and reasonable purpose.

Debts arising from odious or immoral loans should be repudiated, and the creditors should reimburse payments made on these debts at the same rates of interest the debtors had to pay. We would then see that in fact the North is indebted to the South.

The Blair Commission belongs to a very different school of thought. All debt is considered legitimate, and so proposals for debt cancellation are considered charitable. It is also considered fair to attach conditions to such "debt forgiveness", in the form of draconian policies which places those countries in a situation closely resembling that of colonies.

This is Blair's vision. Debt has played its role by creating the conditions which compelled the countries of the South to submit to Structural Adjustment. Newer forms of neo-colonialism are now more appropriate to ensuring Africa's adjustment into the global economy. Beyond debt cancellation, what we need is the recognition of the right of countries to decide strategies for development for themselves. This would create the conditions for a negotiated pattern of globalisation. Without such a fundamental shift away from the neo-liberal, neo-colonial paradigm, the debt would immediately regenerate.


Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. He is resident between Paris and Egypt.

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