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The New Partnership for

  • Africa’s Development (Nepad) has been told to involve the private sector or risk failure to meet its objectives. The organisation has also been accused of being poorly managed during an international conference for employers in Nairobi.

    “Nepad lacks knowledge on what it wants to achieve. We don’t understand what they are doing for individual countries. Although African leaders are willing to make the Nepad dream happen, they can not do it alone. We should be involved,” said industrialist Manu Chandaria.

    A regional advisor to the International Organisation of Employers Africa, Fredrick Muia, said: “Although the organisation has excellent ideas, I do believe that there is a need to co-ordinate its work in order to move it from concept to implementation.”

    He urged its steering committee to devise ways of involving employers’ organisations in its programmes, saying Africa’s economy would not improve unless the private sector was involved in efforts to reform it.

    A sustained economic revival in the continent was impossible to achieve without the co-operation of all concerned.

    Speakers from employers’ organisations in east, central and southern African countries said Nepad remained a monument although member country leaders had declared their dedication to helping it achieve its goals.

    The theme was: “The role of the employers’ organisations in the promotion of the growth and development initiatives through Nepad and other Economic Partnership Agreements”.

    “African governments should provide an enabling environment where there is peace, security, democracy, respect of human rights and sound economic management. That way employers’ organisations can work with their governments to mould a common and shared vision for African countries,” said Azad Jeetun of Mauritius.

    Chandaria said: “Unless we wake up and involve the private sector in Nepad, it cannot deliver,” adding that the envisaged 7% annual economic growth for African countries would only be realised if the private sector was fully involved.

    “We must own Nepad. It can not be owned exclusively by governments and the day we will start owning Nepad is when things will work out,” he said, and accused African governments of make things difficult through bureaucracy.

    “Nepad lacks knowledge on what it wants to achieve. We don’t understand what they are doing for individual countries. Although African leaders are willing to make Nepad dream happen, they can not do it alone. We should be involved,” Chandaria said.

    Nepad anchors on the determination of Africans to extricate themselves and the continent from underdevelopment and exclusion in a globalising world. It charts out a broad framework for the economic and social revival of the continent.