By Sam Makinda
The G8 summit, which has been taking place this week on the Japanese Island of Hokkaido, started in Rambouillet, France, in November 1975, as a meeting of six leading industrialised states: Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the USA. It was later expanded to include Canada and, most recently, Russia. The group plays an important global role as a forum for promoting dialogue among the most powerful countries on some of the pressing global issues. However, the G8 is an informal organisation, which does not have a headquarters or a secretariat.
Moreover, the G8 does not operate according to a particular set of rules and procedures. Despite this, G8 summits have helped set the agenda on key global issues and in the past decade have been a focal point for public demonstrations.
Even terrorists have exploded deadly bombs partly with a view to distracting G8 leaders from their agenda. For example, the July 2005 London bombings coincided with the Gleneagles summit. And the Hokkaido summit was preceded by a suicide bomb at the Indian embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Of what value are the G8 summits to Africa? There are several ways of assessing the relevance of these summits.
The first is to examine the promises the developed countries have made to help African and other developing states with various types of assistance. These range from debt relief, budgetary support and poverty alleviation, to education and training, and the narrowing of the digital gap.
While a belief that rich countries and individuals have a moral responsibility to help those who are less fortunate, Africans should not expect much from G8 summits.
As an informal organisation, the G8 summit has no institutional memory and bureaucrats in Bonn, London, Moscow, Ottawa, Paris, Rome, Tokyo or Washington have no access to the “minutes” because they were not written.
In the early 1990s, I tried to conduct research in the then G7 summits from Rambouillet (1975) to Munich, Germany (1992), but I found there was nothing to guide me apart from newspaper reports.
The second way of assessing these summits is to examine the issues they focus on and explore strategies of obtaining support from individual members of the G8.
For example, at the Kananaskis summit in Canada in June 2002, the G8 summit pledged support for the New Partnership For Africa’s Development (Nepad), while at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, it pledged enormous efforts to reduce poverty in the developing world. The constant refrain of the Gleneagles summit was “Make Poverty History”.
It is not enough for Africans to criticise the G8 for its failure to deliver on such a pledge.
After all, there is plenty of poverty in Britain, France and the USA. Instead, African leaders need to clean up their governments of corruption and devise compelling strategies on how any of the G8 countries, individually, can help them tackle inequality and squalor.
While the G8 have a moral responsibility to assist African states, African leaders have an obligation to eliminate corruption and economic mismanagement, and produce compelling plans and strategies on how the aid will go to those who need it most. // Business Daily
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