Business, government touch base on Nepad projects but forum was always going to be a talkshop
LIKE the drunken uncle who did not arrive for Christmas dinner, Zimbabwe's economic turmoil merited hardly a formal word at the World Economic Forum last week in Mozambique but the issue lingered intangibly during almost all the discussions in Maputo.
The three-day forum ended on Friday, with few concrete outcomes amid the workshops and plenary sessions that at least succeeded in focusing discussions around the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad).
On the last day, Absa Bank's CEO-designate Steve Booysen spoke of the importance of building the reputation of Africa as an investment destination.
But if Zimbabwe's economic crisis represents a threat to that reputation and the stability of the region in the eyes of certain foreign investors, then the Maputo event was notable for its reluctance to get to grips with this issue.
Admittedly, there was a workshop event entitled Zimbabwe: Meltdown or Revival, which provided Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane with a forum to call for President Thabo Mbeki to take a more formal role in the talks between the Movement for Democratic Change and Zanu (PF) before Zimbabwe's election next year.
Also, Mbeki was asked about his statement at last year's Durban World Economic Forum in which he said there would a solution to Zimbabwe within a year but he sidestepped the issue at the Maputo event, saying that earlier statement was more like a commitment on his part to do whatever he could.
"Mugabe wasn't invited, we did not think he could add anything to the event," says Haiko Alfeld, the forum's director for Africa.
But in the discussions on luring foreign direct investment to Africa and the talks on Nepad's African Peer Review Mechanism, the absence of any discussion of Zimbabwe served only to suggest that the country was the key barrier to achieving regional economic stability and to improving perceptions of the continent.
"This was not the forum to address the Zimbabwe issue," says one onlooker. "This was a discussion about how business could work with governments to improve the overall economic climate.
"Zimbabwe is a problem for the political leaders to work out at another forum."
But those hoping the forum would deliver tangible agreements would have been disappointed.
Rather, it was mostly a series of discussions, plenary sessions and concrete examples of where business and government were working well together. "It represented a scorecard of progress," says Alfeld.
He says it is able to illustrate how far along Nepad has progressed, the improvements in Africa's macroeconomic situation as well as the obstacles to achieving the development of the continent.
Whether through lack of money, the fact that its debates were held entirely in English, or a sense that it would be nothing more than a talkshop, the Maputo forum also failed to get any meaningful representation from any country other than SA, with the odd contribution coming from Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia.
As it was, Nepad was perhaps the main beneficiary of the forum.
Until now, the private sector has not invested in any of Nepad's top 20 flagship infrastructure projects but this was partly because many private sector players did not even know that these projects existed, or how they could access them.
Speaking on the last day, Eskom CEO Thulani Gcabashe blamed this on the lack of information about what Nepad was doing suggesting the Nepad secretariat had not done enough to draw the private sector into its investment projects.
But Gcabashe says the forum performed a "useful purpose" as it will ensure the better flow of information between the Nepad secretariat and the private sector.
The forum also saw the launch of a small number of practical development projects.
These included the Africa Water Exchange a matchmaking service to lure business into private-public partnerships for various water projects throughout the continent. The Exchange already has a number of water projects in Mozambique, Nigeria, SA, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and Swaziland.
This is a vital step, given that in order to meet the Millennium Development Goal of providing clean water and sanitation to 70% of Africa by 2015, 700 000 new water connections must take effect daily.
The forum also showcased Mozambique for the first time.
SA's eastern neighbour is a poster-child for how investment can boost a country given that the Mozal aluminium smelter and Sasol's natural gas pipeline have added between 2%-4% to Mozambique's annual gross domestic product growth.
Ultimately, however, things do not get decided at World Economic Forum events they merely get announced there after the real work has already happened.
The legacy of this summit appears to be that while it failed to deal with Zimbabwe, it drew business and government closer together to push Nepad's goal of improving infrastructure on the continent.
Fonte: AIM
