Africans to The Aid of Africa

The challenge in really comfortable hotels is not to get too comfortable.

The soft chairs swaddle you, suggesting sleep; the plush curtains and thick windows muffle all the helpful noise that might jolt you back to consciousness. But Thabo Mbeki is unbowed. He sits upright in his chair, defying pillow mechanics; he radiates a lively charm, even though his minders warned that the South African president was exhausted. He achieves all this, moreover, while holding forth on subjects that would put lesser men out cold. The U.N. General Assembly, for example. Or the contribution of proportional representation to democracy in Lesotho.

Mbeki is expounding on a theme that mirrors, in a curious way, his posture in New York's Waldorf Astoria. He's summoning up the spirit of the anti-apartheid era, the long struggle against rich white dominance of Africa. That struggle, he believes, continues in another form: The battle against the soporific, plush-pillow embrace of well-meaning white experts.

At times Mbeki's revolt against experts has led him to scary places, as when he questioned the link between HIV and AIDS despite the scientific consensus.

But these days Mbeki's revolt takes a more constructive form: He is the cheerleader for Africa's latest poverty-fighting manifesto, the New Partnership for African Development. The NEPAD, as it's known, is a conventional statement of development goals with one unconventional virtue.

Rather than being written in an international forum dominated by first-world types, it's a development blueprint for Africa drawn up by Africans.

This switch in authorship makes a world of difference, in Mbeki's view. In the old days, he explains, development failed because outsiders imposed it, leaving Africans with no sense of responsibility for their own progress.

"Little thing goes wrong, they walk away, it's your thing," is how Mbeki describes African attitudes toward aid donors. "It's been an important factor with regard to the question, given the billions of dollars that have gone to Africa as development assistance, why don't you see any impact?"

Now, with the NEPAD, things may change. "We are taking responsibility for the success of the program," Mbeki says. "We can't say it's somebody else's plan. It's our plan." And, by happy coincidence, Mbeki's revolt against rich-country experts fits the mood in economic development perfectly.

If the World Bank/International Monetary Fund meetings in Washington this coming weekend have one theme, it's that the so-called Washington consensus on development is fragile. The chief source of this fragility isn't any of the ones usually mentioned: That the anti-globalization street protests are back; or that the yelling match between the IMF ) and Joe Stiglitz, the World Bank's former chief economist, proves that there's no longer consensus about the Washington consensus.

Rather, the biggest source of fragility lies elsewhere. It's that, on the many issues where experts do know what to advise, they can't force poor countries to listen. The old view, that you could impose good policies by making them a condition of generous aid, was too hopeful: Countries make the promises in order to receive the cash but then do not implement them. Good policies stick only if the country feels responsibility for them. Even before the NEPAD was born, the World Bank had been trying to cultivate the necessary sense of ownership.

Hence the paradox of Mbeki's revolt against experts: The experts are delighted with it. And, to his credit, Mbeki acknowledges the positive response, even though that puts him in the position of praising the experts whose authority he challenges. Before holding court in the Waldorf, Mbeki had spent the weekend with James Wolfensohn, the World Bank's president; he had nothing but good things to say about him. "The fortunate thing about Jim Wolfensohn is that he actually raised this thing himself," Mbeki says. "He came onto the African continent and said the period of viceroys from the World Bank is over. We can't continue this situation in which we come and tell you what's wrong and what's right about your country."

Listening to Mbeki praise Wolfensohn, one thing is clear. If there is a consensus about economic development these days, it isn't a Washington consensus.