Allegedly voicing the popular will, NEPAD’s authors present NEPAD as Africa's "partnership" with world leaders. The partners that they would woo are the same leaders who preach to Africa about the virtues of free trade while preserving the enormous protections they give to their industrial and agricultural corporations, in open contempt of the WTO, which is supposed to regulate and enforce fair play. Skepticism about corporate-driven globalization is a thread running through the first round of civil society critiques of NEPAD. This book reproduces commentary from major social movements, trade unions, progressive intellectuals and other community leaders. It also includes the original NEPAD and a paragraph-by-paragraph annotated critique.

Does NEPAD simply represent an extension of neo-colonial globalization? Is it a mask for the partnership Frantz Fanon warned against forty years ago? In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon drew attention to a relationship forged by an African leadership which identifies "with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth."

Product details