African countries told to look east
By Meidyatama Suryodiningrat
BANDUNG (JP): The successful development of Asian countries were cited in an international forum here yesterday as an ostensible outline to be emulated by African states which have thus far pursued the singular approach of European and North American models.
"One of the things that Africa has done is to have used the model of Europe and North America, and while those have some relevance and benefits, we believe that the development models do not stop at the doors of Europe and North America," said Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Sirleaf, who arrived from UN headquarters in New York to attend the opening session of the Asia Africa Forum here, yesterday highlighted the remarkable achievements of Asian states and how they could probably be emulated in Africa.
"Take cases like Japan and Indonesia 30 years ago and the miraculous developments they have achieved suggest that there are major lessons of experience that Africa can benefit from," said Sirleaf who is the UNDP's African regional program director.
"Those are rich experiences of Asia that Africa could use a lot in changing its whole development pattern," she remarked.
Earlier in a written message to the Forum which was read by Sirleaf, UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asserted the need for initiatives, such as the Forum, to stimulate cooperation between Africa and Asia.
"Africa has much to learn from the development experience of Asia," Boutros Ghali said.
The Asia Africa Forum was opened by President Soeharto at the State Palace in Jakarta on Monday and is being attended by some 100 senior officials from 43 African and 10 Asian countries.
The five-day meeting of the Forum itself is taking place at the Merdeka building in the hilly town of Bandung, West Java, some 180-kilometers south of Jakarta.
Co-sponsored by Japan, the UNDP and the Global Coalition for Africa (GCA), the Forum is an outgrowth of the 1993 Tokyo International Conference on African Development which gave a firm commitment in cooperating and assisting with Africa's development.
Lessons
According to Sirleaf, the focus on a people oriented development was a major step still lacking in African development to date.
She told The Jakarta Post that Asia's success lay in "the emphasis of human resources development and also the fact that the government played a leadership role in forging an effective partnership between the public and the private sector."
She contended that Africa had put little emphasis on human capital in the past. "What we did was to use of expertise from outside. All of this has not served Africa well."
When asked by the Post on the source of these past failures she replied that they were results of the historical emphasis that followed colonialism.
"Africa wanted to leap-frog into development, creating the role of government in an excessive way," she said.
Former Minister of Environment, Emil Salim, said that Indonesia proposes a self-propelling growth model which emphasizes a community based approach.
"These are projects at the village level working on areas such as agriculture, food, security, public health and irrigation," he explained.
But as a senior consultant for the GCA, Tesfaye Dinka, illustrated, emulating the Asian miracle will be difficult since "unlike the miracles of classical mythology, it comes about not by divine intervention but as result of committed, long term and sustained efforts based on broad popular support."