“Protestors from the richer bits of the world are preparing to descend onthe Canadian Rockies next week, to make mischief at, and around the G8summit,” TheEconomist direly warned last week, resurrecting the familiar refrainthat the poor really want free trade. (We know they do, because wealthy,powerful, white men tell us so.)

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien seems to have bought that line.He’s hoping to get a little legacy out of this week’s summit, if American President George W.Bush will let him, and his mission du jour is the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) — an ambitious, all-encompassing plan for African “development” that departsfrom previous plans for Africa by offering more of the same, only more of it.

Accepting the need for debt reduction, NEPAD calls for saddling Africa withmore debt. The NEPAD proposal says Africa needs US $64 billion dollars ofaid every year, but only $20 billion of this will be grant money. The rest,presumably, will be debt.

The concept: more structural adjustment programs for Africa — moremarket liberalization and more fiscal restraint, in order to attract morescraps of foreign investment. Only now, countries will be told to attractmeagre foreign investment for devastated social services, too.

Even this weak-kneed aid program for wealthy elites is getting a lukewarmreception from G8 leaders.

Tuesday, in a blow to Prime Minister Chretien’sprestige, British Prime Minister Tony Blair told charity workers that theG8’s Africa agenda was “not coming together in any substantiveway.”

And the biggest cowboy in the Kananaskis sandbox, GeorgeBush says he won’t let the other leaders “gang up” on himto prevent him from getting his way. Not surprisingly, Bush is moreinterested in his Palestine “peace” plan, the “war onterror” and the fallout from yet another corporate scandal, than inAfrican development.

Once the ministers have finished their sumptuous meals and flown home, willAfrica be forgotten once again? Chretien insists that it won’t.

And protestors are told they don’t speak for Africa. Yet, when it comes toNEPAD, the Canadian government doesn’t seem keen to allow many voicesfrom Africa to be heard: 58 out of the 60 African civil societyrepresentatives invited to the G6 Billion counter-conference, organized inCalgary earlier this week, were denied visas to Canada. Why?

Perhaps because civil society groups in Africa have been saying things likethis: “…NEPAD [is] biased against the interests and needs of thepoor. [It] promotes a ‘new partnership’ that concentrates onnorthern donors, institutions, trans-national corporations, and the wealthysegments of African societies.”

Apparently, Africa is already spoken for.

So, according to the Canadian government, who does speak for Africa? Justfour men.

Chretien says they represent the voters who elected them. Let’s take alook at Chretien’s champions of good governance. These are the fourleaders who sat at the G8 table — presenting their plan forAfrica’s development.

Abdelaziz Bouteflika was elected president of Algeria in 1999, after all six of his opponents withdrew from the election, declaring the electionto be massively fraudulent. Bouteflika was widely believed to be the choiceof the army and the small group of officers known in Algeria as “LesDécideurs”, the deciders. Prior to 1999, Algeria had been ruled by amilitary dictatorship, installed with Western — especially French— backing in 1992, when elections were won by an Islamist party with amassive margin, then nullified by the military.

Since 1992, between 100,000 and 200,000 Algerians have been killed in brutalmassacres. The government says these are carriedout by Islamist militias, but this does not compare with the tactics ofIslamist groups anywhere else in the world, and no independent investigationhas ever taken place.

Some defectors from Algeria claim the massacres are perpetrated by themilitary to terrorize the population. The massacres often take place neararmy bases and are particularly bloody around Islamic festivals. Theelection of Bouteflika has done little to end the “civil war,”and this year, Amnesty International says the number of political killingsin Algeria remains “shockingly high.” Since last year, the Kabylia region of Algeria — dominated by Berbers — has been rocked by a Berber uprising against poor living conditions and government discrimination. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of Berbers have been killed.

Thabo Mbeki The South African president was first elected in 1999,succeeding his mentor, Nelson Mandela. Since that time, Mbeki has run intoconsiderable trouble at home and abroad. He has made headlines in the Westwith his skeptical views on the relationship between HIV and AIDS.

A former communist, he is now an enthusiastic adopter of neo-liberalpolicies. Within South Africa, he has presided over an accelerated programof structural adjustment that has privatized public services like water,telecoms and health care.

Mbeki’s harsh economic regime last year led the affiliated Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) to an historic break with the ruling African National Congress (ANC). COSATU led a nation-wide strike of fivemillion workers protesting Mbeki’s neo-liberal policies.

NEPAD is Mbeki’s brainchild. It grew out of a proposal he made to theWorld Economic Forum in Davos last year. Mbeki brought a revised version ofthe proposal to the G8 meeting in Genoa, was sent away with homework —to include “good governance” — and returned to thisyear’s G8 meeting with proposal in hand.

Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler of Nigeria, is the firstelected president to hold office there in over seventeen years. RichardDowden wrote in The Observer that “Nigeria has almost nofunctioning national institutions. The country is wracked by religious andethnic clashes that have killed as manyas three thousand people since Obasanjo became president — far morethan died under recent military regimes. In the past two years the army hasrazed two small towns with artillery and machine guns in old-fashionedpunitive raids.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed in massacres that make Zimbabwelook peaceful. President Obasanjo praised his troops, and no one has beenreprimanded.”What’s more, The Financial Times recently reported that $100million dollars of embezzled money returned to the Nigerian government bythe family of the late dictator Sani Abacha, has gone missing — again.

Abdoulaye Wade is the least noxious of the four. Elected in 1999 by aSenegal disaffected by years of economic decline and socialist rule, Wade isa liberal who shares Mbeki’s enthusiasm for International MonetaryFund (IMF)-sponsored policies. For thisreason, Wade was the first African leader Mbeki consulted after presentinghis plan at Davos last year.

Like Mbeki, Wade faces widespread unrest at home. Over the last twentyyears, Senegal has been devastated by IMF-enforcedstructural adjustment programs, making it one of the world’s“least developed” nations.

Not surprisingly, since Wade has continued these policies with gusto, therehas been little improvement in social or economic conditions during histenure, and strike militancy has increased, often withattendant violence.