Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on 
Foreign Affairs

Issue 14 - Evidence - Meeting of May 10, 2005

OTTAWA, Tuesday, May 10, 2005

The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs met this day at 5:30 p.m. to examine the development and security challenges facing Africa; the response of the international community to enhance that continent's development and political stability; and Canadian foreign policy as it relates to Africa.

Senator Peter A. Stollery ( Chairman ) in the chair.

[ English ]

The Chairman: Honourable senators, I want to welcome everyone to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. It is a meeting held in the context of our special study on Africa.

[ Translation ]

Today's meeting deals with foreign aid, in preparation for tomorrow's meeting when we will meet in the same room, at 3:30 p.m., the Minister of International Cooperation, Ms. Eileen Carroll.

Our first witness will be Mr. Gerry Barr, President-CEO of the Canadian Council for International Co-operation. The CCIC is a coalition of Canadian volunteer organisations who work internationnally to end poverty in the world and to promote social justice and human dignity for all.

[ English ]

The Chairman: I welcome Mr. Ian Smillie, Research Coordinator for Partnership Africa Canada. PAC, is a Canadian NGO working with African NGOs on issues of human rights, human security and sustainable development. PAC appeared before this committee to discuss AIDS in Africa.

We will then hear from Mr. Peter R. Kieran, President of CPCS Transcom. Mr. Kieran has twenty years of experience in management consulting in the direction of engagements overseas and in Canada. His clients include the Government of Canada, the World Bank, the United Nations and the governments of several developing countries. Finally, we will hear from Mr. George Ayittey, Professor of Economics at American University. Mr. Ayittey has written on many subjects related to Africa including political economy and economic development. He is the author of, Africa Unchained, The Blueprint for Africa's Future.

I welcome you all to the Senate of Canada. Mr. Barr, you have the floor.

Mr. G. Barr, President-CEO, Canadian Council for International Co-operation: I know there is some element of debate in today's presentation. Overall, I understand the question posed for today's discussion is about the value of development assistance and whether aid helps or whether it does not.

The absence of international aid is certainly not the cause of poverty and aid will not be its cure. Poverty is about marginalization and disenfranchisement. It is about social decisions taken by those in power globally and within states about who counts and who does not. The cure to poverty is not aid but the emergence of those who are living in poverty as rights holders and as citizens demanding accountability from governments and reshaping their social circumstances.

Aid can be an important tool for poverty eradication, but misspent it is more of a burden than a help. You would be a pretty feckless critic to argue that because aid may sometimes be misspent, it ought not to be spent at all. The annual global flow of approximately $60 billion in aid is little enough, and represents a discounted contribution by rich nations to the world's poorest economies. Well used, aid is a boon; badly provided, it is a curse.

How is Canada doing? All here will know that Mr. Goodale was an important part of the Commission for Africa. The Blair commission argues that more and better aid can achieve large results in Africa. The report is itself large and canvasses many areas: peace and security, education, health, economic growth, governance, trade, aid and debt. What is remarkable is the extent to which the commissioners acknowledge the harm that has been done to Africa by colonialism, structural adjustment policies imposed by donors and inequitable rules. It is a report that embraces the idea of a development state. It rejects the idea that trade liberalization can be forced on Africa as a condition of trade or aid. It calls on the rich nations to cancel debts of the poorest economies and take their obligations as donors seriously to double aid to Africa by 2008. This is not the kind of tone that has marked discussion in donor circles of late and it is very welcome to see these sorts of conclusions coming from a study group of which Canada was so clearly and prominently a part.

I would like to underscore a few of the points made by the commission and speak about Canada's response in the context of those recommendations and points. The commission recommends a doubling of aid to Africa overall by 2008-10, and another redoubling by 2015. For its part, Canada has pledged that doubling of aid by 2008, concretely going from about $1.1 billion in annual spending in 2002 to $2.8 billion in 2008.

Canada has yet to set out a plan to achieve the internationally accepted donor target of assigning 0.7 per cent of the value of its economy to help poor countries, a move which the Blair commission and all of its commissioners, including the Canadian commissioner, have sought from donor states. Canada, so far, is missing on this file.

The commission rejects the idea that foreign direct investment can be the key near-term element responsible for the liftoff of the economies of the African nation states. For the commission, an enabling environment based on policy predictability, public accountability and good governance are precursor conditions of that growth.

The private sector is a key part of the commission's vision of African development but it is an African private sector that they have in mind. Strangely, the Canada Investment Fund for Africa tracks in the other direction, aiming to promote foreign direct investment with a $100-million pool of investment capital matched by a further $100 million by private investors.

On the corporate responsibility side, the fund is pretty well kitted out, taking on board ILO conventions, OECD guidelines, that sort of thing. Only 15 per cent of the resources of this fund are to be used for small and medium-sized enterprises, forget the smaller enterprises that are more clearly and routinely in the hands of those in the informal sector and the poor. Very little thought has been given to weighing and assessing the development impact of investment fund commitments.

The Blair commission criticizes past donor practices, rightly pointing out that donor targets are often misaligned with national budgets, with objectives that are opaque and with a transactional burden that is enormously high. It rightly says that aid is at its most effective when it backs national priorities, builds on local knowledge and systems, strengthens the ability to make public policy choices, and when it promotes accountability to citizens.

Canada broadly buys into that vision, and in recent years has moved away from project to program-based approaches. CCIC estimates that 60 per cent of Canada's aid to Africa will be in the area of sector-wide rather than program-based support by the end of 2006.

While Canada has picked up the ownership message which is often key to effectiveness, it has undervalued the role of civil society groups in achieving that objective. Civil society groups play a key role when it comes to the legitimate demands for accountability both in the south and globally. They are the source of innovative models aimed at helping those in poverty to claim their rights. Civil society groups and citizen's groups based in the wealthy economies have been a strategic channel for resources for their counterparts in the south, and key policy partners with their colleagues from developing country economies.

CIDA's funds to civil society groups and citizen's groups, north and south, have declined over the last four years by about 7 per cent over all and within CIDA bilaterally by about 10 per cent.

The Blair commission accepts that agriculture is a key sector for the national economies of Africa. It calls for land reform to aid women farmers and other vulnerable groups. They want a revival of African agricultural cooperative movements. They want a doubling of arable land by 2015, but one of the most marked omissions in Canada's recent international policy statement is its plain failure to take account of agriculture as a key tool in poverty reduction, all the more mysterious for the fact that CIDA launched a new agriculture policy in 2003, quite a good one, that pledged, among other things, a five-fold increase in spending in agriculture.

As the chair said to me before we started, two thirds of the world's poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. It is passing strange that this is not a key part of CIDA's response in the context of African development.

How is Canada doing? Well, we certainly get some things, and we slip up on others. We want to spend more on aid, but we shrink from meeting the internationally accepted donor target. We want to support private sector development, but we do not take account of the fact that 60 per cent of Africa's private sector is in agriculture. We properly want to promote ownership of aid objectives within developing economies, but we are strangely forgetful of the thing that makes ownership work; the public imperatives that emerge from the accountability demands of active citizens and civil society.

Ian Smillie, Research Coordinator, Partnership Africa Canada: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the opportunity to participate in this discussion. I will start with a personal story about my first encounter with Africa 38 years ago when I went to Sierra Leone to teach high school as a CUSO volunteer.

In 1967 we thought we knew the meaning of development. It could be seen in the new schools, roads and clinics that were springing up everywhere. It could be seen in the students, eager young girls and boys who often walked miles to school every day, who stayed late, absorbed information and ideas like there was no tomorrow.

As it turned out for many of them there was no tomorrow. Aiah James was dead at 30 years from an unknown ailment; Daniel Joe killed during the civil war; Kai Foday paralyzed by a stroke at 35 brought on perhaps by early exposure to unregulated chemicals or some pesticide.

Listen to Esther Kaimachende, then a 12 year old, now 49:

My husband and I knew the rebels would come, but we planned to get out the back way with our two daughters and walk to Guinea. They came to the front of the house and the back. The first thing they did was to cut my husband's head off. I was covered with his blood. While they were busy in the house, we ran. It took us three weeks to get to a refugee camp in Guinea. We ate leaves and berries. Now we have nothing.

These stories are all too typical for millions of people in Africa over the past four decades. What we were seeing in 1967 was not a country on the way up, but a country on the way down into a vortex of criminalized politics, bad governance, inappropriate foreign aid, and external investment interested only in what it could get out of the country, fast. Eventually, there came rebellion, war, and collapse.

I brought the Blair commission's report with me today. I do not know if you have seen it; it is a real brick. I cannot find much in it to criticize. The problem is not with the list of prescriptions; the problem is whether or not those with the power to change things, both inside and outside of Africa, will do so.

The second book I have with me today is Partners in Development: Report of the Commission on International Development . Former Prime Minister Lester Pearson chaired that commission and the report was published in 1969. This report set the 0.7 per cent of GNP target for ODA, something that we remain woefully short of reaching.

Most of the prescriptions in the Blair report were there in the Pearson report: more aid, smarter aid, better terms of trade, debt forgiveness, agriculture, infrastructure, health, education, foreign investment, and tied aid.

The new elements in the Blair report are its extensive discussions about governance, peace, and security, chapters that might not have been required had we gone even half way to addressing Pearson's recommendations.

I will address four areas that are in urgent need of new and different thinking: emergency assistance, private sector development, governance, and what I call ``learning.''

The global response to emergencies, whether natural or man-made, is in serious need of reform. The Tsunami response is an excellent example of what is wrong. The emergency was serious, but it was no more serious than the on- going emergency in the Congo. In fact, in the Congo the situation is worse. However, the Congo and a dozen others are forgotten emergencies because the media is not there and because governments choose not to be there as well.

The world's response to emergencies is purely voluntary. We pick and choose depending on our budget, how we feel, and the politics of the situation. For example, the Kosovar refugees got cell phones, and the Liberian refugees got half rations.

We would never respond to emergencies in Canada this way, and the world does not handle peacekeeping this way. If troops are sanctioned for a peacekeeping operation, a full budget is committed. It is assessed, and all members of the UN contribute according to an agreed formula. It is time in our thinking about UN reform to reform our own thinking about emergency response. It is time to give the UN a much stronger mandate in this area and create an assessed funding mechanism for serious emergencies. Canada could play an important role in getting such an idea onto the international radar.

When he was finance minister, Prime Minister Martin served on a UN commission that looked at private sector development in Africa. The commission found, among other things, that missing at the centre is a strategy of economic diversification and the development of a small- and medium-sized indigenous business sector. This is missing for many reasons including lack of capital, infrastructure, roads, water, electricity, entrepreneurial talent, rule of law, and the absence of upstream and downstream linkages.

Aid agencies have had a lot of important success with micro-credit and over the years many funds have been created to support large-scale investment and trade in Africa. However, the middle is missing because we do not take the time to understand how complex it is to create a small, productive enterprise. Money alone is not enough; in fact, it may be the least important element.

We need to clarify the Canadian purpose in private sector development. If we remain primarily interested in selling Canadian goods and services, we should remember that poor people, and especially dead people, are not good markets.

As Mr. Barr suggests, Canada has a lot to offer in the development of an African private sector, in the creation of small- and medium-enterprise development, not micro credit operations. These are fine and they are happening, but productive initiatives of the type that employ five or 10 or 15 people, this missing middle can be the real engine of economic growth and of poverty reduction.

In Canada's international policy statement, small-scale enterprise development receives appropriate attention. In putting our ideas into action, however, we will need to go deeper. We need to stay the course and think more about how to build real and lasting relationships in Africa.

We talk at length about governance and Canadian values, but when it comes to specifics, we seem to put a lot of emphasis on an untested Canada corps and the idea that what Africans really need is Canadians to teach them how to be less corrupt.

Canada, in fact, has been involved in a wide range of governance initiatives in Africa. We just do not think of them that way because the word ``governance'' is not lit up in neon lights. Canada, for example, has been a leader in the creation of a Kimberley Process Certification Scheme for rough diamonds. Forty-four countries plus all those in the European Union now have binding legislation covering all trade in rough diamonds. This came in response to NGO research, partly through the organization that I work with, Partnership Africa Canada and a global campaign on blood diamonds, but it needs governments to come to the table to make real changes.

Canada was, and remains, a leader in this process. The Kimberley Process is all about governance of a natural resource and of an industry; and about governmental management, accounting and oversight in the diamond producing countries of Africa and in the diamond trading, polishing and consuming countries of the north. We can do a lot more of this.

Governance is very much a two-way street. If we expect Africans to take us seriously when we talk about corruption and good governance, then we need to look to ourselves in the north as well. Canada could lead, for example, in a forthright examination of how subsidies and protectionism in the north block entrepreneurialism in the south. We could support African countries when they take their complaints to the WTO. European subsidies on milk held back local dairy production in many countries for decades.

Sierra Leone once exported rice, the staple of its diet. Today, however, in a country with disastrous levels of unemployment, it imports most of its rice. The reason is huge U.S. government subsidies to American rice farmers. If this were to change, it could create 5 million person-days of work per year in Sierra Leone.

I will speak to the subject that I call ``learning.'' In the development business we have to learn from our mistakes. CIDA has developed a reputation as one of the slowest bilateral aid agencies in the world. We have more checklists, forms, studies, consultancies and evaluations than any other donor I know. We are pathologically risk averse. CIDA officials are terrified of the Auditor General and the agency, like others, has an exceptionally low tolerance for failure.

If we truly knew how to create jobs in Africa and how to end poverty, war and bad governance, we would have done it 40 years ago. We do not know how to do these things. All of our investments in Africa carry risk. The obligation is not to invest recklessly but to manage risk. We need to learn from failure as well as from success. Hiding failure is a huge mistake but if failure is to be punished, then that is what will happen and the failure to learn from failure will continue.

I began with a personal recollection of 1967 and I will finish with one from earlier this year. In February, I visited Sierra Leone again and had an opportunity to meet with a group of 15-year-old girls and boys in a town called Kambia near the Guinea border. These children are part of a series of clubs established after the 10-year civil war to help children understand their rights and responsibilities, to deal with gender issues, human rights, violence, and HIV/ AIDS.

What made the discussion special was that the children were so articulate, determined and bright. They told me that they hold meetings, attend a children's parliament, they talk to elders and to the police. The children are concerned about child trafficking and they know of several cases. They work on gender-based violence, ``for this generation and the next one.'' One of this children said that the gender violence is a Muslim thing and one of the boys said, ``no, it comes from ignorance.'' He quoted, source unknown but possibly the Koran, ``It is better to train boys than to repair men.''

At the end of the meeting, the children said what they want to be when they leave school, and all of them want to become professionals such as nurses, doctors, accountants, lawyers and human rights workers. No one seemed to doubt for a minute that such jobs will be there for them.

They looked and sounded so much like my students of 38 years ago.

Peter R. Kieran, President, CPCS Transcom, as an individual: Honourable senators, I am the president of two companies involved in relations with Africa. The first of these is CPCS Transcom, started by Canadian Pacific Railways in the 1960s. CPCS has a staff of 30 professionals and provides specialized consulting services primarily to government organizations in Africa and Asia. Our specialization is carrying out privatization and facilitating private investment in transportation infrastructure.

We have played a major role in assisting African governments to bring private management skills and private capital to their railways and ports. We have helped to privatize the railways or the ports in Mali, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Congo, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Madagascar.

The results of privatization of the infrastructure are sharp increases in capacity and traffic through both the railways and ports. This system is working very well, and although it is a huge success story, it receives very little attention. For instance, in the railway sector, the newly privatized railways have increased their traffic by 19 per cent per year compounded since privatization.

I have some thoughts about the Canadian aid program. I have worked for 35 years in the development assistance area and most of that time I have spent in Africa. During this time, certainly I have seen, as Mr. Smillie has seen, many changes and many things that have not changed. Although the lives of people, especially in rural areas, have not changed much, there is a huge, growing, middle class. For example car ownership, which contributes unfortunately to congestion in many cases, is extremely common today in Africa cities where it was not at all 30 years ago.

The Canadian aid program has changed dramatically and is changing even more quickly today. However, I believe that many of the changes are not good public policy.

I differ from some of the comments on the role of debt. In the 1970s, Canada eliminated its loan programs and converted all of its aid to grants. Unfortunately, at the same time, it left in place all of the procurement mechanisms for grants and instead of loaning money to countries who then made their decisions about procurement and who dealt directly with Canadian companies, the Government of Canada took over that function. This contributed directly to a weakening of capacity in the recipient countries and also a weakening of Canadian commercial links with these countries.

I do not know enough about how government works in Canada, but I am astonished with the tendency of almost all new CIDA ministers to review a program on arrival and then announce new sectors of concentration shortly thereafter. Considering that it takes an average of five years to develop one project, this is just mad.

The current changes in policy will switch responsibility for the delivery of aid projects from Canadian NGOs and firms to foreign NGOs, recipient countries and multilateral development institutions.

Enclosed in my submission you will find the latest statement of CIDA's contracts and agreements for Africa and the Middle East, and CIDA's current disbursements in Africa. Some of these projects are just starting and others are almost finished, and the total number of contracts is $955 million. The chart indicates that about 37 per cent of the funds are directed to Canadian NGOs, 15 per cent to the Canadian private sector, 11 per cent to Canadian government agencies, 16 per cent to foreign NGOs, 15 per cent to development institutions, such as the UN or the World Bank, and 5 per cent directly to foreign governments. This represents all active projects today but it is changing quickly. A review of new commitments made in 2003 indicates that the share for Canadian NGOs has fallen from 37 per cent to 20 per cent, and the share for the Canadian private sector has fallen from 15 per cent to 6 per cent.

The untying of aid is a reality today among all progressive donors. Even France and the U.S. are beginning to untie portions of their aid. I wonder whether the Government of Canada has thought through the long-term impacts on Canadian support for the aid program and on the people-to-people contacts that traditionally enrich the lives of so many Canadians and our friends abroad.

The last trend I would like to speak to is the transformation of our aid program from a development focus to that of a charity organization dispensing money to well-deserving recipients. We have replaced the old objective of sustainable programs characterized by the adage usually attributed to Mao, ``Teach a man to fish and he will care for himself for life,'' with the generous urge to provide medicine for the sick and money to support government programs. This may be aid but I do not believe it is sustainable.

I am a strong believer in the adage of ``trade not aid,'' and my second love is a business called Giraffe The Africa Store. For over 30 years, my wife Betty has managed Giraffe, which has retail outlets on Rue St. Denis in Montreal and on Clarence Street in Ottawa. Our business is importing and retailing high-quality, hand-crafted products from Africa.

It provides approximately 150 equivalent full-time jobs in Africa. It is a marginal business, paying low salaries here and operating at break even, but it has survived for 30 years. It provides a window on African culture in Canada and productive work for many craftspeople in Africa.

Trade requires both exports and imports. There are no government programs that provide assistance to importers from developing countries, but if developing countries cannot sell their products to us, they will not have resources to buy from us.

Since 9/11, 100 per cent of Giraffe's shipments from Africa have been inspected at the port-of-entry into Canada, at a cost to Giraffe of approximately $1,000 per container, plus extensive damage. This is excessive and unwarranted and far exceeds the savings from the generous reduction in import duties extended to the least developed countries. Canada customs should place more emphasis on risk assessment and historical experience with importers instead of inspecting all goods from suspect countries in Africa.

The original request mentioned recommendations, so at the risk of appearing slightly absurd and giving recommendations in seven minutes, I do have a few thoughts.

One recommendation is to reduce ministerial powers to redirect CIDA's areas of concentration. The second recommendation is to create a new agency under the Minister for International Co-operation to provide development assistance loans that will emphasize sustainable development and the creation of productive capacity. I believe that the discipline of making repayments forces a better selection of projects and the recipients understand that the money has to be put to productive use.

Canada should maintain a significant component of Canadian content in the aid program to Africa through Canadian NGOs, private companies and individuals. I believe that Canada customs should eliminate charges to shippers for security-related inspections.

Finally, as a last item in terms of the untying of aid, Canada supports an organization within Foreign affairs called the Office of Liaison with International Financial Institutions. I suggest replacing that office with an office of liaison with development assistance agencies to reflect the growing importance of untied bilateral aid. Such an agency would assist Canadian companies to compete internationally and to have contacts with development assistance agencies such as USAID and DFIT.

George Ayittey, Professor, Economics, American University, as an individual: Senators, thank you for this opportunity to testify before your committee.

I would like to point out that I received my postgraduate education in Canada, although I now live in the United States. I was a beneficiary of CIDA's scholarship program. I went to the University of Western Ontario in the 1970s, and then I returned to Ghana. I came back to Canada, went to University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, got my Ph.D., but could not return to Ghana because of the military coup. I went to the U.S., and it took us almost 20 years before we were able to remove the tyrannical military regime and install a democracy in Ghana.

My colleagues and fellow witnesses have testified regarding aid programs, and especially the Canadian aid programs to Africa. The consensus is that Western aid to Africa has been ineffective, and there is a lot of blame to pass around.

My colleagues have indicated the problems from the donor side. I would like to talk about problems from the African side.

Everyone knows that the Marshall Plan was successful in Germany because the Germans had the institutional and human capacity to utilize aid. This is not the case in Africa, where they have neither the institutional capacity nor the human capacity. Furthermore, Canada cannot design aid programs to reduce poverty and expect them to work in an environment of civil war and corruption. Aid programs cannot exist in an environment where there is no rule of law.

Western aid programs are hobbled by two fundamental problems, the first one is the failure to distinguish between African leaders or government and the people. Quite often Westerners do not want to criticize black African leaders for fear of being labelled racist. This overt sensitivity to racial issues does not help us in Africa, because it inadvertently supports misguided policies.

Second, Western policies towards aid programs to Africa have been leader centred. For example, during the Cold War, the West was seduced by euphonious verbiage or rhetoric of African leaders. Anyone who said he was pro-West or anti-communist suddenly unlocked the floodgates of Western aid. Mobutu was one simple example. Never mind the neo-communists or oppressive regimes that they had established in their own countries, nobody paid much attention, especially not to the people.

Naive Westerners assume that the best way of helping the African people is by handing money over to the governments, upon the assumption that the institution called ``government'' assists in many African countries. This is not so. What we have is a mafia state or a ``vampire state,'' which has been hijacked by crooks and bandits, who use the instruments of the state to enrich themselves. They are cronies and tribesmen and they exclude everyone else. The richest people in Africa are heads of state, and ministers, and quite often, the chief bandit is the head of state himself.

These people take over every key institution of the state. They take over the military, the judiciary, and the media and subvert these institutions to serve their interests. Rule of law does not exist for the people. Transparency does not exist for the people. What happens over time is those who are excluded eventually rise up and remove the ruling vampire elites. This is why Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and now Togo are imploding.

The solution is to reform the state by implementing political, economic and intellectual reform, but the leaders are not interested. If you tell them to reform the system, they take one-step forward, three steps back, and flip to land on the bank account, much ado about nothing. They are not interested in reform.

If you ask them to cut government expenditures, they will set up a ministry of less government expenditure. In Ghana there were 5,000 ghost names on the payroll of the minister of education and when the Dutch government told the government to remove these ghost names, Ghana demanded aid. In fact, it has gotten to the point when you ask them to move a foot they demand aid. They are not serious about reform.

The tragedy is if they do not reform the system, more African countries will blow. Right now, the candidates for implosion are as I have stated in my testimony, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Chad, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Central African Republic. They will all blow.

What are we going to do?

Time and time again, we sit helpless and watch these countries blow, and then we come in with blankets and high protein biscuits. This is what we did when we abandoned Somalia, for example. We stick around until another African country blows, and then we parachute into the other African country.

Mr. Chairman, the time has come to empower the African people, not the corrupt governments. The main occupation of the people is in agriculture, and as one of the witnesses said, that is an area that CIDA has ignored.

NEPAD seeks $64 billion from Western investments. The fact is, the resources that Africa needs can be found in Africa itself. In fact, the OAU indicated that corruption alone cost Africa $148 billion a year.

NEPAD seeks $64 billion. Tony Blair wants to increase aid to Africa by $50 billion. Africa's begging bowl leaks horribly. If African leaders could curb corruption, they would find all the money. I am not saying that Canada should not help, but you cannot pour water into a leaky bucket. The responsibility for plugging these leaks resides with African leaders and governments.

There are other crises. The time is limited in terms of resolving the humanitarian crisis. There is a way to bring an end to these senseless wars in Africa. Each time an African country blows up, Togo or Ivory Coast, as examples, well- intentioned Western donors ask the combatants to sit down at the negotiating table to hammer out an agreement. That is the Western approach. It does not work in Africa, because often when these combatants get together to hammer out an agreement, they squabble over positions in government. Then, since no one is satisfied, they go back to the bush and start fighting again.

There is an indigenous African approach that often helps and works. In this approach, when there is a crisis in the village, all the parties are involved. The chief comes, the combatants sit down and then, the most important thing, the civil society, those who are directly or indirectly affected by the conflict, are also invited. In all the peace accords in Africa, civil society is not invited and that must change.

The fourth problem that ravages Africa is HIV/AIDS. The Western donors have been helpful, but their focus has been on treatment. We are dealing with a disease that has no cure; therefore, we must make every effort to prevent the spread of the disease. This is one particular area I will urge the Canadian government to look into. To prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, you need to involve the traditional leaders, the rulers and the African church. We must focus on this problem.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, there have been some recent changes in Canadian aid programs, as indicated by our first witness. There has been a reduction in the proportion of aid going to the private sector in Africa. It is disturbing. Also, the proportion of aid going to African governments has been increased. This is going in the wrong direction. Canadians see that civil society organizations can play a greater role.

There is another resource, the African exiles in Canada and North America, who can also play a significant role in terms of devising better aid programs to Africa.

The Chairman: That is a very stimulating presentation.

Senator De Bané: I would like to address my question to Mr. Kieran.

Mr. Kieran, you are very blunt, candid and honest in your document and I would like to be very candid with you.

You say, ``I do not know enough about how government works in Canada,'' but on the fifth line you say, ``This is just mad.''

On the last page, in reference to your recommendations you say that we should ``reduce ministerial powers to redirect CIDA's areas of concentration.''

Do you know, Mr. Kieran, that the cabinet chooses those countries of concentration?

Are you suggesting the reduction of ministerial powers, which means that a new government elected by the people of this country should not have the right to review those choices?

This is a business view of the world that maybe works for CP, but it is not how a democratic government works. A new government is entitled to review policies.

Your first recommendation is to reduce ministerial powers. That recommendation is beyond me.

Mr. Kieran: The selection of the concentration of countries is the opposite of what I am saying. This is a policy that has been discussed for 25 years. It took years and years of careful discussion and very broad consultation. However, I have noticed that every time there is a new minister, he or she comes up with an emphasis on gender, on hunger or on children. You have a program where it takes years to develop a project. A new minister comes in and says, ``Okay, I want to focus on gender.'' He or she does not say, ``In five years we will have many gender programs.'' They want to see them right now. The constant change in direction is destroying the capability of that agency. The minister for transportation never arrives and says, ``Let us rip up the roads. We will have just railways to move people.'' In other sectors of the Canadian economy, I do not see ministers changing direction sharply every time there is a new minister. These are ministers that change every few years.

Senator De Bané: This is a caricature of what goes on at CIDA. First, the minister of CIDA does not make those decisions; the whole government makes them. The minister of CIDA implements the policy decided upon by the government.

Second, it is not the minister who says, ``We are moving out of roads and we are going to railways.'' It does not work that way. The donor countries meet with the World Bank and they decide on the different strategies together.

You may have a view of things at CP that is very nice, but, believe me, this is not how those policies are developed.

Senator Andreychuk: Mr. Kieran, would it help if there were a legislative framework? I am inclined to agree that there have been many reviews. CIDA stops when they review and review. They are not working at their objectives. I am not sure whether it goes through a cabinet process, but it does change, even within one government, when ministers are moved around.

The tendency for ministers has been to put his or her own stamp on it, whether the emphasis is on gender or on poverty. It seems just like an emphasis, but I know when you are out in the field it is more than an emphasis. All of the sudden, you have to review and readjust your programs, and a great deal of effort goes into these changes.

If there was a legislative framework for CIDA, which would have to be brought to Parliament, would it be helpful?

Mr. Kieran: That sounds like an excellent suggestion. In Denmark, I believe, all aid programs and projects actually come before Parliament.

I am willing to accept your criticism; it could be that I am wrong. It is not just the change in government, but also that it takes so long to get these things done. For ministers to try the change direction, it is very difficult. It means a tremendous amount of activity, much of which, unfortunately, is name changes. They juggle the words to describe things, often in an attempt to save their projects.

Your suggestion might be a good one.

Mr. Barr: I would like to come to the aid of some of the useful elements in Mr. Kieran's comments. It is true that aid and socio-economic development, especially in the context of developing country economies, is necessarily a long-term process that needs constancy and clarity of purpose. It is exactly for that reason that Senator Andreychuk's idea is of such great value.

The leaders of the opposition recently proposed in a letter to the prime minister the idea of fixing the purpose of aid spending to poverty reduction. They said they were ready to be supportive of aid legislation that would enhance Parliamentary accountability, and would fix the purpose of aid spending. That in turn would ensure the delivery of aid in the framework consistent with Canada's human rights obligations and deliver it in a manner respectful of the perspectives of those living in poverty. That would be a giant step forward for a file which has for 40 years gone unguided by a legislative framework.

It does not make sense that Canada would not have such a framework. Mr. Kieran is correct; there are a number of European countries that have this type of framework. DFID in the U.K. has it and Sweden has a brilliant framework. Many countries are guided in this way.

The enhanced Parliamentary accountability and clarity that would come out of it would certainly increase public support for Canada's aid spending.

Canadians are remarkably supportive of Canada's aid spending, but the very Canadians who are so supportive harbour grave questions about the efficacy of aid. It is because of the imperative nature of the need that Canadians push forward nonetheless and say they will support the file. However, they would do so more robustly if there were a framework that provides clarity in spending.

Senator Andreychuk, you have made a terrific suggestion and one which ought to be supported. The Canadian Council for International Co-operation strongly supports this idea.

Senator Andreychuk: Mr. Ayittey, you have been highly critical, and I agree that the people need to be involved.

Why have you not put any emphasis on NEPAD?

We know the leaders topped it down, but there is an opportunity where African parliamentarians are fighting for accountability. For once, they have a framework where they can point to that document and have something tangible to make their leaders accountable. Before that, it was very difficult.

Do you put any trust in NEPAD?

Mr. Ayittey: No, I do not, because we have seen so many of these grand initiatives in the past. In fact, when the leaders go to summits, they announce the grand initiatives of which the Lagos plan is an example. It seems every 10 years or so the international community comes up with a grand plan to save Africa.

In 1985, the United Nations came up with a special session on Africa. A decade later they sought a special initiative to raise $25 billion for Africa. They make these announcements and at the end of the summit everyone goes home and forgets about the plans. Now we have NEPAD.

Senator Andreychuk: NEPAD was the initiation of African leaders. Up to that point, every one of the plans had an international or northern flavour. NEPAD is an African initiative. The Blair commission is a response to it and it is of the old school.

Mr. Ayittey: They are trying to sell it as an African initiative. When it was started, four African leaders worked together and crafted NEPAD without consulting the African people, civil society groups, or other African Parliaments. Many Africans heard about NEPAD from the Western media. They backtracked and tried to sell NEPAD.

Fine, they made a mistake at the beginning, but we have to commend them for coming up with an Africa initiative. However, you cannot call it an ``African initiative'' because the leaders themselves said that the Marshall Plan was the model for NEPAD.

How can you call something African when the Marshal Plan was its model?

NEPAD seeks $64 billion in investment from the West. As I indicated in my testimony, the resources Africa needs can be found in Africa itself. That is what the AU itself said last August. Corruption alone costs Africa $148 billion per year. Obasanjo, the leader of Nigeria, said that since independence, African leaders have stolen $140 billion from their people. If these leaders can invest one-half of that loot in Africa, things will turn around.

We do not want to be in a position where we are always asking the West to do something for us when the leaders our own leaders are not doing anything for our people.

The other problem with NEPAD is they came up with this peer review mechanism. These dictators are going to stand in judgment of other dictators. That does not make sense. If there has to be accountability, it is the people who will have to hold their leaders accountable. This is why in my comments I indicated that we should empower the African people. The African people talk about these ideas, except they are powerless in effecting change. Change that comes from within is sustainable.

How do we empower the African people? I indicated in my comments that we need to abandon the leader-centered model and focus on an approach which is based upon institutions.

Six institutions are critical and the first is an independent central bank. The World Bank should not loan money to any government in Africa that does not have an independent central bank.

The second institution is an independent and free media. Radio is the most powerful medium; it is the medium of the masses in Africa. In much of Africa, the state controls the media. Only eight out of the 54 African countries have a free media.

The third institution that we need is an independent judiciary for the rule of law. We can preach accountability and corruption all we want, but if we do not have an independent media and judiciary, we will not make any progress in Africa. Those are the two most effective anecdotes against corruption.

We also need an independent electoral commission, an efficient civil service and neutral and professional Armed Forces.

In the recent elections in Ukraine, the people protested the results. Ghana had the most peaceful and calm elections in all of Africa's history because all the institutions that I listed were in place; they had an independent media, judiciary and neutral and professional Armed Forces.

The Ukraine did not have an independent media or an independent electoral commission. That is why the elections stalled. This is why it is critical that Africa has an independent electoral commission.

If you look at the history of Africa, the implosion or destruction of an African country always begins with a dispute over the electoral process. In Ivory Coast and Togo there was a dispute over the electoral process. It is absolutely critical that when we hold elections in Africa, they are free and fair. In order to guarantee free and fair elections you need an independent electoral commission.

The Chairman: Mr. Ayittey, Uganda, with a population of 25 million people, more or less, has 70 cabinet ministers.

I have been in Uganda a few times. This number of 70 must be, and this is a question to you, a question of tribalism and regionalism. You have to put this person in and all these people in order to keep the place stable. This was my only justification that I could come up with for 70 cabinet ministers that were taking cabinet ministers salaries. I thought that it had to be because of tribal circumstances, or regional circumstances or interests. What is your response to that sort of thing?

Mr. Ayittey: Let me say that your hunch is partially correct that tribalism has something to do with the large number of cabinet ministers. The basic problem in Africa is the vampire state. The state is the problem. The bureaucracy is overgrown and part of the reason is tribalism. Insecure African leaders surround themselves with members of their own tribes. They put their own tribes in key government positions. When they come into power, they also bring along with them a whole retinue of their tribesmen and cronies, et cetera. That is part of the reason.

The second reason is that in Africa if you want to be rich you go into the state sector. That in itself attracts a whole lot of people. Everyone wants to go into this state bureaucracy.

The third reason is political patronage. The leaders reward their supporters with posts in the state sector. That is why Uganda has 70 cabinet ministers. In Ghana we have 88 cabinet ministers and deputy ministers with a population of less than 20 million. The ministry of finance has about three deputy ministers. We have a huge state sector, and a huge bureaucracy that eats up revenue. The tax base is small and there are huge government expenditures and this creates a constant deficit. This is how they appeal for aid. Uganda's budget is 70 per cent dependent upon aid. Ghana's budget is 60 per cent dependent upon aid.

The solution is to slice the state expenditures and bureaucracy, but there is some underhandedness especially because of the adjustment program. If you have the military regimes to cut government expenditures, they are not going to touch military budgets. Civil servants will not put projects in place that will affect their own salaries and expenditures. They push the adjustment. They cut education, road maintenance, and health care and these are the programs that affect the poor.

Senator Mahovlich: I want to direct my question to Mr. Smillie. He mentioned 38 years ago that he was over teaching in Africa for CUSO. Whatever happened to CUSO? Was it a total failure?

Mr. Smillie: No.

Senator Mahovlich: Did we do any good?

Mr. Smillie: Yes, I think it did a lot of good. CUSO is still in existence but when you compare the cost of sending a person over to the cost of drilling a well it makes more sense to dig the well.

Senator Mahovlich: My nephew was in the Congo for two years. It was very difficult for him. He was a drafting teacher. Do you think that his work had a positive effect?

Mr. Smillie: I think so. After I was a volunteer, I ran the CUSO program in Nigeria. Often volunteers would come and after a couple of months they would become disillusioned. They would say, ``I am just teaching French or English and this is not really development.'' I would say to them, ``Well, would it be development if you were teaching school in Mississauga?''

Try to remember when you went to school how many teachers really made a difference in your life. Where there one, two, or three? Maybe you are that teacher for one student in that class, and maybe you should not think you have come here to save the world. I think that is part of our problem. We all think we have something really big to give, when in fact we are fairly ordinary people struggling with all kinds of problems. That is what I was saying about aid itself. We are learning things, but we need to learn a lot more. A little humility does not hurt and those teachers did a lot of good things, maybe not for every kid in the class, but for one or two they made a real difference.

Senator Mahovlich: You mentioned that the African church should get involved. Are the churches controlled by the governments?

Mr. Ayittey: No. I was talking about the involvement of churches in the control and prevention of HIV/AIDS disease. If an African country is destroyed, the only two institutions left standing are the indigenous tribal institutions and the church. The church has ways of reaching the people and if you want to alter behaviour, they need to be involved. The church has played a very instrumental role in the media, for example, in reaching out to its flock. The church is a resource or tool that we can use in Africa.

Senator Di Nino: First, I would like to applaud the witnesses, whether we agree with them or not. I tend to agree with them more than maybe some of my colleagues.

The world has been sending aid to Africa for a long, long time. I do not think it would be unfair to suggest that we have failed. I believe that as has been suggested by some of you, just throwing money at the African states is not necessarily going to solve the problem. I appreciate some of the candid comments made by the witnesses.

Care, Foster Parent Plan, Planned Parenthood and World Vision seem many programs in many of the African countries. They opined that the efficiency in spending aid money in the partnerships of NGOs and local organizations is more effective as opposed to aid that is sent to the governments or government agencies.

Could someone verify that those comments are correct or do you disagree with that comment?

Mr. Smillie: Mr. Barr, as head of CCIC, represents all of those organizations and a lot more, so I am sure he has a comment. I think NGOs were the pioneers, not just in Africa but also in other countries, on gender, on micro-credit and on non-formal primary education. They were leaders in the environment. They have been leaders in all kinds of things that we now take for granted. Governments picked up a lot of these ideas. NGOs are very good at experimenting, innovating, and in some cases with bigger NGOs, taking them to scale. Between 1967 and through the 1970s and 1980s, we did many good things in Africa.

Africa today has an indigenous civil society coming up. It was there in the 1960s but we did not see it or notice it. It was there when I was there, but we did not see it. Making partnerships and developing real long-term relationships over time is going to be very important.

In answer to your question, yes, they are doing something important, yes.

Mr. Ayittey: I think Canada was one of the first donor countries to ship the major proportion of its aid to CCSOs, Canadian Civil Society Organizations, which was very good. However, Africa is a very difficult environment in which to operate. Of course, when you form partnerships with the NGOs in Africa itself that is even better. The NGOs can respond far more quickly and they know the needs of the people.

I want to emphasize that the civil society needs a space in which to operate or organize, and that space must guarantee some basic freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of movement. You do not have that when a government controls and monitors the media and everything that you say.

Civil society has no space in Zimbabwe, for example. We have not done anything because Mugabe controls the media. We have not done anything to wrestle the control out of this murderous dictator.

Let us not be presumptuous and think we have the solutions and the Africans do not know anything about how to help themselves. They are aware of their problems but they do not have the power to implement the solutions. Radio will empower them, and as I indicated, Radio Free Africa is the best gift Canada can ever give to Africa.

Senator Di Nino: I have a lot of sympathy for the people of Zimbabwe, but we cannot invade the country. There have been attempts, and I suggest to you that we probably agree that the attempts have not been strong enough to deal with some of these problems in Africa. Short of sending in troops, it is a very difficult problem to solve. I like your idea of Radio Free Africa.

Do you have any other recommendations for us? What else can we put in our report to promote some of your thoughts?

Mr. Ayittey: I have written a book called Africa Unchained , The Blueprint for Development and you will find many of my solutions in it. I would like to leave a copy of that book for you. Mugabe really controls Zimbabwe, controls almost all the levels of power. There is no space for even the opposition or even for civil society to operate. There are two approaches. One approach is to lean on the regional leaders so they can put pressure on Mugabe so that he can reform. Another approach is to lean on the Organization of African Unity, which came up with NEPAD. NEPAD has a peer review mechanism.

When there was the crisis in Togo, the current chair of the EAU, led an effort to strip the son of Togo's former leader who died. The AEU came up and said they were not going to stand up for the military takeover in Togo. Everyone applauded them because we expected the EAU finally to take a strong stand against what was going on in Togo.

Unfortunately, they have not taken such a stand on Zimbabwe. You cannot say there is a regime change through military revision. That is totally out. One possibility is to buy out that regime. If you look at when Somalia blew up back in 1994 Canadians were there as part of a humanitarian mission. The humanitarian mission in Somalia cost $3.5 billion. They could have spoken the language of the regime; money, and bought them out. In fact, the United States employed this option in Panama. It is a serious option that needs to be considered. Canada might be the best country to pursue this option because Canada is viewed in a much friendlier sort of perspective than other Western countries.

Senator Di Nino: You are talking about the effective use of the aid money that we send. Obviously, Mr. Ayittey has some very strong opinions.

Would any of the other three witnesses have any comments as to how our aid Canadian aid to Africa could be more effective than how we are using it today?

Mr. Barr: I want to comment on Mr. Ayittey's idea of governments buying out other governments. I would be inclined to buy out dictators less and support civil society more.

The great strength in Professor's Ayittey's comments is in the terrain of promoting space for civil society. It is there that you get accountability.

If you ask is there one thing that we can do in development that will work, the answer is ``no,'' there is not. No one thing will work. What has to work is a whole series of things together. The independent institutions have to be there. We must replace the vampire state with a development state. None of it will work without active citizenry, without civil society, a hectoring even demanding civil society that creates a context in which accountability is a norm. There has to be a public environment around poverty eradication targets that makes governments accountable to achieving those targets instead of the kind of asset stripping that frequently occurs.

We have heard a little bit about civil society organizations and non-governmental organizations. One of the key functions of non-governmental organizations in the developed world is to function in an accompaniment fashion as partners of NGOs and civil society groups and citizen organizations. They must function in developing country economies where part of the space created for civil society organizations comes from the autonomy of the flow of resources through northern partners to those groups.

Part of the necessary ingredient for effective development is the understanding that we must endure this process in order to achieve the desired goal. Without hard work, we will have failures of accountability, performance and aid. This learning curve that Mr. Smillie has talked about will go ever, ever upwards, and we will never achieve the real lesson in all of this. All of the components must work together to ensure success.

Senator Downe: Mr. Smillie, in your testimony you said, ``CIDA has developed a reputation as one of the slowest, bilateral aid agencies in the world.''

Do you have any suggestions for improvement that this committee might consider in respect of CIDA?

Mr. Smillie: The problems have been there for a long time but became particularly bad around 1993 when the Auditor General had a look at CIDA's programming. The audit was a program audit and I think CIDA invited it. It was not to look at whether they bought the cars that they said they would but whether the cars were useful.

It happened at a time when the United States government was becoming involved in this whole results revolution. The Auditor General told CIDA that it was not adequately paying attention to results. CIDA quickly went from being a learning organization to a results-based organization. It happened in about one month but it has taken almost 10 years to figure out the results of that change. There is a real problem with this new results-based process.

In the old days there would be a teacher-training program, for example, to improve education and that was evaluated. That is fine as far as it goes but in a results regime, you look at the impact of that training program on the teachers and on the children. Often, that could not be measured. You could measure the training program but if you want to know what happened to the kids, you had to return one or two years later, and you might not get the kind of attribution that you had hoped to get.

The problem with aid agencies — and CIDA is not alone in this because NGOs and other governments face the same problem — is that people want to have answers right away. They want to know what was accomplished. Thus, you are driven back to evaluating the teacher-training program and not the long-term results on the children.

Rather than wait for the frightening day when the Auditor General does the audit, it might be a good idea to engage the Auditor General in a discussion about results, particularly where CIDA is concerned. I do not know whether this would work for other government departments but for international development, where attribution is so difficult to prove and where the results, especially in longer-term social and political development will not happen in the life of the project, it might work. We need to have a different way of looking at this process. Certainly, we need to be able to measure it and evaluate it, but we have to get away from the tyranny of the project and of this immediate accountability for everything that happens. If we could reduce some of the systems, streamline them better and have a talk with the Auditor General about what results mean in a development context, then we might begin to improve and get somewhere.

Senator Downe: Your argument, as I understand it, is that the Auditor General and her officials do not have the sensitivity that the measurement of foreign aid is different from the measurement of the success of something for the public works department.

Mr. Smillie: I do not know much about Public Works and Government Services Canada but CIDA, in the last few years, has achieved fairly good marks from the Auditor General. The exercise in 1993 was not hugely critical of CIDA but government departments are so sensitive to the comments of the Auditor General, and even more so today, I would imagine, that they try to anticipate everything and they try to have more and more checks. Thus, they end up with projects, as Mr. Kieran suggested, that are five years old before they get off the ground. They are hardly able to do what they were intended to do in the first place because departments are so nervous of outsiders coming in and being critical.

Senator Downe: Your point is that a good report from the Auditor General pertaining to CIDA is not necessarily a good thing for foreign aid because there is different criterion.

Mr. Smillie: I think they may be measuring the wrong things and may have the wrong time frame in mind.

Senator Downe: With the possible exception of putting the Auditor General in charge of foreign aid, that is good advice.

The Chairman: The Auditor General has offered to come before the committee to discuss CIDA and the passport problem. The committee's problem is finding the time to include the Auditor General on our list of witnesses.

Mr. Kieran: Mr. Smillie mentioned earlier that this is a highly risky and difficult business. We are talking about designing programs that take a long time to happen and about implementing programs thousands of miles away in an economy that we understand imperfectly. Governments and other factors change quickly and civil servants are, by nature, very risk averse. If they are punished when things go wrong, they become more risk averse and it takes even longer for things to happen. Risks need to be analyzed. Similar to the private sector, you have to drill that well, even though you might hit success in only one in 10 attempts. That does not mean that when you do not hit oil you lose your job. In a risk environment, you take risks and understand those risks.

Senator Andreychuk: Mr. Smillie, you put the emphasis on the Auditor General. I think civil servants are somewhat risk averse because they are accountable to too many masters — the public, the private sector, the opposition, the ministers, et cetera.

Is it only the Auditor General or is it the exposure of the last decade of aid that went wrong and the comments of opposition members?

That is why I am leaning towards a legal, Parliamentary framework for aid, but you have singled out the Auditor General.

Mr. Smillie: The Auditor General would be one way to reduce some of the bureaucracy and the consultants that trip over one another to ensure that projects are okay before the money is spent.

You are right when you say that the court of public opinion is very strong and there are only two kinds of stories about foreign aid. There is the feel-good story of the little old lady who has raised some money and gone off to Cambodia and founded an orphanage. There is also the horror story involving a horrible scandal. There is not a great deal of regular intelligent analysis and presenting of aid programs.

About five years ago, UNDP suggested that governments should spend about 2 per cent of their aid programs on informing their public so that they have permission to spend and to do things that may be a little risky. In that way, people will understand when things go wrong that it was not because of stupidity but because there was a calculated risk that was worth taking. In Canada we do not spend 2 per cent to inform the public. I think it is about 0.02 per cent. We have a tiny public affairs budget in CIDA, and there is not much money for NGOs.

How do NGOs raise money to inform the public? The public does not give money for that but they give money to help people. Trying to explain the aid program to people is quite difficult but, certainly, CIDA could do more of that.

The Chairman: I was in Africa when the developmentalists arrived in 1959, 1960 and 1961, and once in a while, I go to various parts of Africa. The conversation that I heard in 1959-60 seems to be the same conversation that I am hearing today. It would seem that little progress has been made, although I am not saying that things have not been done. Someone once took me to see a stove in Spanish Guinea.

I thought that the people here could build that stove. It was a very modest project.

During 45 years, we have accomplished some things, yet we are having the same conversation. The president of Uganda informed me that 86 per cent of the people of Uganda are involved in agriculture. That percentage is likely constant in much of sub-Saharan Africa. We have heard evidence that Kenya, for example, exported agriculture products in 1960, and now imports them.

We have received the Blair report. I cannot say that I have read the brick, because it is a pretty daunting book. Governments say they have to spend all this money or do the various things that have been repeated by the witnesses, but the same governments compete with African farmers with subsidized produce. The cotton scandal affects millions of people. There is the same conversation about governance, infrastructure and education, but it seems to me that if you do not deal with what 86 per cent of the people do, you will never raise the standard of living. Our conversations must involve agriculture.

I do not want to go on because I know it is late. I cannot help but make that observation.

Mr. Ayittey: We have been talking about developing since independence. The African economy is made up of three sectors. There is the traditional sector and the modern sector, and stuck in between them is an informal sector. The modern sector is the abode of the elites, which is comprised of the educated, of which I am one. The modern sector that is lost and dysfunctional and all of the African problems emanate from this sector. They spill over into the traditional and informal sectors.

The real people of Africa, more than 80 per cent of them, are in the informal and the traditional sectors. You cannot develop Africa by ignoring those two sectors. However, that is what the elites did. You cannot develop the traditional and informal sectors if you do not understand how they operate. That is why we are stuck.

Much of our post-colonial development strategy was to build factories and industries in the modern sector. We neglected the traditional sector because we thought it was backward and primitive. The traditional sector is where the agriculture is and where the real people of Africa live.

That is why Africa has been sliding back. That is why Africa cannot feed itself. We neglected agriculture. Agriculture, to us, was an inferior form of occupation. We wanted the industries and the modern high-tech gadgets, not the primitive donkeys, the hoses and cutlasses. That is why we cannot feed ourselves.

Today, Africa spends $18.9 billion to import food. That is about the same amount of foreign aid that Africa gets from all sources.

The Chairman: Thank you very much. Honourable senators, we will suspend for five minutes while we clear the room. We must deal with a report from the Steering Committee. Given the political situation, I would like to do it now.

I want to thank our witnesses, who have been tremendously informative.

I wanted to tell everyone that the Steering Committee had a meeting on Thursday, May 5. The next meeting is scheduled for Thursday, May 12. The items are very quick.

We dealt with a New York City delegation. The delegation will be Senators Stollery, Di Nino, Andreychuk, De Bané, Eyton and Mahovlich. It is under control. We are saving some money.

In terms of the international policy statement, the Steering Committee agreed — we all know the realities of the political situation, but we have to keep going — that we would meet between July 12-14 to hear witnesses on the international policy statement. The draft report will be examined on a later day. It may not happen.

With regard to the passport office, the Steering Committee agreed that the chair will write to the Auditor General to inform her that the committee will attempt to examine her report on the passport office later in the fall.

There is a Saudi delegation arriving next week. We agreed to accept the invitation to meet a delegation from Saudi Arabia. The clerk will send a memo to that effect. I have spoken to Senator Prud'homme to see if he would like to take charge of the delegation.

The Steering Committee also agreed that I attend the Wilton Park Conference that I go to annually, as you know, entitled ``Prospects for Concluding the Doha Development Agenda Trade Negotiations,'' which is July 18-21, 2005.

The next meeting is Thursday May 12. Senator Downe, this is your project.

Senator Downe: If we can, we should invite Bono, if he is here in Ottawa. He is very informative on the Africa file. He is impressive. He uses his celebrity to meet everyone in the world from His Holiness the Pope to President Bush. He is very well spoken. I have his address.

The Chairman: We are working on Bono.

Senator Corbin: When do we see the Saudi delegation?

The Chairman: That delegation is scheduled for May 17 and May 18.

Senator Corbin: Who do they represent?

Mr. François Michaud, Clerk of the Committee: It is a delegation from the Shura Council, which is the Upper House in Saudi Arabia. The members of that council are appointed by the king.

The Chairman: We are sending a memo to everyone. The latest information I have on the Saudi delegation is that the House of Commons is having a meeting with them. This is as of 3 p.m. this afternoon and I have asked Senator Prud'homme if he could take them to lunch and other members who want to be involved.

Senator Andreychuk: The Standing Senate Committee on Anti-terrorism and the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights were approached to meet with them. They were structuring that for Monday, but the latest word this afternoon was that they are not arriving until late Monday. It is a moving target.

The Chairman: It is a work-in-progress. I am giving you the report. Would you like to adopt the report of the Steering Committee?

Senator Di Nino: Agreed.

The Chairman: I will adjourn until tomorrow at 3 p.m. We do have the President of Mali with four of his ministers. They are supposed to be here at 3:05 p.m. That is the information that I have. I hope that everyone will turn out.

Senator Downe: Is there time for the research bureau to do a briefing report? Will that be before the meeting?

The Chairman: Yes.

Senator Downe: Thank you.

The committee adjourned.