APRM: Time to address Government and Civil Society concerns
The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is a complex system that is still finding its way. Lessons learnt from Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa where the peer review has been conducted, show that the realities of human nature and politics mean that participants in peer review will have to contend with a wide range of problems including defensiveness, ambition and a variety of apprehensions by both government and civil society.
APRM is, however, most extraordinary for the opportunity that it presents to civil society. It has important ramifications for African diplomacy, aid and investment levels, and the long-term evolution of political and economic thought on the continent. Against this background, it is imperative that civil society and governments study how best to use the APRM opportunity to catalyse positive political and economic reform. APRM being a political process, fears and apprehensions are inevitable. It therefore goes without saying that the first step in planning should involve assessing and addressing the kinds of concerns that various groups may have.
Governments and civil society will inevitably approach APRM with different assumptions, particularly about what the other might do with the process. All parties will not necessarily agree that the concerns of others are fully justified, but it is crucial to accept that both government and civil society have concerns about how the other will act in APRM. The first lesson learnt from the early APRM countries is that Civil society will inevitably fear and criticise perceived government domination, while Government will inevitably fear that civil society and opposition politicians will not use APRM constructively. In both Ghana and Kenya, angry debates erupted, threatening to derail the process. Such concerns have to be addressed lest they cause real damage. And instead of APRM helping build trust and catalyse change, it can become just another battleground in which the same old political forces carry on the contest that is played out in other arenas.
As stated above, the early APRM countries highlighted a variety of civil society concerns surrounding peer review. The first grows from the political history of recent decades. The 1990 African Charter on Popular Participation in Development and Transformation – one of the standards cited by the APRM – stated thus: “The political context of socio-economic development has been characterised by an over-centralisation of power and impediments to the effective participation of the overwhelming majority of the people.” There is no gainsaying that few countries have fully overcome that legacy and it will affect the perspective of any civil society body asked to participate in APRM.
To understand the point better, it is worth asking at this juncture, what specifically worried civil society in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Mauritius and South Africa. In every country, three main clusters of concern developed. The biggest area of concern was over how the governing council would be chosen, including the number of seats allocated to government and civil society.
Civil society in these four countries expressed strong concern that government would either numerically dominate the council with government officials or would fill it with civil society representatives considered to be government friendly. Civil society also expressed concern about whether government unilaterally named civil society representatives or allowed civil society to nominate its own participants. It is noteworthy that these issues have consistently sparked complaints yet they have not been adequately addressed by the written guidance from the APRM secretariat.
It follows that another lesson learnt is that for APRM to realize its goals, governments must take time to communicate, genuinely consult before taking decisions, and run transparent processes at every level of APRM. For consulting about decisions after taking them damages trust far more than not consulting. The public expects to be widely consulted on all parts of APRM before such decisions are taken. Such consultations revolve around how the process will work, how the governing body will be led, how the report will be written and what the report says.
A second cluster of concerns relate to how the research should be conducted, how and by whom the report should be actually written and edited and whether text fairly reflects the views of all the nation’s various regional, ethnic, religious, business and other constituencies. Governments should note that civil society will express a great deal of interest in the mechanics of the process and reactions will be particularly sharp if government is seen to be dominating the decision-making.
The third cluster of concerns relates to timing and lack of information. With some variation, all of the early governments have officially signed up to APRM without substantive public consultation or advance warning. That decision was followed by a long period during which government said little about its APRM plans. Neither the media nor civil society did much to fill this information vacuum. Then abruptly, from civil society’s point of view, a plan for conducting the review and appointing the governing council was announced. In nearly all cases this preliminary announcement came without significant prior public debate or input.
Yet there is an important lesson to be learnt from this. Governments should acknowledge that the public will expect to play a prominent role in the process and expect to be consulted before the process and governing structures have been decided. To announce a process prior to public consultation will inevitably arouse concerns over manipulation and lack of consultation. Extensive public consultation, transparency and candour go a long way to alleviating civil society complaints.
One solution is to refine the written guidelines for APRM to specifically set out a requirement that the national governing council be civil society led, have a civil society majority and follow a set of selection criteria emphasising persons who have shown themselves to be knowledgeable, non-partisan, and professionally accomplished.
To address civil society concerns, clearer, published rules would give both governments and civil society a better framework to work within. Through mid-2006 the APRM Secretariat and Eminent Persons allowed countries substantial latitude to define for themselves how the process would work. While the APRM base documents noted that the process should have substantial public input, there were few specifics about how that should occur. The rules were left flexible and open to substantially different interpretations.
Rwanda notably felt strongly that it didn’t make sense to bring in the Secretariat for advice until the country had put a proposed structure in place. The country chose a 50-person governing council heavily weighted in favour of government. However, when the Secretariat advised a smaller council with a civil society majority, Rwanda declined to follow the advice. Instead of offering the rules through private consultations that can be ignored, the Secretariat should publish clear rules on what is expected and the processes and procedures needed, which would help remove misunderstandings.
It is also important to choose eminent, non-partisan panelists. By choosing distinguished citizens known both for their competence and non-partisan character, Ghana imbued the process with credibility and pre-emptively minimised civil society and opposition concerns. To reassure both government and civil society, particularly in situations affected by substantial political tensions or distrust, it would be useful – before any governance structure is chosen – for all parties to publicly commit to a set of principles that all pledge to uphold in the conduct of the process
But the government concerns can also not be ignored. For governments themselves bring significant apprehensions about this process. At a rhetorical level, many governments and APRM proponents argue that governments have shown themselves to be fully committed to Nepad and APRM simply by signing up for review. One way to address government concerns is therefore to offer much greater clarity about how a report should be structured. Governments broadly accept that the reports must identify problems but they are concerned that they will give an overall negative view that fails to give credit to government for its attempts at reform and development
By clearly and prominently setting down some rules about how reports should be structured to ensure that they are fair, the process can help significantly reduce government concerns that it will be treated unfairly.
The countries yet to be reviewed could also borrow a leaf from Ghana’s approach. To avoid criticism that government might manipulate the governing council, the Ghana government reached out to opposition political parties, briefed them on its plans and possible choices of people for the governing council. Ideally, governments in all participating countries should do this. The Eminent Persons and Secretariat should suggest that governments do so on their own but they can offer to facilitate a private summit of political parties to discuss the ground-rules of APRM and to gather the ideas of opposition parties about how the process should be managed and who should sit on the governing council. Parliaments have also felt left out of national decisions to undergo peer review and have complained that the executive branch has failed to consult them. Such a political summit could be usefully conducted through parliament or through an informal parliamentary-executive retreat.
Government concerns could also be substantially allayed by improving the quantity and quality of APRM communications and providing clear rules. In the same way that civil society anxieties increase in the absence of clear communication from government, government’s own concerns are compounded by a lack of clear, early communications from the APRM Secretariat and Eminent Persons. The APRM system does involve a support mission to each country that is supposed to offer guidance. Such missions have been assertive and some suggested that countries establish governing structures with a majority of members from civil society. However, some early APRM countries have said these encounters have been too short, lacked clarity on key points and often came after countries themselves have committed to certain APRM processes. Critically, each country process is led by a different member of the Panel of Eminent Persons, who decides what to say and how the various missions will be conducted. As a result there has been substantially different advice offered to different countries and different approaches applied to country assessment missions.
A major lesson is that before any nation is ready to begin contemplating how it will manage the specific institutions and processes required by APRM, it should understand the complexity of the overall task. In terms of process, a country must sign a memorandum of understanding with the continental APRM authorities, create a governing body with broad based civil society participation, define a programme of research, write a self-assessment report, draft a programme of action to respond to governance issues identified in the self-assessment, and manage public communications about all these steps. The questionnaire alone is 88 pages, which includes 25 objectives, 58 questions and 201 indicators. Many of the questions require in-depth research and are not easy to answer.
That the sheer magnitude of this undertaking is unprecedented cannot be understated. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) conducts peer review among industrialised countries, but confines reviews to one narrow subject, such as foreign aid policy. APRM, in contrast, examines nearly the full range of national government endeavour.
In general, the early governments participating in peer review have underestimated the difficulty of the task. To meet the deadline, far more human and financial resources would have to be applied. Moreover, broad civil society consultation, which is a requirement of the process, cannot be rushed without generating protest and undermining efforts to build trust and consensus around the process. Kenya, for example, took eight months just to reach agreement with civil society over who would sit on the governing body. And more time was consumed resolving differences over how the country would conduct its public consultation. According to the Nepad Kenya secretariat’s Kenya Country Report on the APRM challenges, solutions and lessons learnt, of April 2006, “The principle to have effective civil society direction-setting to the APR process must not be compromised. That said, it is very important to ensure that members of the National Governing Council be people of the very highest integrity and people who put national interests first”.