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AFRICAN INSTITUTIONS - United Nations Economic Commission For Africa

A Support System for Growth

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa will mark its fiftieth anniversary in 2008. It has just seen the appointment of a new Executive Secretary. Both of these put the spotlight on what, Kaye Whiteman observes, is one of Africa's best kept secrets. 

In the centre of Addis Ababa lies an imposing structure - Africa Hall. This was built in the early 1960s as part of a complex to house the secretariat of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), which was established in 1958 as part of a UN plan for regional economic commissions on each continent. That for Africa was one of the last to be set up, and was given an impulsion by the beginning of the independence era, beginning in North Africa in the first half of the decade, but spreading south with the independence of Sudan in 1956 and Ghana in 1957.

Africa Hall was the scene of the signing of the historic treaty setting up the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in May 1963, and is still decorated by a famous mural depicting all the heads of state who signed the document. And although the OAU was housed in much more modest temporary headquarters a little way down the road, it always met at Africa Hall. This was, however, symbolic of the uneasy relationship between the two institutions. For, although the ECA had a paternal brief to watch over its sister body, this sometimes caused resentments. Nowadays both the ECA and the African Union have fitting premises, and Africa Hall remains as a monument for the nostalgic and the historically aware. 

But the symbiotic relationship with political Africa, located side by side in the same capital, has meant that the ECA has always tended to have a higher profile than its parallel organisations on other continents. It has attracted more attention because of it and on several occasions has exercised weighty influence on decisions, both international and African, concerning the future of the continent. 

The mission of the ECA was "to initiate and participate in measures for facilitating concerted action for the economic development of Africa, including its social aspects, with a view to raising the level of economic activity and standards of living in Africa and for maintaining and strengthening the economic relations of countries and territories in Africa." It was also to provide advisory services to its members based on quality research into all aspects of Africa's economic activity and to provide what is now called advocacy, both among the African members of the UN and in the wider international community, a function that has progressively assumed greater importance. In 2008 the ECA will mark its 50th anniversary, which will be an occasion to reflect on the institution's history, too little of which is now remembered, and on the contribution it has made, as well as to look forward to how it can continue its special vocation.

To some extent it is unavoidable that the institution's history can partly be traced through its Executive Secretaries. The first was the Sudanese Mekki Abbas (1958-1963), who came from having successfully run the Gezira cotton scheme in the Sudan. He had the difficult task of establishing the Commission from scratch in what was not the easiest of locations. But many of the broad lines, both in structures and policies, of what came later were laid down in that period.  He was also detached from his duties for a short period to help out in the UN's operation in the Congo.

It is fair, however, to say that there have been three major shapers of the organisation - the Ghanaian Robert Gardiner, who was there from 1963 to 1975; his immediate successor, the Nigerian Adebayo Adedeji (1975 to 1991), and another Ghanaian, K.Y. Amoako (1995-2005).

Robert Gardiner was a British trained archetypal West African mandarin steeped in the ways of the colonial administration, who had been Head of the Ghana Civil Service under Nkrumah before being poached by UN Secretary-General, U Thant, as a trouble-shooting Special Representative in the Congo from May 1962 to July1963. Having won golden opinions there, he was sent to Addis Ababa at a time of optimistic expansion in the field of development. The 1960s were the first Development Decade which saw the birth of UNCTAD and the UNDP as additional instruments in what was conceived at that time as a great cause for the UN, and still remains an essential part of its vocation, especially focused on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - the global targets for 2015. It was a period of optimism when Africa was still producing good growth figures in spite of population increases, and there was expectation that despite the political upsets of the decade, from the Congo crisis to the rise of military regimes, the continent was on the path of progress.

Apart from rapidly developing the research side of the institution by recruiting a team of talented academics and top bureaucrats, Gardiner was a great apostle of regional integration in Africa, and it was during his time that the ECA developed and implemented the blueprint, originally devised in 1960, of four main regional groupings (West, North, Central and East and South) that were eventually designed to come together in a wider programme for the economic unity of the continent. In this, Gardiner was practising his own pragmatic form of Nkrumahism, and he was able to preside over the birth of the first to come to fruition in May 1975. This was the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), in his own West African region, after ten years of patient diplomacy and several false starts.

The other ECA zones were the ECCAS in Central Africa (born in 1983), the Arab Mahgreb Union (AMU) in North Africa, born in 1965 but dormant for much of the subsequent period, and the Preferential Trade Area (PTA), which grew in 1993 into COMESA - the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa. The road to the establishment of these groupings was not easy, but all are now in a somewhat imperfect existence. COMESA, in particular, is still troubled by the more successful existence of SADC, and the AMU has been paralysed by the political tensions between Algeria and Morocco. The African Economic Community, whose treaty was signed in 1991 and ratified in 1994, was intended to be based on these groupings, with a view to their merger in the space of forty years. This deadline may eventually have to be revised. But the idea of the road to unity passing through the regions is still very much alive, and indeed still seems to be, in practical terms, the only path to the much desired African unity.

Professor Adedeji was to some extent a horse of a different colour, though as a former Head of the Nigerian Institute of Public Administration at Ife, he also came into the mandarin category. But he had also proved that he could be an effective 'can-do' political operator of considerable ingenuity during his four years as Commissioner for Economic Development and Reconstruction in the post-civil war government of General Gowon. In that position he had been one of the main architects of the coalition of forces that went to the making of the ECOWAS regional grouping in May 1975.

In Addis Ababa, as a committed Pan-Africanist, he continued to pursue the difficult dream of integration with all the resources now at his disposal. The creation of the four zones of integration had led to the creation of sub-regional offices, which in the late 1970s matured into the establishment of Multinational Programming and Operational Centres which later became sub-regional development centres, and were the ECA's main instruments in promoting sub-regional cooperation. Indeed the concept of the 'sub-region' is still profoundly built into the ECA's philosophy of development.    [back]

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