Representatives from more than 60 African NGOs this week issued their riposte to Tony Blair's commission on Africa report.
The Alternatives Commission for Africa report is scathing about the Blair document. Samir Amin, from the Third World Forum, says the only good thing about the report is the quality of the paper it is printed on.
He adds: "The report is thick but totally empty. It is full of misleading platitudes on debt, poverty and trade."
The Alternatives report oozes with suspicion of the private sector and damns those countries that are considered to have achieved any sort of economic success. So Tanzania and South Africa, which have managed to attract foreign investment, are lambasted for "complying with the neoliberal agenda" of Blair's commission.
One of the authors of the Alternatives report, Charles Abugre from Ghana, contends that the real culprit for Africa's plight is neoliberalism, not Africa's people nor its governments. But what he and other authors fail to address is how India and other Asian economies managed to lift millions out of poverty precisely through variations of the neoliberalism that they decry.
