As they settled into their Maputo hotel rooms yesterday, delegates to the 14th Africa Economic Summit heard some sobering analysis from the event’s organizers, the World Economic Forum. In the last 30 years, while the rest of the world has become significantly wealthier, the per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa has actually fallen by 11 percent.

The leaders meeting in the Mozambique capital will be considering a plan known as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), which aims to boost financial accounting and standards of governance to encourage investment from the outside world. No doubt the final summit communiqué will embrace NEPAD with open arms, but how much most African leaders actually believe in the plan must be open to doubt.

Since escaping colonial rule around 40 years ago, Africa has generally been its own worst enemy. Greedy dictatorships, ethnic suppression, vast spending on armaments rather than the economy, and chaotic and corrupt bureaucracies have all robbed ordinary Africans of the chance to improve their lives. The result has been a despair and lethargy which is every bit as damaging. To this consequence has been added the horror of AIDS, which has struck far more devastatingly at Africa than anywhere else.

It suits the West to blame Africa entirely for its failures. But that is not entirely fair. While African leaders bear a large share of responsibility, their misdeeds have been compounded by a selfish and doctrinaire outside world. During the Cold War, the rival superpowers fought out their battle in Africa, supporting military dictatorships and ladling out just sufficient funding to keep the economies ticking over. When peace broke out between Moscow, Beijing and Washington, Africa was dropped as irrelevant.

Now came the greatest wrong. Burdened with huge debts, African states had the IMF and the World Bank move in and demand that they conform to the sort of economic restructurings that have been applied to very different economies such as Britain in 1976 and Turkey more than once. One deadly effect was the enforced opening of protected markets to outside producers. Thus local manufacturers were destroyed. Taxes raised by governments implementing IMF reforms were siphoned out of the country to pay back Western lenders. Meanwhile Africa’s greatest economic strength, the production of primary agricultural crops, was negated because of low prices and subsidized production elsewhere in the world.

Africa is now much more politically stable. But all the NEPAD agreements in the world will do Africa no good unless its historic debts to the outside world are forgiven in return for introducing transparency and proper financial accountability.