For more than two decades, African governments have promised to transform agriculture, increase investment and end hunger. Yet as the continent enters another ten year agricultural cycle, Hon. Agho Oliver Bamenju is asking whether Africa has been trying to fix implementation without first confronting a weakness in the system itself.
Hon Agho Oliver Bamenju, Member of Parliament for the Bafut Tubah Constituency, believes the problem may go back to the foundation of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, CAADP.
Speaking on the sidelines of the recently concluded Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, Hon Agho Oliver questioned why African countries have repeatedly renewed their agricultural commitments without producing the results expected.
“As a lawmaker, I have been reflecting on the foundation on which the CAADP was built,” he said adding “anything built on a faulty foundation cannot stand.”
His criticism comes as Africa moves from the Maputo and Malabo commitments into the Kampala Declaration and the CAADP Strategy and Action Plan for 2026 to 2035.
The original Maputo Declaration of 2003 committed African governments to allocate at least 10 per cent of national public expenditure to agriculture and rural development and pursue annual agricultural growth of 6 per cent. The commitment was renewed under the Malabo Declaration in 2014.
More than 20 years later, however, the continent remains well short of several of those targets.
The fourth CAADP Biennial Review, assessing progress up to 2023, gave Africa an average score of 4.56 out of 10, against a benchmark of 9.29 for countries to be considered on track. Forty nine of the African Union's 55 member states submitted reports, yet no country was on track to meet all the Malabo targets by 2025.
According to Hon Agho Oliver, that record raises a fundamental question on what happens when governments repeatedly make commitments but face limited consequences for failing to deliver them?
Hon Agho Oliver's argument centres on the legal nature of CAADP.
Rather than being established as a binding treaty or convention, CAADP was launched through a political declaration. That approach gave countries room to adapt the continental framework to their different economies, agricultural systems and fiscal circumstances.
But the lawmaker argues that the same flexibility has also weakened accountability.
“I strongly suggest the failure lies at this initial stage.” he concluded
The argument is particularly relevant as the Kampala Declaration starts another ten year cycle. Africa is effectively asking governments to recommit themselves to agricultural transformation after the previous commitments produced uneven results.
The question is whether another declaration can succeed where previous ones struggled.
There is, however, a limit to simply demanding that governments spend more.
African states face widely different economic circumstances. Governments must balance agriculture against health, education, infrastructure, debt servicing, security and social protection. Conflict, falling revenues and fiscal pressures can make the 10 per cent agricultural expenditure target difficult for some countries to meet.
Available data also shows how far the continent remains from that benchmark. Agricultural expenditure accounted for about 2.1 per cent of total public expenditure across Africa in 2020, compared with roughly 2.5 per cent during 2014 to 2019. Only a handful of countries met or exceeded the 10 per cent target that year.
That means the debate cannot end with a demand for governments to find money they may not have.
The harder question is what governments should be required to do when they cannot meet an agreed target.
For Hon Agho Oliver, countries should have to explain their shortfalls, identify alternative financing and implementation measures, and subject those plans to stronger parliamentary scrutiny.
.png)
Hon Agho Oliver during the fourm
In effect, the issue is whether flexibility should allow governments to adjust their plans or allow them to escape accountability altogether.This is where Hon Agho Oliver sees a larger role for national parliaments.
Agricultural policy is often developed and implemented within executive institutions and ministries. Parliamentarians can debate budgets, represent farmers and raise policy concerns, but their influence is limited when continental commitments are not translated into domestic laws, budget frameworks and oversight mechanisms.
The African Food Systems Parliamentary Network, AFSPaN, has been pushing for a stronger parliamentary role in the domestication of the Kampala Declaration.
The network argues that parliamentarians should be involved throughout national agricultural policy cycles, with sufficient information and budgetary influence to scrutinise implementation.
Hon Agho Oliver supports that approach.
For a constituency MP representing Bafut and Tubah, the issue is not simply an international policy debate. Agricultural commitments eventually have to produce results in communities where farmers struggle with access to inputs, markets, infrastructure, finance and productive land.
That is where the distance between continental promises and local realities becomes visible.
A national agricultural budget may meet a percentage target on paper, but the farmer still needs to see the benefit. The question, therefore, is not simply how much a government allocates, but where the money goes and what it produces.
Hon Agho Oliver's argument also places greater emphasis on the connection between policy and the communities represented by lawmakers.
His recent constituency interventions have increasingly focused on practical support for local livelihoods, including assistance to vulnerable young people and support for raffia wine tappers in the Bafut Tubah area.
That local experience gives the CAADP debate a practical dimension.
Raffia wine tapping, for instance, is a small rural economic activity, but it provides income for families while depending on the survival of raffia wetlands. Support to tappers can therefore intersect with agricultural livelihoods, environmental protection, local production and cultural preservation.
.png)
The same principle applies to farmers more broadly where continental strategies only become meaningful when policies and public spending eventually reach the people producing food.
For Hon Agho Oliver, this is why parliamentarians must have a stronger role in determining how agricultural commitments are translated into national and local action.
His proposal does not necessarily amount to demanding a rigid continental law that forces every African government to spend exactly 10 per cent of its budget on agriculture regardless of its economic circumstances.
Such an approach could ignore the wide differences between African economies.
The stronger case is for a framework that makes governments answerable for the commitments they make.
That could include domestic legislation, parliamentary oversight, transparent agricultural budgets, measurable national investment plans and public reporting on results.
Governments that cannot meet continental targets could be required to explain why, identify what they can achieve and demonstrate how they intend to close the gap.
And parliamentarians could be given greater responsibility for examining whether approved funds are actually reaching farmers and producing measurable results.
This would shift CAADP from a cycle of political commitments towards a system in which governments have to account for what they promise and what they deliver.
Africa now has another ten years to implement the Kampala Declaration and its CAADP Strategy and Action Plan.
The continent has already accumulated declarations, strategies, scorecards and biennial reviews. What remains uncertain is whether the new cycle will produce a different implementation record.
For Hon Agho Oliver, the answer may lie less in producing another set of promises than in changing the structure through which those promises are enforced.
The question now is If governments have spent more than two decades committing themselves to agricultural transformation while implementation remains below target, should Africa continue responding with new declarations, or should it strengthen the legal, parliamentary and financial machinery behind them?
For farmers in Bafut, Tubah and communities across Cameroon, the answer will ultimately be measured in practical terms whether agricultural policies improve production, incomes, food availability and the conditions under which they work.
By Bakah Derick with reports from Kilali Rwanda
Tel: +237 694 71 85 77
0 Comments