Objectifying African Development: Overview of the Performance of APRM'S Socio-economic Development Theme in South Africa (2003-2018)

The African Union (AU) hinges development on continent-wide developmental programmes like the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). To objectify NEPAD, its agency labelled African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) was founded. Consequently, one core instrument of NEPAD to fast-track the process of socio-economic renewal of African nations is the APRM. Whereas the APRM has four thematic areas, this study focused on its Socio-Economic Development (SED) theme. The study's all-encompassing objective was to illuminate the outcomes of South Africa's SED theme execution between 2003 and 2018. It espoused the new governance theory as its theoretical foundation and adopted critical discourse analysis (CDA) for data analysis. Based on secondary analysis of qualitative data (SAQD), it found that the adopted governance approaches did not enable optimum improved socio-economic indicators like eradication of poverty, youth unemployment, and poor healthcare services among others. Its analysis seems to suggest that ineffectual governance for actualising the SED theme by South African regimes during the understudied timeframe was the case. By implication, non-application of new governance mentalities to demonstratively implement and actualise the SED precepts maximally is a major cause why the socio-economic transformation of South Africa remains abysmal. Its analysis directed attention towards institutional and structural remedies of governance and government mechanisms that can reverse the negative outcomes to have superlative SED outputs in South Africa, and also lessons for other African countries. It concluded by suggesting the conscious application of New Public Management (NPM) techniques in South Africa's governance paradigm.