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Afri can leaders meeting in Abuja yesterday chose six eminent figures as the first members of a "peer review" body designed to monitor the performance of the continent's governments.

The group of three men and three women includes a prominent banker, an academic, two humanitarian workers, an economist and a diplomat drawn from six countries attached to the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad).

"I have great confidence in the integrity of the sons and daughters of Africa who have been nominated to serve on this panel," said Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, hosting a Nepad conference.

Peer review is a key concept of the Nepad development blueprint, designed to show the G8 leaders of the industrialised world when they meet next week in France that Africa is serious about keeping its own house in order.

The panel will examine the performance of Nepad members' governments in the fields of economic reform, democracy and the rule of law, and their findings be used to exert private peer pressure on African leaders.

More names will follow, said the head of Nigeria's Nepad implementation team, Isaac Aluko-Olokun as he announced the first six names.

They are: Nigerian economist Professor Adebayo Adedeji; Professor B A Kiplagat, Kenya's former ambassador to Britain and France; Doctor Graca Machel, the Mozambiquan children's rights activist and wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela; Senegal's Marie Angelique Savane, a senior official of the UN Population Fund; Dorothy Njeuma, a university chancellor from Cameroon; Chris Stals, a white South African former central bank director.

Obasanjo and four other African leaders are to travel to Evian in France on June 1 to meet the leaders of the world's richest nations plus Russia and push their case for greater development aid and debt relief. – Sapa-AFP.

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