India and South Africa shared the challenge of a struggle against poverty, President Thabo Mbeki told businessmen in Johannesburg on Friday.
Business was vital if this problem was to be effectively addressed, Mbeki told the Seventh India Calling Conference.
”We need the business people in this room, with the talent, the capacity, with the things they can do, which must make an impact on this problem,” Mbeki said.
The conference was a three-day India-South Africa business conclave organised by the Indian Merchants’ Chamber and Business Unity South Africa.
A visiting Indian delegation and South Africa’s business community explored trade and investment opportunities between the two countries in infrastructure development, manufacturing, trade and services.
Mbeki said the challenge of poverty was fundamental to everything the two countries wanted to do together.
He emphasised that the relationship went beyond bilateral aims. When India spoke, the developed world listened to it as a representative of billions in the developing world.
India was effectively addressing the fundamental problems of equality and re-balancing of power in the world, which was critical to solving ”all of the problems we face”.
Mbeki said it was only now that South Africa had been liberated that the challenges of economic development and upliftment on the continent, and African unity, were being tackled.
South Africa, with many challenges of its own, was being pressed to play an active role in achieving these objectives.
”And so we must turn to India again and say: ‘Here is this other task, what must we do about this continent that faces these problems?”’, said Mbeki.
It was the India-African relationship which had to be strengthened if the continent was to achieve its development goals, he said.
Afterwards, Mbeki visited an exhibition of Indian wares and left with lengths of bright silk draped over his shoulders. – Sapa