ANNIE THOMAS, Bamako | Wednesday
THE heads of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), flanked by 10 African leaders, have emerged from two days of talks claiming to have forged a radical new approach to the continent’s chronic poverty.
The talks, held in the impoverished west African state of Mali, led to “a major step forward to define a new approach to fight poverty in Africa,” said IMF Director-General Horst Koehler.
It’s a great step forward,” said Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, one of African heads of state who huddled with the IMF and World Bank teams, occasionally braving protesters who objected to the world bodies’ policies concerning debt relief.
Wade also described the meeting as “a new departure” in the approach to poverty and development, while World Bank President James Wolfensohn said: “I’m optimistic. There’s a partnership between us.”
None of the officials at the press conference gave details of the new approach, but they did refer to the drawing up of precise projects for priority issues and regions, with the focus being on planning at the sub-regional rather than the purely national level.
Wolfensohn said the African leaders had defined their top priorities as improvements to infrastructure, education, health and agricultural productivity.
In addition to the finance officials and the Senegalese leader, the talks brought together presidents Alpha Oumar Konare of Mali, Mamadou Tandja of Niger, Didier Ratsiraka of Madagascar, Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso, John Kufuor of Ghana, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Antonio Mascarenhas Monteiro of Cape Verde, Omar Bongo of Gabon and Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone.
Wade told the press conference that Africans had “been financing development by loans and aid for years.” However, those instruments “don’t take us very far. We need something else, and that something else is what we have produced today.”
On debt, the African leaders at the press conference were not in agreement, with President Bongo of Gabon calling for African countries’ debts to be purely and simply forgiven, but Wade saying that “We must first understand how we got into debt in the first place, otherwise we’ll just cancel them and then start all over again.”
Two other key regional leaders, Presidents Thabo Mbeki and Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, arrived in Bamako later for a separate meeting with the IMF and World Bank officials, also due to include President Obasanjo. – AFP
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