DIADIE BA, Dakar| Wednesday
AFRICAN leaders assured world business representatives on Tuesday that they were committed to breaking with a past of misrule as they courted support for an ambitious new revival plan.
The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) aims to propel Africa from the margins of the global economy through massive investments from richer countries, in return for democracy and good governance.
For two days, African leaders have met more than 1 000 businessmen in Senegal’s capital to discuss possible projects and how to get the estimated $64 billion a year needed to fund them more than seven times foreign investment in 1999.
Closing the meeting, Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo emphasised that Africa’s leaders were committed to ending the continent’s reputation for corruption, human rights abuses and lack of democracy.
”We have peer review,” he said. ”We will say to ourselves: ”Mr. President, what you do in your country is not good. Either you change or you get isolated.”
Western countries have welcomed Nigerian and South African backing for Commonwealth sanctions against Zimbabwe, after elections widely condemned as fraudulent, as just the example of peer pressure which is needed to back the plan.
To try to end another spiralling crisis, Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has brought Madagascar’s two rival presidents to Dakar to see if they can avert potential disaster on the island with the help of the gathered leaders.
RISK FUND FOR INVESTMENTS
He said leaders had agreed to find a way of insuring against investment risks on the troubled continent.
”We are going to create a company to insure against risks to private investments in Africa,” Wade told reporters after the conference without elaborating.
The absence on Monday of Obasanjo and South African President Thabo Mbeki, heads of state of Africa’s main powers and the prime movers of the plan, got the conference off to an inauspicious start.
But Obasanjo jetted in for the end of the meeting, which was hailed as an important step by businessmen from around the world. Among them were representatives from corporate giants like Exxon Mobil, Microsoft and Coca Cola.
”This was not a conference to sign projects, but it was a conference to raise awareness on Nepad, and in this regard it was a success,” Obasanjo told reporters.
”I have never seen such strong commitment from African leadership,” said Donna Sims Wilson of Chicago-based Loop Capital Markets.
As well as discussing projects for telecommunications, roads, energy and agriculture, the meeting was to look at proposals for a Group of Eight (G8) summit in Canada in June.
The G8, the world’s seven main industrialised countries plus Russia, have given moral support to Nepad and will discuss in June what they can do to ensure it meets with more success than failed Africa-wide development schemes of the past. – Reuters