Davos 2012: Africa leaders urge co-operation
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16740064
Some of Africa's leaders have urged closer co-operation within the
continent on energy and infrastructure projects to help its growth
prospects.
Speaking at Davos, South Africa's President Jacob Zuma urged massive
investment in infrastructure to promote trade within Africa.
Guinea's President Alpha Conde said there should be pan-African
ministers for energy, infrastructure and trade.
He said he hoped the new ministries could be agreed by the African
Union.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi agreed on the need for closer co-
operation on infrastructure projects and said the planning and
coordination body of the African Union, Nepad, was already working on
this.
But he urged caution, warning it would and should be a long process.
"It took 50 years for the Europeans to come up with a single currency
and it appears they went too fast for some of its members," Mr Zenawi
said.
The leaders were taking part in a session called Africa: From
Transition to Transformation, at the annual gathering of economic,
business and political leaders at the ski resort of Davos in
Switzerland.
Mr Zuma said infrastructure was at the heart of one of the key issues
for the continent, namely how Africa leads itself.
"Africans must trade amongst themselves," he said.
"Intra-Africa trade is negligible," Kenya's Prime Minister Raila
Odinga pointed out. "Europe trades more with itself that with the rest
of the world."
The chair of the session, the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown,
said the continent needed billions of dollars of investment in
infrastructure, but red tape and cross-border problems were getting in
the way.
Mr Zuma said those issues, or bottlenecks, were being addressed.
"How we open up borders for the free flow of people, or workers, as
well as goods - that is being discussed as well as infrastructure," he
said.
'New Africa'
Speaking at his first visit to the World Economic Forum, Guinea's Mr
Conde, who described himself as the country's first democratic
president after ten years of dictatorship, said: "If we want to move
ahead we have to help ourselves. If we do that we can agree on
producing our own energy, breaking down barriers to trade.
"The African leaders have to change our attitudes... not have money in
banks abroad... to develop our own resources for our own people."
"We have alot of faults, we are a bit selfish, fight for power rather
than our people.
"I am here to show there is a new Africa... that we can be the
continent of the 21st century."
For some of the leaders, the Indian economy, which developed rapidly
thanks to developing its manufacturing sector, was a model African
countries could follow.
"We are where India was in the early Nineties, we have the same size
of population," said Ethiopia's Mr Zenawi. "That is our ambition,
based on the growth of the past few years. It is not an idle ambition."
He said although the Millennium Development Goals - on relieving
poverty and disease in the world's poorest nations - concentrated on
advances in primary education, that would not be enough to create the
skills necessary to transform economies.
"Africa is a natural destination for manufacturing," he said, adding
that he hoped companies who relocated to Asia for cheap, efficient
labour, would relocate to Africa, given the necessary investment in
education and infrastructure.
However tackling the problem of corruption was still a "major issue",
said Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete.
"The first thing to fight against corruption is transparency," he
said, adding that his country was now publishing all mining contracts
as part of a new mining code.
"The best guarantee for an investor is transparency."
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