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Africa must own fully her renaissance
- J. H. Mensah
Accra, July 27, Ghanadot - Mr. Joseph Henry Mensah, a senior
Ghanaian statesman, economist and politician, calls for
Africa and her leaders to own the African renaissance before
they can hope to realize any dividends from it.
The speech was delivered at a
public lecture, the them of which was "Towards the African
Renaissance; Contributions of an Economist."
Mr. J. H. Mensah spoke on the
topic: "Can Africa of the 21st century climb this mountain."
He noted in his lecture that history had shown renaissances
of European, Asia and Latin American took off and succeeded
because they were initiated and carried through by the
leaders and peoples of those continents. Africans, he
said, would have to do the same.
"Here in Africa after 50 years
not a single country has been able to make that transition
yet - in the decade-and-a-half before the end of the 20th
century the number of undernourished Africans actually
increased by some 45 million mouths, twice the population of
Ghana," he said.
He blamed the state of African
economies on lack of faith and confidence of African leaders
in themselves, and in their peoples to initiate and manage
the necessary change needed to lift African states from the
doldrums of poverty into globally competitive economies.
Mr. Mensah, who is MP for
Sunyani East, observed that during the post-colonial and
post-independence renaissance of the Third World in the 70s
and 80s, the economies of independent African states
remained largely stagnant while Asian and Latin American
countries reached middle-income levels one after the other.
"One of Africa's worst legacies from the era of political
darkness and economic stagnation in the early decades of
independence is that too many of the important actors are
simply unable to believe in their own capacity to bring
about change, to project their own and their neighbours'
circumstances unto the new plane."
Instead of forging change, Mr.
Mensah said, the leaders of Africa were happy to put the
entire blame of lack development on the imperialists,
including their very own dependency of these same
imperialists.
He noted that during the early post-independence
renaissance, more and more African leaders sought to
entrench themselves in political power over and above the
interest of the masses, saying that as a result Africa had
remained largely unchanged as those leaders themselves did
nothing to bring change.
He referred to the Grand Debate on Union Government at the
9th African Union summit in Accra, and wondered whether that
could have been a platform for the new African renaissance,
considering the focus of interest of the 53 African leaders
that emerged at the summit.
"It may be that those leaders who have developed the
self-confidence to think in such terms should find a way of
banding together to develop, sell and implement the idea,"
he said, in reference to those who advocated "African Union
Government now" as a way of launching the African
renaissance.
Mr. Mensah, however, noted that whereas Africans would be
expected to design and completely own the African
renaissance, it was necessary to tap on the existing support
from the international community, especially funds in the
private sector, to enable the continent to reach
middle-income levels within set times.
He said it was not enough to ask Africa's development
partners to back off and allow Africans to own and manage
their own development, adding that as things were now, too
many of the decisions that could make or break the African
renaissance were unfortunately within the power of the
development partners.
Mr. Mensah noted that as much as development had a critical
role to play in the African renaissance, it was also
imperative for African states to be given the opportunity to
exercise some amount of financial freedom in order to reach
high economic heights within the shortest possible time.
"African states should exercise financial freedom in
accessing the vast international circulation of private
investable funds. It is principally that circulation of
private money rather than the flows of Official Development
Assistance (ODA), which has fuelled all the contemporary
instances of successful emancipation of countries out of
Third World status," he said.
In that regard, he noted that for countries like Ghana,
which had benefited from debt cancellation by their
development partners, there should be a limit on how long
those development partners could constrain and influence the
development financing policies of such beneficiary
countries.
"A lot of the multilateral debts cancelled by the World Bank
and International Development Agencies (IDAs) would have
been subject to servicing and repayment obligations for the
next 20 years.
"And so will Ghana's external resources mobilization
policies remain subject to World Bank surveillance over the
next 20 years?"
He also cited the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)
as one of the important instruments that could facilitate
African economic renaissance provided Africans were able to
derive optimum benefit by strategically diversifying their
export base to rake in a greater chunk of the trillions of
dollars AGOA promised, 90 per cent of which was currently
benefiting the American side of the AGOA trade.
Source GNA
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