New Spirit Will Free Africans From Poverty, Says Mbeki

from All Africa

Business Day (Johannesburg)

By Wyndham Hartley
Cape Town

There was a new spirit growing in Africa which would see the continent's people free themselves of the "evil spirits which defined Africans as nothing more than mere objects of charitable kindness", President Thabo Mbeki told the annual meeting of the African branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association on Friday.

In a tough Africanist speech, Mbeki welcomed the creation at the recent African Union (AU) summit of the Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund by the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad).

He said $625m had been put into the fund, raised exclusively in Africa. "We are confident that within the next 12 months the capital base of the Pan-African Infrastructure Development Fund will reach $1bn. We, as Africans, are making the firm statement that we are ready to rely on our resources to finance our own development, focusing in the first instance on the critically important infrastructure projects already elaborated by Nepad."

He said he had felt the "palpable presence" of a new spirit in Africa and believed that it and the lighting of the flame of peace in Côte d'Ivoire would "serve as a symbol of the determination of the African masses, truly the wretched of the earth, to free themselves from all the evil spirits that have had a free run over the face of our continent for far too long, stripping us of our dignity and imposing on us the humiliating condition that many in the rest of the world have come to treat us as being nothing more than mere objects of charitable kindness".

In a sharp criticism of colonialism and western interference in Africa, Mbeki said that after the wave of independence in the 1960s, "a combination of factors that brought about numerous crises in our countries ensured that our continent was placed under de facto trusteeship, with programmes and policies for Africa's development drawn-up by people who were not only not African, but were in many instances those who had been colonial masters.

"To defeat this neo-colonial stranglehold, we have developed our own path of development, as reflected in the constitutive act authorising the establishment of the AU, and the AU development and reconstruction programme, Nepad."

He said these were formidable instruments to address poverty and development in Africa.

Mbeki urged the gathering of African parliamentarians to take seriously their responsibility to ensure the success of the AU and all its elements and institutions.

He said MPs should exercise oversight of the African Peer Review Mechanism of the AU, which was critical for setting benchmarks for governance .

"It is obvious that we have a lot of work ahead of us," Mbeki said.

"All of us are obliged to take action to implement the provisions of the African Convention on Terrorism. Not all our countries have passed the necessary legislation to make the convention operational," he said.

The association could work with the Pan African Parliament to prepare model legislation on terrorism to be made available to all African parliaments . This would help to ensure "compatible legislation that brings the African Convention on Terrorism into force in all our countries."