South African Press Association (Johannesburg)
12 February 2002
Cape Town — National sovereignty can no longer be used by African leaders as an excuse for wrongdoing in their countries, President Thabo Mbeki said on Tuesday.
Speaking at an international African mining conference in Cape Town, Mbeki said he was confident that "progress is going to be made" regarding many of the political problems and conflicts on the African continent.
"Certainly, the resolve among the leadership of the continent is that we can't allow issues for instance that have been used in the past, issues such as national sovereignty, for people to hide behind those boundaries and say that by virtue of the protection of national sovereignty I should be allowed within my country to do things that are clearly wrong.
"There's discussion on the continent about concepts such as peer review; that all of us must be subject to peer review on the basis of detailed, clear and agreed guidelines as to what constitutes good behaviour and what constitutes bad behaviour," Mbeki said.
In moving towards the formation of the African Union (AU), it was necessary to reinforce the processes of African unity and to interact to ensure that "in a sense, we are capable of policing one another" to ensure that nobody on the continent acted in a way that was against the interests of their people and the continent.
There was ongoing work within the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad) to "spell out" what was meant by good political governance and good economic governance.
Thus, when the AU met in July, it should be able to approve "a definite set of rules and regulations that should bind all of us as African countries".
"So that there are certain standards of behaviour, which are agreed, which are clear, which are capable of enforcement... therefore we are in the process of giving substance to the vision contained in Nepad."
Mbeki said there was also other important work underway, including in the European Union, the Nordic countries, G8, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and United Nations agencies, all of which "will help to reposition the African continent so that it also joins the rest of the world in terms of development".
There was nothing peculiar about the continent which condemned it to poverty and underdevelopment, and much could, and had to be done to ensure the process of economic decline and socio-economic regression was reversed.
A continent potentially as rich as the African continent, could not be allowed to still demonstrate the highest levels of poverty and underdevelopment in the world, Mbeki said.
There were many possibilities to do things to change the lives of the people for the better, and it was unacceptable that these were not done "because of an absence of will, particularly on the part of the Africans themselves".(ADF3)
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