Addis Ababa — Opening Statement by K. Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa at the start of the African Development Forum III on 4, March, 2002.
Your Excellency Prime Minister Meles Zenawi,
Your Excellency Secretary-General Mr. Amara Essy,
The Vice President of the African Development Bank, Mr. Cyril Enweze,
Honourable Ministers and distinguished delegates from throughout the continent, Distinguished guests and participants from outside of Africa,
Distinguished leaders of civil society and business,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a rare privilege to be able to welcome so many eminent personalities at one gathering. It is clear from the large number of Foreign Ministers, Transport Ministers, other key Ministers, and Governors of Central Banks here with us, that governments across the continent recognize the high stakes in the topics we will be discussing.
I want to also welcome with great pleasure many other eminent participants. First and foremost, the Prime Minister of our host government, who, with utmost dedication and insight, has continued his country's historic leadership in working to foster unity on this continent.
I am so pleased to welcome Secretary-General Amara Essy. This Forum owes so much to his guidance and collaboration.
And I welcome Cyril Enweze, who, when Omar Kabbaj at the last minute was required to remain in Abidjan, has kindly agreed to fill in for his president.
Both the OAU and the ADB are essential leaders in bringing about whole networks of actions that will bring this continent together.
I welcome with particular warmth two of Africa's most respected figures: Adebayo Adedeji, the creator of so many regional development accomplishments and Salim Ahmed Salim, whose outstanding leadership, particularly in building peace and political cooperation, has been so well recognized. Their contributions to all Africans will long endure and their wisdom is again sought in this meeting.
I welcome the heads of the subregional institutions who have so often been at the cutting edge of regional integration. I am particularly pleased to greet Dr. Ibin Chambas the new Executive Secretary of ECOWAS.
I would also like to warmly welcome our many development partners. In particularly, I welcome with gratitude the Representatives of the Governments of the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Belgium as well as the European Commission, all of whose generous support has made this Forum possible.
And, not least, I welcome a wonderful array of leaders from African civil society, business, media, diaspora and, not least, academia. Your voices are essential at each major step as Africa seeks a more united future.
Mr. Prime Minister,
Honourable Ministers,
This is the third African Development Forum. We wanted a regular venue to bring together officials and leaders of all aspects of African society to look at Africa's most profound problems, to learn best cases, to explore options for further progress and to accelerate actions for the collective good.
The first ADF was on the issue of information and communications as a way to leapfrog development. It led to significant public and private sector actions to accelerate the information revolution in Africa.
The second ADF was on the issue of HIV/AIDS where we stressed how important leadership at every level is to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and to help care for those suffering from the disease. The esteemed Executive Director of the UNAIDS programme, Dr. Peter Piot, declared that meeting to be a breakthrough. Everyone who attended ADF II will remember the singing: Kenneth Kaunda singing his encouragement for us to organize and lead at all levels, and all of us singing happy birthday to Charlotte Mjele, a 22 year old South African girl living with HIV.
There have been follow up actions to ADF II at many levels. Following the ADF there was a more united and successful effort to help create the UN's Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria. The African Union will join us in producing an annual report on how well African states are doing in fulfilling their commitments on HIV/AIDS. This report will go to the annual summit of the African Union. We are mainstreaming HIV/AIDS issues within ECA. We are proposing ICT connections with Africa's Ministers of Health so that regular policy dialogues can take place with them on HIV/AIDS. Subregional organizations are taking more active roles in monitoring work on HIV/AIDS. So, a lot has been done, but much more needs to be done.
This, the third ADF, is also intended to bring together views and interests on a fundamentally important issue... one of great complexity where there is a lot at stake for our political and economic future. This is the economic and political integration of the African continent.
Ever since its inception, ECA has fostered regional integration. We were a venue in which Pan-Africanism was discussed. We proposed and urged the creation of the African Development Bank. When regional integration lagged, with great creativity, Adebayo Adedeji and other leaders actively fostered the creation of the main subregional economic communities. Ever since, ECA has helped a number of these groupings to build their capacities and we have done a good deal of joint work with them.
As this Forum will discuss, there have been a lot of accomplishments. But, at the same time, we all have also seen that a number of our fondest hopes for regional integration have not been realized.
This ADF needs to consider where we are, what have been our best experiences, what are the pitfalls ahead, and what should be the sequence of next steps towards our new dream. We must be candid about what usually are unspoken fears: the possible loss of sovereignty, development opportunities and revenues. These are real factors and they must be faced.
We come together after a good deal of preparation. A consultation with ECA's network of African research and academic centers was held. A number of background papers will be presented in the breakout sessions. Africa's Ministers of Transport will meet concurrently here and feed their important recommendations into this meeting. Focus groups representing important parts of African society will meet to offer recommendations here. In sum, this Forum has an ambitious programme befitting a complex topic. All of us are needed to assure a good outcome.
It is a tradition in my home country to welcome your guests, with at least a glass of water, and to invite them to tell their story first, before you tell them yours. So it is in this spirit that I call upon our distinguished opening speakers to tell their stories, and then I will come back to you with mine.
Your Excellency, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi,
Honourable Ministers and leaders,
Friends all,
When planning for this Forum began 18 months ago, we were motivated by concern that regional integration move faster, and that Africa respond ever more effectively to a globalizing world.
We did not anticipate - who could? - an alignment of political initiatives, that would create tremendous added interest in this Forum.
One has been the initiative by South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria, Senegal and Egypt, which together led to the creation of the New Partnership for Africa's Development, NEPAD. Alongside NEPAD, we at ECA have been proposing a model for transforming partnership in development cooperation, an idea with strong resonance in the principles of NEPAD.
Another is the whirlwind of political activity and consensus, that led to approval to create an extremely ambitious African Union.
At the same time, trade initiatives from Europe, America and the WTO have establish many new opportunities and challenges.
Leaders in the past, who wanted Africa to unify, would be in envy of us at this Forum. We now have real choices before us. The stakes are high, and key decisions must be taken in the next few months.
But, decisions are not easy, as there is no standard blueprint for regional integration. Experience around the world shows, that each successful regional initiative, must be crafted for its particular political and economic environment.
The issues involved, are among the most complex that leaders will face, requiring outstanding thinking and political courage.
The issues are so complex, that ECA is establishing a mechanism, so that national and regional players, can keep track of where Africa stands in its efforts to integrate. Tomorrow, you will be briefed on ECA's new Annual Report on Integration in Africa, which we call by its acronym, ARIA. A copy of the overview chapter has been made available to you. The first ARIA will review Africa's accomplishments and the current challenges towards integration. It will show a mixed report card.
As you participate in the discussions over the next days, you will have a chance to share your concerns and ideas, on the way forward, towards regional integration in Africa. Here are the issues that concern me.
First, I believe we must be sure that our economic integration fosters enterprise at all the levels we need for our development. We want to support the informal sector. We want our own small and medium sized firms to grow. We want to reduce and eliminate trade based upon corrupt practices. And we want to foster trade and investment by large local and international firms that can pursue subregional and regional economies of scale
For example, if we create international transport, energy and communications systems which bypass major areas where our poor live and work, then we will get an unbalanced development. I am so glad the Ministers of Transport are here to help us think through this kind of issue.
My point is that across a range of integration issues, we need to be clear about our need for balanced, equitable development.
Second, we need to assure more effective creation of regional public goods. There are a number of public goods that ought to be fostered through integration.
Uppermost is peace and security. This is a major theme of the Forum which underpins every economic and social aim.
Public goods in social development also often require coordinated approaches. The rollback of HIV/AIDS is one challenge; food security is another.
Common environmental challenges cut across borders throughout the continent and require coordinated approaches.
And, an issue particularly close to my heart, we ought to be fostering, as a public good, scientific expertise and research of all kinds. This includes the analysis and policy studies needed to help find ways to accelerate development. Policy cohesion needs sound policy analysis, which requires strong universities and think tanks
The third issue is that we need efficient ways to regionalize. I noted at the beginning of this session, that the Regional Economic Communities, or RECs, were created when it became clear that carrying out the larger vision of regional integration was lagging.
The RECs were created as stepping stones to regional integration. Now there are 13 RECs covering a range of functions and intentions. These pieces of the puzzle, in fact, do not fit together very well. Perhaps that is why almost all of our countries belong to more than one of these RECs. Twenty-seven countries belong to two, 18 belong to three and one country belongs to four.
In addition, there are a whole host of regional policy and training centers that bear on regional integration. Now leaders call for a number of new regional institutions. Experience in Africa and elsewhere clearly shows that both subregional and regional organizations are needed and useful, if there are complementary divisions of labour.
But, overall, Africa's current system is too complex, too duplicative, and requires too much political energy and money for what is being produced. So, as the ARIA report recommends, the system should be rationalized. We can all recognize that efforts to rationalize the current plethora of integration institutions, will not succeed, unless there is solid political backing. How can we assure that there is political understanding of the fact, that creating an ambitious African Union, should go hand-in-hand, with decisions to rationalize and economize elsewhere?
If there is agreement on the scope of integration plans and on an overall architecture, my fourth issue comes into play: what should be the pace of integration?
Up to now, regional integration has moved in an ad hoc evolutionary manner. The pace has been deliberate, and at times maddeningly slow. But now we are moving to a much faster timetable. Our political leaders are asking for a huge amount of institution building and policy creation in a very short time frame. Clearly choices will have to be made, and they should be choices which sequence actions. The next major actions to implement the African Union, might well be selected both because they are urgent and because they can be solidly achieved. Each achievement will build confidence to take on the next needed tasks.
We must look for ways to accelerate the integration process. For example, we can better identify and use best cases from within Africa and from around the world to inform our choices and decisions.
The decisions on pace should be ambitious, but the pace should be doable.
Substance, architecture and pace will then define the fifth item on my agenda of issues: finance. New regional institutions will have payrolls and operating costs to fund. As our ARIA report will show, even now, many of our existing regional institutions have difficulty financing what they are supposed to do. Their budgets are modest compared with their mandates. Even so, collecting funds against modest budgets has become difficult. For example, COMESA and CEMAC had a rate of collection against assessed contributions which fell from 100 percent in 1993 to just over 50 percent in 1998. One result has been a turn to and dependence upon external funders.
Our goal should be not just to pay the core bills, but to create truly robust institutions strong enough to produce solid gains for all members.
I am attracted by the rationale our colleagues in COMESA used in putting forth their budget a few days ago. Secretary-General Mwencha said that lack of adequate peace-keeping and integration actions, which together might cost at most $1 billion, meant that countries in his region lost over $13 billion in GDP last year directly related to conflicts.
Let me put the issue to you this way: we need a new way of conceptualizing and financing regional integration which calculates not only what it will cost to integrate, but what it will actually cost us if we do not move to effective political and economic integration.
This leads to my last issue: whatever we do, we cannot do alone. Successful integration, requires finding the ingredients of a real political consensus, throughout societies, so that new regional solidarity can be created and sustained, both in the popular imagination and in viable institutions.
By now it is self-evident, that national policies have sustainability, if there is appropriately widespread participation, in their formulation and execution. But we have only begun to understand, how this dynamic works at the supra-national level. What is safe to say at this stage, is that the process of integration has so far largely been in the hands of governments alone.
The African Parliament will certainly help build a broader consensus. But we cannot over-rely on one mechanism for such a critical task. Nationally, civil society and business need to be involved with governments, in discussions aimed at shaping policies, on what integration steps should be taken. And we need mechanisms to involve a wide range of non-governmental groups, in on-going policy dialogues at the supra-national level. If ADF successfully models the consultative approach, that would be wonderful.
In the end, successful regional integration in Africa, will respond to broad-based ownership of the process, and a consensus that this is our common destiny as Africans.
To summarize: the issues I particularly am concerned about are:
* how can we assure that economic integration equitably serves to foster all parts of our societies?
* how can we assure regional public goods including peace and security, public health and research?
* how can regional integration be made to be efficient?
* how can we assure adequate finance?
* what is the best pace and sequence of tasks towards regional integration? and
* how can we assure the benefits of broadly based societal involvement?
To get us to the point of recommending actions on these and other important issues, you will have a number of plenary sessions, breakout sessions, and sectoral focus sessions. There will be a dialogue with Prime Minister Meles and two other heads of States. We will also have the honour of the participation of two Nobel Laureates: Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Robert Mundell, whose work has been required reading since even before my doctoral studies in economics.
Honourable Ministers and distinguished participants,
All of your work over the next days will be summarized in a consensus statement, that will be brought to the attention of the upcoming OAU Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, and which will be widely circulated.
In addition, and what in the end may well be of more significance, I hope this Forum also helps you produce your own broadly based national agendas arising from government, the private sector, NGO networks, and thoughtful coverage of regionalization in the media. For, in the end, anything so tremendous as the African Union, will require us to act beyond our own spheres of control, in broader networks and alliances.
Mr. Prime Minister,
Honourable Ministers,
All this will be the work of many months and years. It will take all of us and more to make it happen. If we have a productive week, we can help shape the important work ahead. Let us do so.
Thank you for your kind attention.
[ADF3]
