Tunis — The former president of Senegal Mr. Abdou Diouf on Thursday urged African states to surrender more authority to the continent's regional organizations to help them ensure the success of regional integration in Africa.
"No integration can succeed without a real willingness to hand over the management of certain affairs to supranational authorities," Mr Diouf told staff, members of the diplomatic and development communities at the AfDB's temporary relocation agency in Tunis.
In a keynote address to a symposium on Improving Africa's Perspectives in a Globalized World: the Role of Regional Integration, Mr Diouf said that some African states had been unwilling to surrender the necessary authority to regional bodies to help them ensure the success of the continent's efforts at economic integration.
The result had been inadequate progress in a number of continental economic initiatives, including the New Partnership for Africa's Development.
"Africa will not succeed if each State, often the fruit of [unintended] circumstances and without deep roots, falls back on the fallacious heritage and marginalizes itself in the name of sovereignty," Mr Diouf said. "Insofar as some are not ready to accept the fact that shared sovereignty is the path to greater sovereignty, any effort at regional integration is condemned to stagnation." Mr Diouf said Africa now needed economic integration more than ever before. This, he said, would help ease the brain drain to the north and other economic hardships on the continent.
Citing an UNCTAD report on least developed countries, Mr Diouf said Somalia, Gambia and Cape Verde had lost half of their university-trained specialists in recent years to industrialized nations. The specialists left their countries in search of better working and living conditions.
At the same time, Eritrea, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Madagascar, Sao Tome and Principe, and Equatorial Guinea lost more than a third of their experts to other countries.
"There is no doubt whatsoever that the brain drain has had major repercussions on the upgrading of production infrastructure, the expansion of exports, the modernization of business enterprises and the improvement of health and education," he said.
He said part of the solution to Africa's brain drain lay in allowing Africans greater freedom of movement on the continent.
This, Mr Diouf said, would help stem the outflow of African expertise to the north, offset skills shortages on the continent and contribute to the generation of greater wealth.
Sign up for free AllAfrica Newsletters
Get the latest in African news delivered straight to your inbox
"By increasing intra-regional trade - thus the size of the unrestrained market -, regional communities could offer three-fold growth prospects: improving the attraction of member countries to foreign investors; facilitating specialization and acquisition of comparative advantages; offering a global approach to one of the current main problems facing products from poor countries, namely the issue of traceability, standards and non-tariff barriers," he said.
He said in the new context of globalization, the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund must reinvent their legitimacy and rebuild negotiation spaces adapted to new issues concerning global public assets.
Mr Diouf regretted that Africa, with 10 percent of the world's population and the third largest continent in terms of land mass, had remained on the sidelines of globalization. Its relative share in world trade and investment had actually declined over the past thirty years, adding that Africa's share of world exports had fallen from 3.5% in 1970 to 2% today.
Mr Diouf's address was in the context of the AfDB's Eminent Speaker's Programme.
