Business Africa Daily: How rich Africa could beat poverty by Bingu Wa Mutharika is President of the Republic of Malawi
Africa is not a poor continent. Rather it is the people who are. The continent has the largest world deposits of diamonds, gold, coal, copper and manganese. It has large deposits of minerals, huge reserves of crude oil and natural gas and vast forests, fisheries and land for agriculture and cattle ranching.
Africans rank among the poorest in the world in the midst of plenty for three main reasons. First, since the early days of colonialism, there has been incessant plunder and exploitation of Africa’s resources by the developed world to the detriment of economic development in Africa.
Second, there is deliberate marginalisation of Africa in global financing, foreign direct investment and access to science and technological innovation that could have created new wealth for Africa.
In other words, African resources do not create new wealth or employment in Africa because they are not processed on the continent but are shipped to the industrialised countries in raw form.
And finally, most African governments have, so far, not taken concrete action to ensure that we change globalisation system in our favour.
We have not developed home grown strategies to deal with our specific situations. In most cases, we have depended on “surrogate economists” to advise us and ended up with wrong diagnoses, wrong prescriptions and hence wrong results.
.......
As an integral part of this strategy, we have in place the Public Sector Investment Programme (PSIP) that aims to create a favourable and enabling environment for local enterprises to invest and create new wealth for FDI to flow into Malawi.
The new strategy has resulted in the growth of the Malawi economy from a mere two per cent in 2004 to a phenomenal 8.5 per cent in 2006.
To break the “vicious cycle of poverty,” Malawi will not take a posture of “business as usual” but has set up clear “performance criteria” in the national budget to evaluate its actions.
To enhance the performance of our economy, Malawi decided to shift from preparing “expenditure budgets”, to preparing “growth budgets” to provide the nation with a new economic vision, a sound policy for resources mobilisation, and the best practices in science and technology.
This will help transform Malawi from a predominantly importing and consuming economy to a manufacturing and exporting one. Nonetheless, the industrial nations must agree to change their mindset.
In this regard, let me draw your attention to the remarks made by the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who in his report to the House of Commons on the Group of Eight Summit said “the wealthy nations of the world simply cannot any longer ask the developing world to stand on its own feet but shut out the very access to our markets necessary for them to do so”. The world is one and Africa is part of it.
Industrialised nations must work to enable African countries to participate effectively in global negotiations to benefit from technology, global finance, international trade and prosperity.
Comments