THE African continent should be united when negotiating for investment, fighting illicit financial flows and ensuring beneficiation to realise its potential as a resource-endowed continent, Zimbabwe’s former Foreign Affairs minister Walter Mzembi has said.
Mzembi was speaking as a panellist during a discussion titled Africa’s Governance and Development: The Role of Foreign Aid and China’s Influence at The World Forum on the Future of Democracy, AI/Tech and Humankind held in Berlin, Germany last week.
The forum was attended by former US President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, European Parliament vice-president Katarina Barley, heads of State and Nobel Prize laureates.
Mzembi said an effective Africa, which could bargain and negotiate had to transform itself from a loose coalition of 55 countries into a proper union.
He said the European Union was strong by design, bargaining, negotiating, trading, investing and pooling resources and ensuring safety in numbers.
“And we have those kinds of countries that were created by history in Africa, which are economically unviable by geographical size, by resource endowment, by population and yet when they are brought together and amalgamated to the other countries, they have strength.
“So Africa, has to discover its formula in terms of that architecture for it to be taken seriously by the United States and China,” he said.
Mzembi said Africa must plug illicit financial flows as there was a lot of money flowing out of the continent.
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“If you give me a country today, the first thing I would do, before I even look at revenue streams and revenue lines, would be to plug leakages because there's just too much illicit financial flows out of Africa.
“It is estimated to be something like US$80 billion to US$100 billion per annum. If you plug that, you keep it in, it can be a very huge saving for the continent that can drive its development,” he said.
Mzembi called for beneficiation of the continent’s resources.
“Africa is richly endowed, but it is losing all its resources in raw form, un-beneficiated, no value addition to other industrialised nations, in the process also exporting jobs.
“And that is why our people, they flood Europe, they flood China, they flood every part of the world except Africa because they are following their jobs, which have gone out as raw materials, which have not been value added at home,” he said.
Mzembi said creating industries would generate jobs and value so that Africans would never bother Europe or any part of the world.
“We need democracy because it is democracy that will ensure that minority rights are protected, individual rights are protected. I think President Clinton mentioned the other day, that democracy is not the government of the people by the people for the people only.
“It is also, by extension, the protection of minority and individual rights. And you only feel the soundness and strength of democracy when you are outside and when you have lost, that is when you feel that this country is democratic or not democratic,” he said.
Mzembi said the migration of Africans to the East was not a rejection of the West but pragmatism on where the continent was seeking value.
“So we need to find middle ground. And that middle ground is to force us through intellectually tested models like the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy, the African Forum for Cultural Diplomacy, which force Africans to begin to have dialogue as a first recourse before they go into conflict so that we continue to be attractive as investment destinations.
“So the future of Africa, other than interstate diplomacy, also belongs to non-governmental organisations. It belongs to the individual.
“And we must capacitate our people at that level to be able to talk to each other so that we can be equal and attractive partners for the future,” he said.
