Create new order for Africa’s development – Speaker tells world leaders

The Speaker of Parliament, Professor Aaron Mike Oquaye, has called on world leaders to create a new order of co-operation and economic partnership that will provide a new enablement in Africa.

Addressing participants in the 141st Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly in Belgrade, Serbia, he said Africa needed a new economic paradigm which would promote global justice and equality, address poverty, misery and disease as well as uplift the nations in the continent.

“Once this economic liberation is delivered, women empowerment, health, education, poverty, misery, disease and the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals will follow automatically,” Prof. Oquaye said The Speaker of Parliament led a delegation to Serbia to participate in the Parliamentary Union Assembly where global leaders meet to discuss development issues.

This year’s theme was “strengthening international law: Parliamentary roles and mechanisms, and the contribution of regional cooperation”.

New era fight

Prof. Oquaye said some time ago, the prime focus in Africa was the fight against colonisation, adding that after independence the emergence of dictatorship and militarism and governance challenges in myriad forms, turned the world’s attention to a search for good governance leading to the second wind of change.

“Today, our existential problems are in three main dimensions: Climate Change; Nuclear race and threats which still affect Africa adversely and poverty, misery, and disease which stem out of the old economic paradigm of dependency and re-cycling poverty,” he said.

Prof. Oquaye said global warming had changed agricultural patterns and jostled planning efforts in Africa.

“Globally, it has caused resources which could have been available for other nations to help Africa tackle gaping problems to be expended elsewhere,” he said.

Prof. Oquaye said the world needed a nuclear-weapons-free zone to make it a less dangerous place to live in.

Nuclear weapons in possession of the USA and Russia (apart from other nations) will trigger an avalanche which will consume humanity. Notably, also, the huge resources expended can be channelled to more benefits for the developing nations,” he said.

Economic order

Prof. Oquaye said the present World Economic Order where the developing nations essentially produced raw materials and the developed nations produced and exported finished products to Africa was not helping Africa’s development.

“Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire for example produce 60 per cent of the world’s cocoa but receive less than 10 per cent of the end product of global income. By the existing World Trade Organisation framework, the free movement of goods globally leads to the dumping onto African markets, cheap products of all kinds”

“The result is that infant industries are adversely affected. Notably, industrialisation was not achieved in any nation without protectionist measures to protect local infant industries,” he said.

Prof Oquaye said the continent’s fruits, for example, needed to be applied to processing into juices and vegetables into pasters, so as to avoid the glut in peak seasons and import in lean seasons.

“Before local industry can compete, it must be protected from cheap brands dumped from a number of nations,” he added.