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Sale of Africa’s natural resources faces more scrutiny than weapons -

Sale of Africa’s natural resources faces more scrutiny than weapons -
By Brighton Phiri
Saturday August 04, 2007 [04:00]

THE sale of Africa's natural resources is subjected to more scrutiny than the sale of weapons, Botswana President Festus Mogae has observed. Officially opening the 81st Zambia Agricultural and Commercial Show on Thursday, President Mogae asked Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) leaders to pay much attention to the region's supply constraints, inability to compete regionally and globally.

"This is of critical importance because global competitiveness in terms of quality, packaging and labelling, reliability to supply goods in the required quantities, and on time, determine who enters and remains in the market place," President Mogae said. "We therefore need to fully commit ourselves to making our region an economic hub of choice, which will competitively attract investors and promote the growth of our regional trade."

President Mogae, however, expressed his concern with the international media's misrepresentation of Africa's economic potential.

"It is a matter of great concern to us as African leaders that the international press still wants the world to believe that natural resources are a curse to Africa and that conflict in some parts of Africa are essentially a fight over natural resources," President Mogae said. "While that might be true in a minority of cases, the sale and utilisation of our natural resources is a blessing and a source of economic empowerment for our people. It is, therefore, rather strange that the sale of our natural resources has been subjected to more scrutiny than the sale of weapons that are actually used to kill human beings."

He commended Zambians for being with their Botswana counterparts in their efforts to convince CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) that some SADC countries needed to manage their elephant herds if they were to avoid environmental disaster.

"We need to convince those of our citizens who live side by side with elephants, that elephants are a source of their economic empowerment and not just a destructive liability. It therefore makes good sense to be allowed to sell some of our ivory for the benefit of such communities and for sustainable conservation of our elephant population," he said.

President Mogae, however, observed that while the SADC Protocol on Trade had been under implementation since the year 2000, intra-SADC trade had not grown as fast as the SADC leaders expected.

He urged SADC leaders to consider looking at factors that had contributed to the less-than-expected growth in regional trade.
President Mogae further observed that the region had never constructed a new electricity generating plant during the last 20 years, resulting in the steady depletion of surplus generating capacity.

He said the region had to invest at least US $1.8 billion per annum to achieve a load growth of three per cent per annum.
And President Mwanawasa explained that the citizen economic empowerment Act was aimed at promoting the economic empowerment of citizens and local companies, besides promoting gender equality in access, owning, managing, controlling and exploiting economic resources in the country.

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