Africa would not allow to be "remote controlled"

Accra, May 30, GNA - It is wrong and inefficient to leave decision-making more and more to development partners for them to try and micro manage the Continent's development by remote control, Mr Joseph Henry Mensah, Chairman of the Ghana Development Planning Commission, said on Wednesday.

Mr Mensah, who was addressing the op ening session of the two-day conference on "Financing for Development", said: "The only successful model is to leave the task of developing Africa to the African people and their chosen Leaders.

He urged opponents of aid to the Continent not to hide under the guise of corruption among African Governments and Leadership to withhold the necessary assistance.

The conference which is on the theme: "The Infrastructure for Growth, the Energy Challenge," followed a similar one in Abuja last year during which African Finance Ministers took the critical step to lead a process that translates financing for development commitments into action in order to attain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). While emphasising that foreign aid and grants were not the best means of fostering development and reducing poverty on the Continent, Mr Mensah said the only way out of poverty into which the countries had been plunged was assistance to increase their own productivity; enable workers earn improved incomes and in the process be able to pay for higher levels of welfare.

"The afflictions of our peoples are but a reflection of the Third Division levels of productivity and of incomes in which they are mired. These afflictions cannot be cured by charity or by vain search for social equity through the redistribution of wealth that has been created.

"In the end, the assured route to eradicating our peoples' poverty is not through providing this or the other enhancement in the quality of their lives with foreign grants, loans or other means of buying a better living on other taxpayer's money. It is through increasing their own productivity so that they can procure these improvements out of their own pockets," he said.

However, Mr Mensah said the Continent could only elicit the confidence and get the appropriate response from development partners through a process of re-examination of the fundamentals of national development and the mind-set regarding the global relationship between national development and Official Development Assistance. "We Africans have to stop believing that our Continent was created by God to exercise a permanent tenancy in the domains of Third World Poverty. We should stop measuring ourselves by how well we are doing in the Third Division and begin planning on how to get into the Second Division."

Mr Mensah said he was optimistic that African Leaders would reposition their thinking to understand that the manifestations of poverty on the Continent were the result of average productivity and not the result of insufficient aid or poor government or bad luck. He expressed the hope that the developed world would live by the pledge they had made in Gleneagles in 2005 to increase Overseas Development Assistance to the Continent to reach 0.7 per cent of Gross National Income by 2015.

Mr Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, said the Accra Conference would assess progress and commit to realistic time bound targets on aid disbursement to meet the Continent's infrastructure needs and also address financing challenges within the energy sector and especially explore the various financing options and find ways to encourage private sector contribution in dealing with the energy crisis on the Continent. 30 May 07