Africa must fully own African renaissance - J. H. Mensah

Accra, July 27, GNA - Mr. Joseph Henry Mensah, a senior statesman, economist and politician, has said African renaissance would only take off when it was wholly owned, designed and implemented by Africans themselves.

"This African Renaissance must be wholly owned, designed and implemented by Africans themselves or it would not take off," he said when he delivered the seventh in the series of monthly Golden Jubilee lectures to mark the 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence. The theme for the lecture was, "Towards the African Renaissance; Contributions of an Economist. Mr. J. H. Mensah spoke on the topic: "Can Africa of the 21st century climb this mountain."

He noted that history had shown renaissances of European, Asia and Latin American took off and succeeded because they were initiated and carried through by the leaders and peoples of those continents, saying that Africans had no choice but to do same.

Mr. Mensah, who is MP for Sunyani East, observed that during the post-colonial and post-independence renaissance of the Third World in the 70s and 80s, the economies of independent African states remained largely stagnant while Asian and Latin American countries reached middle-income levels one after the other.

"Here in Africa after 50 years not a single country has been able to make that transition yet - in the decade-and-a-half before the end of the 20th century the number of undernourished Africans actually increased by some 45 million mouths, twice the population of Ghana," he said.

He blamed the state of African economies on lack of faith and confidence of African leaders in themselves, and in their peoples to initiate and manage the necessary change needed to lift African states from the doldrums of poverty into globally competitive economies. "One of Africa's worst legacies from the era of political darkness and economic stagnation in the early decades of independence is that too many of the important actors are simply unable to believe in their own capacity to bring about change, to project their own and their neighbours' circumstances unto the new plane."

Mr. Mensah said that the mind-set of African leaders was to blame Africa's over-dependence on imperialists and to launch and drive a wide-range of African renaissance in post-independence era. He noted that during the early post-independence renaissance, more and more African leaders sought to entrench themselves in political power over and above the interest of the masses, saying that as a result Africa had remained largely unchanged as those leaders themselves did nothing to bring change.

He referred to the Grand Debate on Union Government at the 9th African Union summit in Accra, saying that it was uncertain whether that could have been a platform for the new African renaissance, considering the focus of interest of the 53 African leaders that emerged at the summit.

"It may be that those leaders who have developed the self-confidence to think in such terms should find a way of banding together to develop, sell and implement the idea," he said, in reference to those who advocated "African Union Government now" as a way of launching the African renaissance.

Mr. Mensah, however, noted that whereas Africans would be expected to design and completely own the African renaissance, it was necessary to tap on the existing support from the international community, especially funds in the private sector, to enable the continent to reach middle-income levels within set times.

He said it was not enough to ask Africa's development partners to back off and allow Africans to own and manage their own development, adding that as things were now, too many of the decisions that could make or break the African renaissance were unfortunately within the power of the development partners.

Mr. Mensah noted that as much as development had a critical role to play in the African renaissance, it was also imperative for African states to be given the opportunity to exercise some amount of financial freedom in order to reach high economic heights within the shortest possible time.

"African states should exercise financial freedom in accessing the vast international circulation of private investable funds. It is principally that circulation of private money rather than the flows of Official Development Assistance (ODA), which has fuelled all the contemporary instances of successful emancipation of countries out of Third World status," he said.

In that regard, he noted that for countries like Ghana, which had benefited from debt cancellation by their development partners, there should be a limit on how long those development partners could constrain and influence the development financing policies of such beneficiary countries.

"A lot of the multilateral debts cancelled by the World Bank and International Development Agencies (IDAs) would have been subject to servicing and repayment obligations for the next 20 years.

"And so will Ghana's external resources mobilization policies remain subject to World Bank surveillance over the next 20 years?" He also cited the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) as one of the important instruments that could facilitate African economic renaissance provided Africans were able to derive optimum benefit by strategically diversifying their export base to rake in a greater chunk of the trillions of dollars AGOA promised, 90 per cent of which was currently benefiting the American side of the AGOA trade.