Europe and Africa: Towards a New Relationship - Webinar Address by President Michael D. Higgins to the Institute of International and European Affairs
Áras an Uachtaráin, 10 June 2020
A chairde,
I am delighted to be with you all today, even if it is to be in a virtual sense, to address the important topic of how we might pursue the most fruitful relations between Africa and the EU, how Europe might release itself from the narrative of the past and be part of a narrative of hope, be engaging as equals with our planet’s neighbouring continent of the young.
This is a topic on which I, as President of Ireland, have spoken on several occasions, a topic about which I feel passionately, for the quality of the European Union’s relationship with the continent of Africa and its people is a subject of such great importance, a topic which carries hope in its transformative potential for so many, yes for Africa, but also all of us as we seek to address the issues of our time, including the dysfunctional balance of economy, society, culture and, most importantly, ecology and the loss of biodiversity.
May I first thank the Institute for International and European Affairs for the invitation to address you, and compliment the Institute which has, in recent years, become such a critical resource for sharing ideas and evidence that are helping to influence policy at European and global levels.
Misconceptions of Africa
We have now the gift of new empirically based research published on Africa. For Europeans the issue is do we read it, respond to it, allow it to influence policy and our EU-Africa relationships and Agreements.
For example, the subtitle Carlos Lopes and George Kararach gave to their recent (2020) valuable work, Sustainable Change in Africa, is “Misperceptions, New Narratives and Development in the 21st Century”. I was struck by something most basic when I first read the book. It was how the Mercator projection has suggested to generations of Europeans that the continent of Africa is about the same size as Greenland. Greenland is in fact 14 times smaller. “Mercator’s 1569 cartographic definition of the world became one of the most influential and widely circulated world map projections throughout the 19th and 20th centuries”, the authors write.
The authors go on to point out that indeed the landmass of Africa is, “the size of India, China, the United States and most of Europe combined”, and that, “Africa’s blue or maritime economy is even bigger than its landmass”. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is about half the size of the European Union.
When it comes to the continent of Africa, we have so many misperceptions, however, to undo. ‘Misperceptions’ is perhaps misleading, for indeed the distortion of African realities has a long spectrum that includes, for example, the racist language of David Hume in his essay, “Of National Characters” in 1748, to the annual reports of certain extraction companies in contemporary times, and of course if we are to undo misperceptions, we must re-conceptualise, redo development theory and practice, international trade, architectures of debt and dependency. It is significant, too, that anthropology is missing as a tool in the contemporary accounts. That great intellectual and moral impulse to understand culture seems to have been consigned to 19th century history shelves with the decline of Empire, a project it served so well. Yet of course, it could yield, in contemporary times, valuable insights if utilised as alternative to some World Bank reviews.
Today Africa is the continent of the young, accounting for 20 percent of the young people of the world, a continent of over 1.3 billion people in 2018. It constitutes 16 percent of the world’s human population. It is, therefore, a continent on which the hopes of so much of our shared future rests. It is on this continent we might perhaps see the playing out to fruition of our efforts at achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, provide an adequate anticipation and response to climate change – in short, achieving that connection between economy, society, ecology and culture that we so urgently need and cannot postpone, involving, as it does, the future of the planet itself as a habitable space.
For Africans there is the urgent need for reducing poverty, for good security in the basic necessities of life, of delivering healthy living conditions, for universal basic services including education and healthcare, for peace and reconciliation and an end to conflict, and for an enduring, sustainable future built on prosperity in its widest, most fulfilling, inclusive sense.
For the achievement of a fruitful dialogue between the European Union and Africa, there are preliminary tasks to be accomplished at European level, one of the most important being abandoning any affected amnesia as to the brutal colonisation of previous times, acknowledging the detritus of imperial subjugations which surfaces too often, stirred by fingers of hands that are carrying the old intent.
For while Europeans choose to forget, Africans rightly remember. We in the European Union, must transact that painful memory if we are, as Hannah Arendt might put it, to stop the events of the past crippling us in the present and obstructing us in the future. I worry that we have not reached the point of critical sophistication that will do that. I recall the dismissive response I received to a quotation I made in one of my papers from one of Sankar Muthu’s books. I think it was Enlightenment against Empire. We do really need to be free and courageous in critiquing empire in the same way as we have been willing to set about critiquing the extremes and possible abuses of nationalism past and present.
Ireland and Africa
Ireland’s relationship with Africa is quite a unique one, be it from the work of Roger Casement, to contemporary non-governmental organisations and Irish Aid. It has, unlike the historical relationship of former empires, been largely one of identifying with the aspirations of Africans for lives of freedom from hunger, access to education, and achievement of inclusive rights, including the full rights of women to participation in all aspects of life. These are powerful foundations upon which to press upon the European Union the need to develop a future relationship with the continent of Africa, which will be one of African agency in a transformed Africa.
Ireland brings to the African table its own experience, not only of an economic, social, political domination, but also the experience of a suppressed culture, forced exile and, frankly, of racism, as Hume put it in the specific case of the Irish, they having missed out on the civilisation that he thought a Roman occupation might have brought them, thus were uncivilised, but, above all else, ‘lesser’.
Ireland welcomes the centrality of African agency in the new work on the transformation of Africa, and sees it as being an immensely valuable contribution, having a global significance as we re-define economics and its connection to ecology and culture.
Ireland has, from missionaries to aid and development workers, a special connection among African nations resulting from its contribution to education, and we can, as a result, be looked to as a source of leadership in other areas, such as addressing those unfair and imbalanced terms of trade that currently prevail which confine African produce to the lower end of the value chain, for example, confine Africa’s benefit from its coffee trade to a paltry 10 percent, and the appalling trade conditions imposed on coffee products produced in Africa that limit any gains in the value of finished products.
Not only as President of Ireland, but through a lifetime in Parliament, I have often stressed that Ireland needs to continue to deepen its diplomacy with the continent that will, after all, be the birthplace of over 2 billion people by 2050, a continent of such population that, quite scandalously, continues to be under-represented on the Security Council of the United Nations, allowed to present its own version of African needs and possibilities. Ireland’s deepening of diplomatic representation in Africa is currently underway, I am so glad to hear that.
It is not only in addressing the under-representation of the people of Africa that Ireland can give a lead. At the United Nations Ireland can show leadership in calling for an urgent review and redesign of the architecture of the global financial institutions, an architecture that for so long now passed purpose, an architecture that has not succeeded in preventing our planet, in ecological terms, being brought to the brink of survival itself, that has failed to eliminate global poverty, that has deepened inequality, that has lost cohesion between and within North and South, and has left a world where conflict is endemic, and never short of armaments produced in countries including those who speak of a peaceful world.
Given all of this and what Africa now faces, in conditions of pandemic, offers such as a suspension of six months’ interest on debt, as proposed by the G7, should be seen for what it is – a grossly inadequate gesture offered from a distance by those not sufficiently engaged with the human dimension of their proposals in a financialised global economy that eschews any notion of a moral compass.
Last month, Ireland become the 27th non-regional member of the African Development Bank. This is as an important addition to the deepening ties that will inform Ireland’s relationship to Africa and its people. The African Development Bank, and the African Development Fund it administers, can play an important role in fostering sustainable and inclusive social and economic growth and prosperity, helping the African continent to achieve its potential in a sustainable way as the continent of promise and opportunity. For Africa it is just that, a continent where transformation is already underway. In that we can be partners.
The African Development Bank is currently implementing a 10-year strategy to 2022, focused on two objectives: inclusive growth and green growth for Africa, aiming for a prosperity that is more equally shared and meets the needs of present generations without compromising the wellbeing of future generations. This also involves the taking into consideration of the differing social, economic, and environmental aspects that arise in the sustainable development of countries that have differences that must be recognised.
To achieve these objectives, the Bank has set five operational priorities, including infrastructure development, regional economic integration, private sector development, governance and accountability strengthening, and upscaling skills and technology training, together with three areas of special emphasis, namely fragile states, gender, and agriculture and food security. A disbursement of $6.6 billion occurred in 2018 to successful projects in these priority areas.
There have been many great achievements already resulting from such funding. For example, 100 percent of new lending from the African Development Bank on energy projects in 2017 was on renewables, up from 14 percent in 2015. Just last week, a new solar farm on the outskirts of Mogadishu should, according to its owners, quadruple power generation for the Somalian capital, whilst also cutting costs. It has provided 8 megawatts of clean electricity since March, and is predicted to provide 100 megawatts by 2022.
Technology has also given other benefits, contributing significantly to the enabling of democratic processes. In line with the freedoms that characterise democracy, today more Africans can access the internet, use mobile phones, and share information with the world at large. The total Sub-Saharan African population with internet access has almost tripled, from 7 percent in 2010 to nearly 22 percent in 2017. Likewise, the number of mobile phone subscriptions in Sub-Saharan Africa has almost doubled to 764 million in the same period, according to Daniel F. Runde’s analysis, The Role of the AfDB and the Future of Africa, published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in October last year.
Our membership of the African Development Bank and its trust fund is an investment in Africa’s potential, and Ireland’s partnership with these important regional multilateral institutions will both advance our shared, but redefined, development priorities. Membership and investment will open future opportunities for Irish science and technology in the region, as well as support projects that spur food security, sufficiency, poverty reduction and sustainable economic development at different levels across Africa.
Africa, ‘the smart continent’ of the future, with a civilisation of sufficiency and inclusion, can be an exemplar, and I believe a leader, in the better and inclusive use of technology.
COVID-19 and Africa
As our world, in all its different circumstances, continues to respond to the threat to individuals, families, communities, societies and economies, it is difficult to overstate the toll that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken – the lives cut short, the space and time for the expression of grief curtailed for those who have lost loved ones, lack of access, denial of liberty, those experiencing severe illness or who are vulnerable, livelihoods made insecure or lost for millions of families.
Coronavirus, being a global problem, necessitates a global response. Yet, it is so plainly evident that societies differ in their capacity to respond, such as those in Africa who are in a profoundly exposed position in terms of resources – for example, the proportion of the population that is reliant on the informal economy that prevails, and the consequent limitation that results on the measures that may be utilised in responding to COVID-19. While the pandemic is a global threat, our global vulnerability differs greatly. These differences test both our global solidarity and the architecture of our multilateralism now so much under threat.
COVID-19 is a reality in all countries of Africa. We should therefore remind ourselves that there is now an unprecedented opportunity for Europe to begin its journey towards a new contemporary and future shared ethical relationship, and do so not only as good regionalism, but also as an exercise in multilateralism, forging a new approach in its relationship with Africa, this time based on solidarity, one that will include a fundamental re-examination of how unfair trade and existing debt structures are impeding, not only the capacity to respond to COVID-19, but also the necessary transformations which a continent is getting underway, with an African agency that seeks a new form of partnership with its most proximate neighbour, the European Union.
May I suggest that now is not a time for retreating behind borders. In the African countries where COVID-19 has arrived in greatest numbers, there are immense problems and inequalities in terms of healthcare provision. The same is true of Latin and Central America.
Given such inadequacies of equipment and personnel, where it is most needed, there is a real risk that the pandemic could be difficult to contain across Africa and Latin America, and could result in mass fatalities and wider socio-economic problems, particularly in the possible event of a second wave of the virus. The prospect of a future vaccine does not come guaranteed, despite multilateral requests, as to its widespread availability in impoverished nations. There is a need for a global response as to the freedom and capacity of access of all to a vaccine that will have been probably developed with shared global research, State and private.
United Nations Secretary General Guterres has correctly underscored how, if COVID-19 is to be countered, richer countries must assist those less resourced, or potentially as he put it “face the nightmare of the disease spreading like wildfire in the Global South with millions of deaths and the prospect of the disease re-emerging where it was previously suppressed”.
The unresolved issues of hunger are now, in 2020, all exacerbated. According to recent research published by Oxfam, Coronavirus could double chronic hunger in Africa. Both the virus and the restrictions imposed to curb its spread are disrupting planting, harvesting, the movement of farm labour, and the scale and distribution of produce across Africa. There are urgent calls for borders to remain open for essential agri-food trade.
In this context, it is necessary to recognise how dangerously fragile, often shallow, at times contradictory, the practice of multilateralism has become, how some conflicts are being continued even as the United Nations recently called for a ceasefire to enable citizens and their governments to respond to the challenges posed by the Coronavirus.
In addition to the threat posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many African countries, particularly those in the east of the continent, are now in the throes of a second wave of desert locusts, many times worse than the plague that descended a number of months ago. The locusts present “an extremely alarming and unprecedented threat” to food security and livelihoods, according to the United Nations. A swarm of just half a square kilometre can eat the same amount of food in one day as 35,000 people.
Structural Problems
Yet, we must be cognisant that, once the COVID-19 crisis is over, all of the inherited and acquired structural impediments to Africa’s sustainable development remain. Perhaps the largest of these impediments remains debt. It is surely one of the greatest global failures – the continuing failure to achieve the will of the members of the United Nations in relation to making debt, and credit flows, serve as instrument rather than stranglehold – be it in relation to the Sustainable Development Goals, climate change, migration or pandemics.
Responding adequately to structural global inequalities can, by inter alia recognising African agency, provide Africa with the prospect of carving out a path of recovery of its deep and diverse cultures, a shared prosperity, an enduring peace, and a hopeful future, not only for all its citizens, but for us all, for the achievement, I repeat, of a sustainable connection between economy, society and ecology.
I use the term ‘agency’ very deliberately, as I agree with development economist and High Representative of the Commission of the African Union, Carlos Lopes, that it is through the creation of African agency – that capacity to act autonomously and independently, which has been denied to Africa at so many points during its colonial and post-colonial periods – that Africans will be enabled to undertake the necessary structural reforms so as to create a brighter, shared future.
There are some basics that it is necessary to repeat. The health of the populations of the planet must take precedence over any abstract version of global debt. Statistics illustrate how, for instance, in 2016, Angola spent nearly six times as much servicing external debt as it did on public health care. Fifteen countries in Sub-Saharan Africa spent more paying creditors abroad than on doctors and clinics at home. This is morally outrageous. Furthermore, Sub-Saharan Africa spends less than 5 percent of its total government expenditure on public health, a consequence, in part at least, of the debt-ridden nature of its economies. There is now an unanswerable case for a global campaign for Universal Basic Services.
When it comes to trade and the economy, recent low commodity prices have led to decreased revenues, with African exports having declined by approximately a third in recent months. The Chinese economic slowdown has impacted severely on African exports given the high dependency of many African countries on the Chinese market. Furthermore, many African countries collect relatively low levels of taxation revenue by international standards, as I have already stated, with estimates indicating that as much as 89 percent of people, in some states, and even regions, work in the informal economy, compounding the economic challenges facing the continent.
Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the least industrialised regions in the world, and the modern industry that is currently in place struggles to keep pace with what are usually referenced as international productivity metrics. If labour productivity has stagnated or declined in many African countries over the past 60 years, only to recover modestly since 2000, and GDP has tripled in the same period, serious wealth and income distribution questions are raised. Jobs distribute income, even if in some parts if our planet industrialisation has been irresponsible in ecological and human terms. Yet, there is an industrialisation, as Lopes and Kararach point out, that can be appropriate for Africa on best use of resources natural and human. Critical, too, is the transfer of science and technology on new terms.
The external shocks I referred to earlier, including China’s slowdown and falling commodity prices, as well as the widespread drought in Eastern and Southern Africa, have led some industries to become a drag on their economies rather than being engines of growth or available for structural transformation.
This is all the more worrying because Africa is still predominantly specialised in relatively low-technology industries with a huge dependence on agriculture. Findings from some of the better work in the development economics field suggest Africa’s long-term development would entail a diversified move away from exporting raw materials and the attendant reliance on high commodity prices, entry into more complex, advanced activities that yield higher value goods and services for export, thereby increasing the share of GDP derived from advanced manufacturing, and improving competitiveness vis-à-vis other world markets. What, then, are the prospects for these developments?
Let me quote, if I may, from Carlos Lopes and George Kararach’s book, Structural Change in Africa:
“Five decades of development planning have not yielded the 7 percent, which is the minimum required to double average incomes in a decade. Instead, there are a range of highly unequal and vulnerable economies that remain entrenched in poverty. The evolution of industrial policy in Africa mirrors the evolution of development planning. These include the import substitution policies that took root after the independence era, then planning was enthusiastically driven in the 1960s through to the 1970s; the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s when planning waned and the state was rolled back; and then this was followed by poverty reduction strategy papers in the 1990s when liberalisation, deregulation, and privatisation were entrenched as methods of economic management. The weaknesses in understanding Africa as well as its misrepresentation during these periods has a lot to do with the deficits in industrial production and the incidences of de-industrialisation. This is ironic since most governments implemented various industrial policy strategies and interventions to promote industrial development.
Manufacturing as a share of output and employment decreased or remained low over most of these periods. As African countries prepare to take their rightful places in the future global economy, they have a real opportunity to promote economic transformation through the industrialisation process by capitalising on the continent’s abundant natural resources, adding value to them, while also supporting the development of infant industries. The manufacturing sector in particular has been the engine of economic development for the majority of developed countries, and very few countries have developed their economies without a strong manufacturing base, so much so that the terms ‘industrialised’ and ‘developed’ are often used interchangeably when referring to such countries.”
As with many other global issues, establishing the root cause of Africa’s political and economic challenges is fundamental for understanding the dynamics of the African continent which, as Lopes and Kararach correctly identify, requires an understanding of how the issues of geography, economy and demography have influenced, and will continue to influence, Africa’s development.
Colonisation and Its Legacy
Returning, if I may, to the ethics of transformation and a meaningful multilateralism, it is critical to recall that, between the 1870s and 1900, Africa suffered European imperialist adventurism and aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonisation. Despite many African societies’ brave resistance, foreign domination was successfully imposed, and by the early twentieth century much of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, had been colonised by European powers.
The European imperialist push into Africa was motivated by factors that were not just economic, but also political, social, cultural and racist. The colonial drive followed the collapse of the profitability of the slave trade, its abolition and suppression, as well as the expansion of the European industrial revolution.
An interplay of economic factors – the imperatives of capitalist industrialisation including the demand for assured sources of raw materials, the search for guaranteed markets, and profitable investment outlets – as well as political factors, including inter-European power struggles and competition for pre-eminence, together with social factors, such as rising unemployment and poverty in Europe, all led to this ‘Scramble for Africa’.
The colonisation was characterised by frantic attempts by European commercial, military, and political agents to declare and establish a stake in different parts of the continent through inter-imperialist commercial competition, the declaration of exclusive claims to particular territories for trade, the imposition of tariffs against other European traders, and claims to sole control of waterways and commercial routes across Africa.
The arbitrary national boundaries that followed have been largely responsible as source for ethnic conflicts on the continent due to the forced separation of ethnic groups across states and the forced assimilation of others within states. Colonialism also replaced the pre-colonial governance structures with Western ones, creating a system of kleptocracy in some nations through the formation of hierarchical ruling structures. Economic rewards given to African elites created a dominant leading class at the expense of other Africans and the continent’s natural resources.
Despite the demise of colonialism, some elites have remained and maintained their relationships with former colonialists as part of a shared corruption in parts of Africa. Such elites are being continually rewarded for draining their states’ natural resources and thereby reinforcing inequality.
Colonialism, furthermore, created single-crop economies in societies that relied overwhelmingly on agriculture, sentencing African economies to the volatile whims of markets and market-based fluctuations, and exposure to crop failure. Forced integration of developing states into the international trading arena augmented the already widespread inequality between developed and developing states.
Central to colonisation was indirect rule and assimilation, and a consistent theme propagated by the imperialists was the portrayal of the indigenous Africans as uncivilised and uneducated. This racist notion, widely promulgated, legitimised the ill-treatment and exploitation of those who were colonised, including their relegation to the status of second-class citizens in their own countries.
Forging a New Relationship between Europe and Africa for an ‘African Enlightenment’
As to the future then, the basic physical conditions for economic transformation are challenging and to different degrees in many (but not all) African countries: small, often fragmented markets, poor infrastructure, remoteness, and sometimes a scarcity of relevant natural resources all play their part in the continued poor trade and wider economic performance of many African countries. Even when these factors are taken into account, however, there remains a large unexplained ‘residual’.
It is good, therefore, that a new generation of scholars, that include Professors Lopes and Kararach, are examining those structural features of the African economy that account for its past record and are serving to impose limitations on its future development. I am not sure, however, may I mischievously suggest, that they have departed sufficiently from the notorious Modernisation Theory, with its linear assumptions. Yet what is most important is their suggestion as to what is possible, and that will include, an appropriate form of industrialisation that can be ecologically well fitted and adjusted to local capacity.
If Europe is sincere about its wish to be a partner in enabling Africa to achieve an inclusive, sustainable and prosperous future, debt cancellation must be an intrinsic element of a new, authentic European-led response. It is my strong view that a temporary cancellation of debt interest would not suffice as an effective response. Rather, a much more radical approach is required to effectively relieve Africa’s debt burden, by restructuring, redefining and, in some cases, forgoing the bulk of outstanding debt. Such an approach would be a fitting demonstration of genuine European solidarity with our neighbours to the South. It could help to consign to the category of transacted painful memory so much of the horrendous consequences of hundreds of years of colonial and post-colonial hubris, exploitation and abuse.
There is such strong evidence that our current development models are in disarray or producing dysfunctional consequences. A new model must come from a genuinely inclusive dialogue. Enabling Africa to become self-sufficient and to develop sustainably will require giving agency to Africans to build a sustainable future for all Africans.
Why debt cancellation will help in this regard is by allowing strategic commodities that are held by the state to be used for the purpose of economic advancement for all, rather than serving debt repayments. Improving agency may also require alterations to the forms of bureaucratic and governmental systems in place in some African nations so as to achieve inclusivity and accountability. It will also necessitate that there is a willingness on the part of the State to work inclusively with civil society in its engagements with external partners.
African agency is about not the freedom to imitate falling paradigms. Neither should African agency be solely seen as emanating from, and being exerted solely by, governmental elites. Rather, it can be a by-product of independent civil society and progressive movements across Africa at individual and societal levels, working with entrepreneurial versions of the State towards shared goals.
Agency also relates importantly to the multilateral level. The ongoing under-representation of African nations in international organisations, including the United Nations, is a major cause for concern. We should all be concerned at this under-representation. We continue to witness an historic, unjust under-representation of an Africa which was still ruled by colonial powers when the United Nations came into existence and the Security Council established. Africans must be allowed to have influence in Council decisions affecting their own continent. The increasing effect of climate change on international peace and security gives this proposal even greater urgency.
A 21st-century ‘African Enlightenment’ is underway and, may I suggest, it can draw on sources deeper and richer than any limited European 18th-century rationalism. For example, it can draw on a diversity of pre-imperialist sources of wisdom, as well as the vigour and energy that comes from being the continent of the young on our planet.
To enable such a transformation requires us Europeans to re-conceptualise development models in relation to Africa and indeed elsewhere, to emphasise the need to seize the possibilities of transformational change, to be partners, partners with a listening capacity, as we offer our help in the efforts to build a sustainable future for the planet.
As to what is already underway in Africa, we have examples available to us. We can build on excellent initiatives already receiving assistance from the European Union, such as the Great Green Wall, a project led by the African Union which aims to transform the lives of millions of people by creating a mosaic of green and productive landscapes across North Africa, combatting the effects of desertification.
The key structural changes that are required in relation to Africa have been identified, as I have said, by Carlos Lopes, George Kararach and many others. These include changing politics, respecting Africa’s diversity, embracing a deeper understanding of the policy and historical context, not defeated by it or its consequences move to sustainable industrialisation, increasing agricultural productivity and diversity, building a new social contract, adjusting to climate change, and inserting agency in the relationship with Africa’s key partners, especially China.
An effective European input into an African 21st-century Enlightenment requires an agreed and appropriate definition of what is meant by ‘structural transformation’, as Lopes and Kararach have written in the work I have already quoted, Structural Change in Africa: Misconceptions, New Narratives and Development in the Twenty-First Century.
It requires an understanding that, while Africa seeks transformation, it is not alone, and that any such transformation must be grounded in eco-social sustainable policies. It requires, too, a proper understanding of the role of new forms of sustainable industrialisation in any transformation, as well as other key enablers such as innovative development financing.
Conclusion
Whatever policy proposals that are made now and in the future must accept that it is past time that the residues of the imperialist mindset, succeeded as it was by ‘the idea of Progress’, of Modernisation Theory with its ethnocentric linearities, which must be eschewed from informing assumptions in policies, diplomacy and scholarship.
I so agree with Carlos Lopes that such residues continue to permeate modern-day misconceptions of Africa, often propagated in ignorance by the media, misconceptions, misreadings that are not only cartographic, but also pervade work on risk perceptions, levels of conflict, problems of political stability and other spheres of human existence.
Such misconceptions far too often portray a continent in continual crisis, despite that continent having made significant progress in recent years. Such accounts usually form the basis of an unhelpful and inauthentic African narrative that portrays a gap between perception and reality regarding its transformative potential.
I am not for an instant discounting the need for institutional change. Of course, an overall commitment to good governance and state well-being is needed in many African states as a prerequisite, but this cannot be used as an excuse for shirking Europe’s moral and ethical obligation to progressing and being partners in Africa’s overdue economic and wider social transformation.
We need now, all of us, to move beyond our prescriptive approach to dealing with African challenges, an approach that often resulted in programmes of aid in the past that were externally imposed, conceived and applied without proper understanding of the crucial need for African agency, that were offered, delivered, even imposed without due cognisance of history and the context of Africa as a diverse, fast-changing continent. Perhaps it is even an appropriate time to return to using old tools in our task such as anthropology.
I agree with Carlos Lopes that a paradigm shift in African Union-European Union relations is now urgently needed. Our challenge as Europeans must, therefore, be to forge that new relationship with Africa, by arriving at a new place founded on real multilateralism and solidarity, so that we can be ethical partners in the necessary structural change that can deliver universal basic services and transformational prosperity in Africa, and an enduring, sustainable future for the continent of the young, on which those of us who believe in global social justice and solidarity place so much collective hope.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.
Beir Beannacht.
Thank you all for listening and participating.