Africa’s Security Marked by Terrorism, Resurgence of Unconstitutional Changes: AUC Chairperson

113

February 5/2022/ENA/ The security situation in Africa is deeply marked by the metastasis of terrorism and the dangerous resurgence of unconstitutional changes, Chairperson of African Union Commission Moussa Faki Mahamat said.

Speaking at the opening of 35th African Union Summit today, the chairperson said the expansion of terrorism is taking an unprecedented scale on the continent.

Moreover, he added that terrorism and unconstitutional changes establish causal links known to all. One often finds its pretexts in the significance and expansion of the other, and the necessary struggle against the latter produces the illusion that the second is the response to proven failures in the struggle against the first.

According to the chairperson, "the security situation on the continent now calls for a real new approach which should question our peace and security architecture and its correlation with the new destabilizing factors in Africa."

In the absence of this burst of intelligence and decision, the chairperson has serious questions about the future of the flagship project to silence the guns on a fixed date.

Faki noted that the dangerous expansion of evil requires stronger international mobilization and more fruitful, more concrete, and active inter-African solidarity.

"It is particularly disconcerting to see, here and there, the vague desire for non-African commitments to support the African countries under attack, while the tenuous ray of African solidarity only allows us to see the immensity of the African paralysis vis-à-vis neighboring houses set ablaze."

The context marked by these two scourges would have made it possible to glimpse hope if the world were not one where national selfishness, withdrawal into oneself and the collapse of the values of solidarity and generosity, fruits of our common humanity visibly fade, he stated.

The chairperson underscored that the profound and irrefutable truth is that no part of international society can be reassured about its fate when all the other parts are not.

Faki observed that there are many attempts to approach Africa and this no doubt indicates an increased interest in the continent, but this interest has not yet frankly translated into a substantial developmental consideration in favor of Africa.

“The idea, a mirrored time of a Marshal plan in favor of the continent, gradually flew away. I am not far from thinking intensely that such a plan, however necessary, will never come from the outside world,” the chairperson noted.

The African leadership is more than ever strongly challenged for a surge in the mobilization of endogenous resources revealed by the immense potential of the continent.

“There is no salvation except in this African direction for Africa,” he underlined.

Pointing out the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the continent, Faki said the impact of COVID-19 resulted in a 2.1 percent contraction in growth in 2020 and an increase in the debt ratio by 10 points of GDP.

Africa, due to the insufficiency of external financing to compensate for the low rate of its savings, will not be able to regain the dynamics of its growth before the onset of COVID -19.

Active in the mobilization of financial resources in favor of the continent both by the reduction, even the cancellation of the debt and by the mobilization of the special drawing rights, Africa's strategy will focus on the identification, even the invention of other innovative sources of financing and reducing the harmful effects of the pandemic on the continent's economies with their well-known structural weaknesses, the chairperson elaborated.

“Our great challenge is and remains, in this area, the acquisition of autonomy in the financing of our own development through an energetic fight against illicit capital flows, through the reform of our fiscal policies and through the acceleration of implementation of African financial institutions.”

Ethiopian News Agency
2023