Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan on Saturday said there might be external forces impinging on Africa’s growth by providing deadly weapons to destroy the continent through terrorism.
He said this to African leaders in Abuja at the 7th Joint Annual Meeting of the Economic Community of African Conference of African Ministers of Finance.
“Whenever you mention security, I always remember that sometimes when you look at the characters that carry the weapons in turbulent areas, including the Northern part of Nigeria, you see a young person carrying AK 47 equivalent of 1000 U.S. dollars.
“But the total thing he wears in the body is not up to 50 U.S. dollars; so where is the money coming from that they use in buying these weapons to kill and increase our problems.
“We need to find out if there are external forces that don’t want Africa to grow by providing these weapons.
“So we should all work as a team and share knowledge on social financial options for regional infrastructure projects.
He asked the leaders present at the conference to focus on issues affecting the continent especially in the areas of corruption and insecurity and come out with practicable recommendations.
President Jonathan said African leaders should prioritise the structural transformation of African economy if they must achieve regional industrialisation initiative.
“‘The theme of this conference, industrialisation for inclusive and transformative development in Africa is of special relevance to Africa at this time.
“Here in Nigeria it corresponds with the transformation agenda and ongoing programme of national renewal.
“The structural transformation of African economy must continue to be a core priority to close the poverty gap and industrialisation must be key for transformation,” the president said.
He said African economies, in the 1980s and 1990s, went through many challenges and were saddled with high foreign debts.
According to him, the GDP growth of most countries was about two per cent on the average but has reversed recently.
“Our foreign debts are in decline and the foreign direct investments are positively coming up in the continent.
“In fact, African Diaspora are also investing robustly in our economies and in the past decade African economy has grown to about five per cent,” Mr. Jonathan said.
He said the benefits of the positive economic growth had been restricted by inequality, noting that countries must work together for the benefits to spread to the grassroots.
He said that although many of the African economies had been classified as middle income, frontiers and MINT economies, they still share common challenges.
He noted that some of the challenges which need to be fixed include job creation, industrialisation and building social safety nets.
“We need to focus on industrialisation as a backbone for our structural transformation,” he added.
Mr. Jonathan noted that the impact of industrialisation in countries such as Malaysia, Taiwan, and Brazil among others remained relevant; adding that Nigeria had continued to learn from them.
He added that the launch of Nigeria’s industrial plan was to boost the sector from four per cent of GDP to 10 per cent by 2017.
He said the plan focuses on four areas of light manufacturing, agro business, petrochemicals as well as solid minerals and metals.
This, he said, might not take off until the nation’s infrastructure was fixed adding that same would be applicable for the continent.
He said Nigeria had made infrastructure core priority and has transparently done the power sector privatisation as well as the launch of the construction of N117 billion second Niger Bridge.
He called for efforts to ensure that positive economic growth in the region was translated to jobs to change the lives of Africans.
“As we grow our economies it’s our obligation that we carry everyone along; we can learn from some of the social programmes introduced by Latin American countries.
“We must ensure that the social protection programmes will become financially sustainable and also reach the reality of those that need our support,” he said.
He expressed the hope that good industrialisation plan and trade would help to consolidate the positive economic growth witnessed in the region.