The Japanese prime minister said on Saturday in Tunis that Japan wants to help “quality growth” in Africa and announced “investments of $30 billion (about 30 billion euros)” over three years.
Japan gives “priority to an approach that values human investment and quality growth,” Fumio Kishida said in a speech at the opening of the two-day proceedings of the 8th Ticad Summit (Tokyo International Conference on African Development).
These funds, “private and public”, will have to be dedicated to “promoting a green economy” that will benefit from an envelope of four billion dollars, said Kishida, who spoke by video conference from Tokyo due to having contracted covid-19.
“To improve the lives of Africans, we will also provide up to five billion dollars co-financed with the African Development Bank” (AfDB), Kishida added, including one billion dollars for “debt restructuring”.
At the previous Ticad in 2019, former prime minister Shinzo Abe warned Africa about the danger of accumulating “excessive” debt, in an allusion to China.
Beijing has steadily increased its influence in the region in recent years through its ambitious “Silk Roads” infrastructure project.
Japan also wants to help the continent in the face of the shortages resulting from the war in Ukraine, to the tune of $300 million in co-financing with the ADB for “food production and the training of 200,000 people in agriculture”.
Twenty African leaders (heads of state or government) are attending Ticad, according to Tunisian sources, as well as 5,000 people invited to a business forum and parallel conferences.
Among the heads of state present is the President of Guinea-Bissau, Umaro Sissoco Embalo.
In his speech at the opening of the event, Tunisian President and summit host Kais Saied called for the “joint search for the means for Africans to realise the dreams and hopes of the first generation after independence”.
Said also praised the Japanese success that has managed to “achieve development while preserving their culture and traditions.”
Senegalese head of state Macky Sall, current president of the African Union, paid tribute to the “benchmark partnership” with Japan, hailing “concrete results in agriculture, health, education, hydraulics”.
Since its creation in 1993, the Ticad summits, co-organised with the United Nations, the World Bank and the African Union, have generated 26 development projects in 20 African countries.
For Sall, African priorities are “the quest for pharmaceutical sovereignty” with increased (local) production of vaccines and medicines and “food sovereignty”.
Africa has 60 percent arable land, significant water resources and labour, but wants “investments for beneficial cooperation,” he stressed.
The continent would also like “a reallocation of special drawing rights” from the IMF to help recover from the economic effects resulting from the covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Sall argued.
The African Union president-in-office said that “Africa is also calling for the suspension of debt interest by the G20” and asked for a place in this group of 20 major economies “to ensure better support for the continent’s interests”.
According to Sall, this could materialise “at the next G20 summit in Bali” in November.
Before it began, the conference suffered a diplomatic setback with the departure of the Moroccan delegation and the withdrawal of the ambassador to Tunis, in reaction to the arrival at Ticad of the leader of the Polisario Front and President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), Brahim Ghali, who is fighting for independence in the territory of Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco.
Defending itself for having abandoned its “traditional neutrality”, Tunis, for its part, recalled its ambassador to Morocco, assuring that the SADR had been invited by the African Union, of which it is a member.
Macky Sall said he “regretted Morocco’s absence because of a lack of consensus on a question of representation”, hoping that “this problem will find a solution”.
The Ticad is politically important for President Kais Said, the protagonist a year ago of a palace coup through which he assumed all powers, in addition to the economic point of view, because Tunisia in crisis hopes to attract investors for 80 projects that could create 35,700 jobs.
Lusa
