Oceanic bank boss charges African leaders on infrastructural development

04.02.2008

Chief Executive of Oceanic Bank International, Dr. (Mrs.) Cecilia Ibru, has urged African leaders to see infrastructural development as ultimate public goods that would bring the desired economic growth and development to the continent.

She said this while presenting the declaration on African’s industrial drive, put together by the United Nations (UN) Global Compact and the African Private Sector to the African Heads of States at the 10th Ordinary Session of the African Union held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last week.

Addressing over 35 African heads of states and governments and scores of diplomats, African ministers, heads of UN organs, including the Secretary General of the UN, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, and international observers on recipes for industrial development in Africa, she said African states had to jointly collaborate on ways to foster key infrastructural development that would remove all barriers to the movement of persons, transfer of goods and services across the continent.

“ Achieving this will lead to landmark progress in our quest to deepen regional and global trade and also consolidate our fragmented markets to a point where Africa as a continent can achieve greater competitiveness in global markets,” she said.

Bemoaning the poverty level in Africa, where more than 218 million people live in poverty, especially in the rural areas where more than 70 per cent of the continent’s poor people live off agriculture, she said empowering the poor could only be an opportunity for value creation, as the population of over 800 million people represented a huge market for business opportunities.

She challenged the African leaders to leverage on the population of over 800 million, comparable to India’s 1.2 billion and china’s 1.3 billion to transform the economies.