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ACCRA. — Africa’s continuous over-dependence on outsiders was the major stumbling block to the quest for completing the agenda of Pan Africanism and the African Renaissance, a senior diplomat said on Friday. “If Africans are to take full control of their natural resources and make the use of their human resources on the continent and abroad, the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism will smile in their graves,” Pavelyn Tendai Musaka, Zimbabwe’s Ambassador to Ghana and Dean of the African Diplomatic Corps in Ghana.
She was addressing the African Union at 50th high-level Africa forum and the 10th edition and 21st anniversary of Pan-African Historical Theatre Festival and Emancipation Day.Panafest and Emancipation Day are significant events aimed at healing the painful wounds of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that took millions of Africans away into the Diaspora.
Since 1998, however, Emancipation Day has been an annual event to recall horrors of the obnoxious slave trade and honour those who worked hard to overcome the challenges of that trade.
Musaka said the entire world was looking at Africa, as the last frontier for future economic development.
“A revolution mindset that harnesses all the available human and natural resources on the continent and off the shores of the continent holds the key to the stability and prosperity of the entire African race,” she said.
This year’s event is particularly significant as Ghana is hosting High Level Dialogue on Pan Africanism and the African Renaissance on the theme: Re-uniting the African Family: Pan Africanism and the African Renaissance”.
The events have over the years served as powerful tools to get Africans in the Diaspora to retrace their steps to Africa, either to visit, settle or invest in the country.
She urged the African people, especially the youths and women in different economic sectors within each African country to locate their respective counterparts in the different African countries and begin to collaborate directly with each other to enable the Africans to bring about economic independence once and for all in accordance with the vision Africa 2063.
Ghana’s Minister of State in charge of Public-Private- Partnership, Rashid Pelpuo, said now, once than ever before, Africans were being challenged to take charge of their own destiny.
“We must do all we can to take charge of the governance of our natural resources in the face of a wave of tremendously powerful interests which come carrying the promise of free trade and partnership,” he said. — Xinhua.
Online Reporter