Prime minister addresses COMESA summit

African governments must radically transform their economies to escape the "mire" of dependency, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi urged on Thursday.

Speaking at the summit of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), he said in a global market Africa would "sink or swim together". Meles called on African countries to build closer ties and restructure their economies to help overcome the burden of poverty. He said they must transform their current global trading position, which was detrimental to Africa’s development, into one that would benefit the continent.

"Our economies are small and un-diversified," he told the seventh heads of state meeting of COMESA in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. "Many of our countries are heavily dependent on foreign aid," added Meles, who was appointed chairman of COMESA at the summit.

"Much of government income in our countries depends on import duties. Most of our economic entities have been established in a highly protected environment. "In brief, most of our economies are mired in an environment dominated by rent-seeking activities," he told the delegates at the two day meeting held at the UN’s Economic Commission for Africa. He also called on COMESA to do more to ensure that the peoples of the continent played a key part in the economic integration.

COMESA, which was formed in 1994, comprises 20 countries in Africa who have signed up to closer integration and trade. They include Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Their combined financial muscle is said to be in the region of US $4.3 billion.

The heads of state attending the summit included Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Sudan’s Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir and Zambia’s Levy Mwanawasa, who is also chairman of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The president of Egypt, Husni Mubarak, the outgoing COMESA chairman, was unable to attend because of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Meles also argued that regional economic integration was the "bedrock" of the African Union, the pan-African body due to replace the OAU in July. He said closer ties would improve Africa’s position within the global market and help tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping the continent.

"Only vibrant and diversified economies can be successfully integrated. It is therefore clear that for the COMESA objectives to be fully achieved, we need to bring about a speedy and fundamental structural transformation of our economies. No amount of political goodwill will suffice in the absence of such a structural transformation of our economies," he stressed.

Meles told the heads of state that their economies were "too small and fragmented" to achieve a speedy transformation alone. "Thus we need closer ties amongst ourselves to speed up economic growth and transformation. We need to link up our transport and communication links, to integrate our infrastructure and harmonise our policies to the maximum extent possible," he said.