Source: African Union
WELCOME REMARKS OF THE AFRICAN UNION COMMISSION CHAIRPERSON, H.E. DR. DLAMINI ZUMA TO THE WOMEN'S CONSULTATIVE CONFERENCE ON PAN AFRICANISM, RENAISSANCE AND AGENDA 2063

12-13 May 2013, Addis Ababa

Programme director

Your Excellency, the Deputy President of Gambia and Your Excellency, Vice Prime Minister of Zimbabwe - both strong activists for women's rights

Welcome to Mme Ruth Neto, from PAWO, linking the different generations

Distinguished Presenters and Panellists

Excellencies and Participants

Representatives from the UN agencies

Commissioners and AU staff

Ladies and Gentleman

Thank you for accepting our invitation to participate in this consultative Conference. We thought this gathering is critical, on the eve of the 50th Anniversary Summit, to ensure that women's voices are heard loud and clear as we reflect on the past, assess our current state and plan for the future.

We celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of PAWO last year, but it went quietly. This is still the story of women's lives. But it must change.

The 50th anniversary celebration of the OAU and AU is happening in two phases: the first on 24 and 25 May 2013, with the main celebrations in Addis Ababa and others across Africa and the world.

On 24 May we will have celebrations with the youth engaged in an Intergenerational dialogue with current and former Heads of State and Government, and with President Kaunda who attended the first Summit in 1963, linking all generations. This will take place in Africa Hall, where the OAU was formed in 1963.

During May different sectors will have meetings, starting with this Consultative Conference of Women. On 24 May there is a meeting of the Pan African Chamber of Commerce and Industry, another meeting of African Editors and a host of other sectors during the week of 19-24 May. This will thus be a celebration of both state and governments and non-state actors. The Youth dialogue and other meetings of civil society will be part of the record of the Anniversary Summit and will inform the Summit Proclamation that will be adopted by our Heads of State and Government (HOSG).

Saturday, 25 May will be the main Anniversary Summit, and the speeches will be by HOSG from Africa and the rest of the world, discussing the same theme we are talking about today. This will culminate in a celebration, with all these events broadcasted live across Africa.

The second phase will be the Yearlong 50th Anniversary activities, in every country and in the Diaspora, allowing sufficient time for reflecting and planning for the future. We will ensure that wherever Africans or people of African descent are - there should be celebrations and reflection.

As part of the Yearlong celebration there will be discussions about the future. It is necessary to celebrate our heroines, learn lessons from the past, but we must focus on the next fifty years. The past generations defined their strategic mission and fulfilled it. As Franz Fanon said, it is now time for us to define our mission.

During the year, we want all sectors to meet and discuss the past, but more importantly the future. Where do we want to see Africa in the next fifty years? This is what we want you to discuss. You are a small sample of women, and when you get back home we want you in your sectors to discuss with more women the question where we want Africa to be in the next fifty years. Whether you are in politics, the arts, judiciary, development, business, all areas of human endeavour, we want you to be part of it.

The African agenda for 2063 cannot be defined by governments alone; it must involve all of us - in every sector of society. All of us must have a say on the African dream into the next five decades. If we don't do that, the narrative from Africa will come from other people. It is critical that the narrative and agenda come from us; so that our friends know where we want to be and can help us in that agenda. If we don't have a roadmap, we may take detours that may take us where we need to be.

There are discussions on the global post-2015 agenda, it is a global agenda, but we must have our distinct African agenda. We make our input into the post-2015 agenda as part of the global citizens, but it is not the sum-total of the African agenda.

For instance, without pre-empting the discussions, we say we want to be prosperous in the next five decades. Those who are prosperous today were in the same position as us fifty years ago. Thirty years ago China was as poor as Malawi, and where are they today, because they set their mind that they will overcome poverty and move towards prosperity.

I think it is possible for Africa to be prosperous and at peace with itself before 2063. Some call it too ambitious, but I think it's possible if we work to achieve it.

There are voices that say by 2030 we must have eradicated extreme poverty. I don't agree with it. It's not cool to be poor, as young people say. We must eradicate poverty. If we set the target to only eradicate extreme poverty, it means we say that it's ok to be poor; we just don't want to be extremely poor. Is that what we want for our children? That is why it's important for Africa to define where it wants to be.

That is why we haven't given you many documents, because we want your original ideas, we don't want you to be confined by critiquing documents, but to have your ideas, which will then be added to our documents later by the drafters. We want a free flow of ideas.

Dear Participants and Sisters,

From the side of the African Union Commission, we put together ideas, and central to this is our overarching vision that Africa must be integrated, prosperous and at peace with itself. In this regard, a few ideas and priority issues:

Firstly, what are our assets and how can we accelerate our developments, so that we set milestones towards African prosperity, peace and modernisation? The EU just received the Nobel Peace prize, showing they are at peace with itself - and yet just in the last century, they dragged us all into two World War and then only after this devastation, did they then concentrate on massive reconstruction. So it is indeed possible, despite what we have today, to have a peaceful continent.

The AUC believe that our most precious and abandoned asset remain our people. We must invest in them, we are more than a billon strong, by 2050 we will be more than 2 billon strong. By 2025 a quarter of the world's under-25 year olds will be in Africa. We must investment in our youth, women and all our people to unleash their creativity and energy. Women of Africa remain more than half of our continental population, and we give birth to the other half. Prosperity and peace can therefore not be achieved without them.

Secondly, our land and agriculture is another asset and a driver for prosperity. Africa is a huge continent. On our landmass we can fit in the USA, China, India, and W Europe and there will still be space for Japan and a few other countries. That is how big we are, never mind the maps, just by the size of our continent.

If we look at the world, most countries have exhausted their arable land, but Africa still has most of the reserves of arable land, about 60% of global reserves. It will however be important how we deal with it: we must increase production, have more land under cultivation, process what we produce, and be able to distribute it in Africa and to export. It must be a key part of our industrialisation strategy.

We must also be careful, because everybody is looking at this land. Some are already acquiring huge tracks of land in Africa with very long leases. However, what they grow, they take out lock, stock and barrel and in raw form to their countries. We must find a way to get them to beneficiate in our countries, because that's how we create quality jobs. If Africans are only farm labourers, and not involve in agro-processing, we will remain poor. Africa must also have access to these products when our people need it. We must therefore ensure that we engage our governments on these matters, and we need to develop an AU policy on this matter.

Thirdly, we have other mineral, energy and natural resources, which must be used for the benefit of our people and to industrialise, modernise and build African prosperity.

Fourthly, we must continue to build peace and inclusive governance as critical to our development.

Fifthly, there is the issue of infrastructure. For example, SSA produces the same amount of energy as Spain, and yet Africa is twenty times more populous than this country. This shows that if we continue on the current trajectory and pace of infrastructure development, we will not move towards prosperity. With all our infrastructure development - energy, transport, ICT and other - we must use the most modern technology and knowledge, so that we leapfrog our development.

A further challenge is transport for intra-Africa trade. For example, getting rice from one part of Ghana to another is more expensive than importing from Thailand. We must therefore ensure that we modernise and greatly expand our infrastructure to facilitate intra-Africa trade.

Africa in its infrastructure development must think modernisation - why can't we think of our grandchildren traveling on a speed train from Gambia to Mombasa, from Cape Town to Dakar, with a highway next to it that link all our capitals? We must think of infrastructure that links us, moving goods and people across the continent. India and China will between them in the next two decades be sending more than 300 million tourists across the world. How much of that will come to Africa, will depend on the infrastructure to move around. If we don't have the infrastructure, they will go elsewhere.

Sixthly, we must think creatively about mobilising resources, including alternative sources of infrastructure - to fund infrastructure and our development on a larger scale and at a faster rate.

We must therefore build our continental and regional institutions, not only for governments but for all of us, especially women.

Finally, in all of these areas, women and youth must be there: in business, they should be there, in political leadership, they should be there. We will say there are enough women when we have true gender parity and 50% of women everywhere; unlike now, when we can count them on one hand. We have two Presidents - Liberia and Malawi - and a few more Vice Presidents. We must move towards a situation when we don't have to count them, because they are enough.

We must ensure that by the end of the African Decade of Women in 2020, we see tangible improvements in the situation of women.

In conclusion, let us recall the words of that great son of our soil from Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara who in 1987 said:

'We must understand how the struggle of (African women) is part of a worldwide struggle of all women and, beyond that, part of the struggle for the full rehabilitation of our continent.

Thus, women's emancipation is at the heart of the question of humanity itself, here and everywhere. The question is thus universal in character.'

The modernisation and prosperity of Africa, women are at the heart and should be at the heart. If they are not, we shall never reach our goal.

We look forward to fruitful deliberations. I thank you