News
Korea is a model for Africa’s industrialization, says Adesina
53rd Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank opened in Busan, Korea, on Monday with a call on African Governments to create the right environment for the private sector to lead the continent’s industrial revolution. Participants also advocated for a balance between the role of the State and the private sector.
Korea was presented as a good model for industrialization which African countries can learn from.
“Korea’s example is incredible. Korea was as poor as any African country in the 1960s with a low per capital income. Today, thanks to the determination of its people and its commitment to industrialization, Korea is the 11th biggest economy in the world, an example Africa should learn from,” said African Development Bank President, Akinwumi Adesina at a media breakfast.
Discussions around the media breakfast table focused on the theme of the 2018 Annual Meetings, “Accelerating Africa’s Industrialization,” and the need to tell the great stories of Africa – the story of a resurgent continent ready to take its rightful place in the industrial world.
“If you look at countries that have industrialized – China, South Korea, Singapore and many others – the role of the State was clear. One of the things that I think we need to take out of this conversation is that the State has a great role to play in Africa’s industrial revolution, particularly in terms of industrial policy, providing direction, support for infrastructure, and directing capital to particular industries,” he stressed. “Ethiopia is a very good example.”
Adesina explained that industrialization was selected as the theme of the 2018 Annual Meetings to further showcase what Africa can learn from a country like Korea.
“There is nowhere better than Korea to address this theme. Korea’s incredible success over the last 60 years provides a perfect model to the African Development Bank to redouble its efforts towards Africa’s economic development. Africa is a tremendously blessed continent, but it needs to industrialize, create lots of jobs, and be more competitive in the global market.”
For Africa to witness true agricultural transformation, technologies need to reach farmers to enhance productivity. This was the message of the Leadership4Agriculture Forum, held on Day 1 of the meetings.
“We cannot say we have leadership when we still have 65 percent of the land in Africa uncultivated. We must develop solutions to agriculture and ensure that the sector can grow to a US $1-trillion business,” Adesina said.
Participants in Monday’s Leadership4Agriculture session included Ministers and key partners involved in the development of agricultural industrialization of the continent. They emphasized the need to enhance the competitiveness of Africa’s agriculture sector and to develop industrial value chains required to power the growth of the sector to a world-class industry.
Mima Nedelcovych, President and Chief Executive, Initiative for Global Development, said the African agriculture sector required efforts to improve its competitiveness and called for reforms to ensure that low-interest rate lending is available to the agriculture sector.
“We have to take action as well as talk. Talk is important, but we also want to take people to task,” said Jennifer Blanke, the Bank’s Vice-President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development, on moving past discussing agricultural challenges to executing solutions for them.
How to leverage the continent’s youth to accelerate economic prosperity through industrialization was the focus of a session on “Bridging innovation and industry: African youth solving continental challenges.”
Badr Idrissi, a young Moroccan industrialist, co-founded ATLAN Space, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence and drone technology to solve some socio-economic problems. The innovation has helped Morocco to effectively fight illegal fishing.
“They say that artificial intelligence is not meant for Africa. We are here to prove that wrong,” Idrissi said.
Idrissi used his 12-year international work experience at Microsoft and Nokia to develop and provide tech solutions, which have created employment for several young Moroccans.
In Kenya, a young banker, Lorna Rutto, quit her job to co-found EcoPost, a social enterprise that has created thousands of sustainable jobs for people in marginalized communities, in addition to conserving the environment.
“I was inspired by what I thought was going wrong in my community. Trees were being cut down and plastic waste was all over the place,” Rutto told the session. “It was very scary for me to resign a good bank job, but I had to fulfil my ambition as an entrepreneur. That was when I developed the idea that waste was a resource and not a thing to throw away.”
EcoPost has so far transformed over 3 million kilograms of plastic waste into plastic lumber, saved over 500 acres of forest and helped mitigate climate change in Kenya.
Adesina commended the young entrepreneurs for converting challenges into opportunities and urged them to continue representing the industrialization of Africa.
“Young people are not just the future of Africa, they are the present,” said Adesina. “They represent entrepreneurship and energy. This must be nurtured, harnessed and scaled up to propel Africa’s industrial revolution and the Bank is here to harness that.”
Dangote Petroleum Refinery has made headlines by announcing a further reduction in the price of diesel, dropping it from ₦1200 to ₦1000 naira per litre.
The refinery’s decision comes on the heels of its recent supply at a significantly reduced price of ₦1200 per litre, which was introduced three weeks ago, signifying a remarkable 30 per cent decrease from the previous market price of approximately ₦1600 per litre.
This substantial reduction in diesel prices at Dangote Petroleum Refinery is expected to reiterate positively throughout various sectors of the economy, potentially serving as a catalyst in alleviating the persistently high inflation rate in the country.
In a statement last week, Aliko Dangote, Africa’s wealthiest individual and the owner of the refinery, expressed his optimism regarding the potential impact of the price reduction on inflation in Nigeria.
“I believe that we are on the right track. I believe Nigerians have been patient, and I also believe that a lot of goodies will now come through. There’s quite a lot of improvement because if you look at it, one of the major issues that we’ve had was the naira devaluation that has gone very aggressively up to about ₦1900,” he remarked.
As anticipation builds around the implications of this move by Dangote Petroleum Refinery, stakeholders and consumers alike remain hopeful for the positive effects it could bring to the Nigerian economy in the coming months.
More than 50,000 Russian military personnel have died during the Ukraine conflict, the BBC reported Wednesday, citing its own reporters, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers.
They found that more than 27,300 Russian soldiers died during the second year of the war, a 25-percent increase on the first year.
BBC Russian, Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022, using open-source information from official reports and the media, as well as using satellite images of Russian cemeteries to estimate the number of new graves.
The figure of more than 50,000 is eight times higher than the official toll acknowledged by Moscow in September 2022. It does not include deaths of militia in Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine said in February that it had lost 31,000 soldiers, but that figure is also likely to be significantly lower than the true toll.
Russian losses spiked in January 2023 as it launched a large-scale offensive in Donetsk and again months later last year during the battle for the city of Bakhmut.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” at dawn on February 24, 2022, which has since turned into a bloody and attritional war, isolating Russia from the Western world.
Responding to the report, the Kremlin said it did not disclose any information on military deaths and casualties, which falls under the remit of the defence ministry.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added official secrets laws and those covering what Russia calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine meant it was “absolutely understandable” that the ministry did not release the figures.
The National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) has disclosed that 95 million Nigerians need to enroll for the National Identification Number (NIN) to meet its target of 200 million enrollments by 2025.
Kayode Adegoke, Head of Corporate Communications at NIMC, emphasised the importance of this enrollment during an interview on X over the weekend.
He stated, “For NIMC to meet the 200 million target by 2025, 95 million Nigerians need to register for the NIN.”
Adegoke revealed that over 105 million NINs have been issued to Nigerians and legal residents so far.
He assured Nigerians of the commission’s commitment, saying, “We want to assure Nigerians that within the next one or two years, we will reach our target of enrolling all Nigerians.”
“The NIN serves as a unique identifier for each citizen and has become increasingly important for various government initiatives aimed at improving security, governance, and service delivery.”
Adegoke highlighted the efforts to streamline the modification and enrollment processes under the leadership of Abisoye Coker, the director-general of NIMC. He announced the development of a self-service platform, allowing Nigerians to make necessary modifications such as changing names, dates of birth, email addresses, and phone numbers from anywhere, using different devices.
Emphasising the convenience of the self-service modification portal, Adegoke encouraged Nigerians to utilize this innovative solution.
He noted the evolution of the process, citing the past requirement for applicants to visit NIMC offices for data corrections.
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