Your Excellences,
All protocol observed,
• I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for having put aside your heavy schedules to come and attend this Bureau Meeting. Let me also take this opportunity to that the Government of Kenya for having offered to host the Bureau Meeting and for the warm hospitality accorded to us since arrival in this beautiful city which is also famous for its tourism attraction.
• I would also wish to thank our implementing partners; the RECs, UNIDO and other stakeholders for supporting the African Union Commission and the Department of Trade and Industry in implementing the decisions of our Ministers as well as the decisions of the Executive Council and Summit. The road map ahead of is clear and it was defined by the treaties that established the OAU and now AUC particularly the Abuja Treaty for the establishment of the African Economic Community by 2025.
• Excellency, as we all are aware, last year in May, the African Union Commission celebrated its Golden Jubilee of establishment. To commemorate the historic event the African Union t Commission conducted wide and inclusive consultations about what the future of Africa. The Africa We Want in the next 50 years. Consolidating on the achievements of the past 50 years, a cross section of people including the youth, women, diaspora etc gave their expectations about the future of Africa in the next 50 years.
• The outcome of these wide consultations is the Agenda 2063 which is "A global strategy to optimize use of Africa's resources for the benefits of all Africans". It is an approach to how the continent should effectively learn from the lessons of the past, build on the progress now underway and strategically exploit all possible opportunities available in the immediate and medium term, so as to ensure positive socioeconomic transformation within the next 50 years.
• This Bureau meeting is thus being held in a period where the African Union member States are in the process to re-orient their development planning to align with the Agenda 2063 and to work towards achieving social and economic structural transformation using the abundant natural resources. It is indeed a period where we, as Africans, are defining a “Paradigm Shift” to ensure that we move away from a Continent that is traditionally exporting its resources in raw and unprocessed form to a continent that is highly industrialised and economically independent
• To achieve the AU vision of “An Integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the global arena”, significantly more action is still required on a number of fronts” and now the Agenda 2063, the continental initiatives and frameworks that have been adopted by the Africa African Union Heads State need to be implemented. These frameworks include among others, the Action Plan for Boosting Intra-African Trade, the achievement of the Continental Free Trade Area supported by the Action Plan for Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa AIDA, the Action Plan for the African Mining Vision AMV, the African Agri-Business and Agro-Industries Development Initiative, 3ADI, and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Action Plan PMPA. These initiatives are not only critical for achieving an integrated Africa but also for ensuring that at the national level governments achieve their development visions and objectives of creating jobs, creating wealth, protecting the environment and ultimately achieving an inclusive growth and a sustainable development.
• All the frameworks and initiatives as indicated above which are coordinated by the AUC Department of Trade and Industry, if and when implemented, will lead to the achievement of the visions and goals of the African Union member States both at the national, regional and continental levels. We need to ensure that we work towards a commodity based industrialisation as this is the only way that we will create jobs for our growing youth population, create wealth and thus eradicate poverty.
• The Conferences of Ministers meet every after two years to deliberated on how to implement the decisions of the Heads of State and Governments and of the Executive Council and to also make recommendations for consideration by the same executive policy organs about how to achieve the objectives for which such frameworks and initiatives were developed.
• The role of the CAMI Bureau is therefore critical because we are responsible for ensuring that the decisions and recommendations emanating from the Ministerial Conferences are implemented and then reporting back to the Ministerial Conference every after two years. We meet to monitor the implementation of the recommendations and decisions.
• This makes the role of this 1st Bureau Meeting of CAMI 20 even more critical because one of the key recommendations of CAMI 20 was to take stock of the implementation of the CAMI decisions all the way from CAMI 17 to CAMI 20. Your excellences, you are therefore going to consider a report from the senior officials that has considered matrices of the implementation of all these decisions among other items that were on the agenda.
• This Bureau of CAMI 20 is also presiding over the end of the traditional Conferences of Ministers because as from next year these Ministerial Conferences will be replaced by the “Specialised Technical Committees”(STCs) where the Ministers responsible for Trade, the Ministers responsible for Industry and The Ministers responsible for Mineral Resources Development will be meeting in one session. This looks quite sensible because then the Industrialisation policy will be well placed to ensure coherence, however, in practical terms this will require well planning ahead to ensure that the individual Ministry’s Objectives and visions are not overshadowed by other Ministries.
• To this end the Bureau of CAMI 20 will have to strategically position the Ministry of Industrialisation to ensure that the policies, decisions and recommendations that will come from STCs will support Africa’s Commodity based industrialisation. We need to use our comparative advantage to industrialise, but to achieve this there are a number of issues that we need to address and which should not be lost when we get structured under the STCs. These include, among others:
o Mechanisms for financing industrialisation- this is key because to finance industrialisation requires inward thinking. It is the financing of our domestic industries, the SMIEs and SMIs that will shape Africa’s Industrialisation. Donor funding cannot on its own finance industrialisation in Africa but we can only use such funds to leverage our own funds.
o Coherent Policies for industrialisation: to ensure that key national policies including fiscal policies, investment and finance policies, procurement policies etc are supporting industrialisation
o Private sector engagement that ensures public private partnerships will be critical. Particularly ensuring that our small and medium enterprise and industries especially in the Mining and Agri-Business and Agro-Industries and integrated into the regional and global value chain. Public private partnership in financing industrialisation based development will also be critical
o Gender supportive strategies and Policies: this is also very important as we believe that women will play a critical role in Africa’s industrialisation drive. To this end I wish to inform you that this year my Department in partnership with the AUC Bureau of the Chairperson and supported by UNDP held a high level African Women Business Linkages Forum here in Nairobi from 18th – 20th August. This forum brought together over 120 High Level Business Women in AFroica to network and make linkages and astonishingly one of the key outcomes is an African Women in Mining Association.
• Mr. Chairman, all these will be fully explored during the Strategic Stakeholders Retreat wich will start tomorrow 23rd and end on 26th and we do believe that joint planning for effective implementation of these decisions is paramount. We also wish to institutionalise the retreat so that every year we AUC, the Regional Economic Communities and our key implementing partners and stakeholders, meet at least twice a year to plan together and review implementation.
• Your excellency I do not wish to pre-empt the Senior Official Report which you will be considering, but I wanted to highlight a few key issues that we are requesting your consideration for effective implementation of the Assembly, Executive Council and Ministerial decisions.
• With these few remarks I would like to thank you once again and wish you, Your Excellences fruitful deliberations
I thank You
• H.E Dr. Dlaminin Nkosozana Zuma wrote an email from the Future
