Africa experiencing second awakening, economic one - Russian FM
MOSCOW. Oct 27 (Interfax) - African countries are still heavily dependent on their former metropoles and they are well aware of that, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday.
"Now that Africa is free from colonialism, and when, in the 1960s, the wave of de-colonization ended their political dependence, the Africans, as I feel it, are experiencing a second awakening, the economic one," Lavrov said at a meeting with the editors-in-chief of African media outlets in Moscow.
"And the Africans understand that for all their political freedoms won in the fight against colonialism, they are still very, very heavily dependent on Western countries, their former metropoles, economically, in logistics, in infrastructure," Lavrov said.
He said he had several times found himself in a situation where the aircraft could not be refueled in a friendly country because oil facilities there were owned by Western companies.
"The Africans understand that that is a manifestation of incomplete sovereignty, put mildly. And the second awakening will, of course, be economic, including getting to a situation where the African continent's richest resources will not be just extracted and exported as raw material, but will be used in Africa itself in order to create an added value there, not in the former metropoles," Lavrov said.
This is especially important now that "information and communications technologies, artificial intelligence, the rapid scientific development on the whole and the prospects of applying its achievements and discoveries in practice are in fact becoming the main trend of global development," Lavrov said. "And we here, as Russia, are ready, like we were during the Soviet times, to help our friends create new industries and help adopt technologies, train specialists and share our experience," Lavrov said.
"And these matters, matters of the technological, economic, development of our relations, they are central to the agenda of the current summit," Lavrov said.
