Africa has the people, resources and knowledge needed to achieve its development ambitions but continues to struggle to turn its plans into results, President Paul Kagame said on Tuesday.
Kagame was speaking at the Africa Mindset Reset Forum in Kigali, a two-day gathering of more than 2,500 leaders, experts and policymakers focused on the changes Africa needs to make to achieve sustainable development.
He said the continent had made significant progress over the past 50 years, but should also confront the reasons it has failed to achieve some of the goals it has repeatedly set for itself.
“Africa has everything it needs to develop. It has people, it has resources and it has a history from which we should have learned many lessons,” Kagame said.
The bigger question, he said, was why Africa had not been able to reach the future it had envisioned despite having many of the tools required to get there.
“There is an Africa we want, but why can’t we reach the Africa we want when we have everything?” he said. “There is something we must identify that keeps making us fail, and then confront it.”
Kagame said African countries often develop strategies and agree on what needs to be done, but fail to match those commitments with action.
He said changing the continent would therefore require changes in behaviour and the way institutions and people approach their work.
“We must change our continent, but we cannot change our continent without changing our behavior, the way we do things and the way we conduct ourselves,” Kagame said.
He also criticised a tendency among some Africans to celebrate achievements from outside the continent while failing to recognise and support African talent.
“Why don’t we do things that make us appreciate one another?” he said, urging Africans to build on the abilities of their own people.
Kagame said such attitudes could leave Africans dependent on others for direction while complaining about decisions made elsewhere.
The forum was organised by the African School of Governance, which Kagame helped establish. Ghana Vice President Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, former South African President Thabo Mbeki and former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn were among the speakers.
