Raila Odinga roots for stronger ties between North, Sub-Sahara Africa

CORD leader Raila Odinga has appealed to North African nations to engage more with their counterparts South of the Sahara to foster economic prosperity and security on the continent.

Speaking at the Crans Montana Forum in Morocco yesterday, Raila said the Maghreb countries have tended to view Sub-Sahara Africa with little enthusiasm especially in trade and diplomatic cooperation.

He said while the Northern Africa states have treated Europe as their primary economic and diplomatic partner, the region has products the rest of the continent is forced to import from Europe at high costs. He singled out Morocco, which is rich in phosphates that could be turned into fertiliser stocks using oil, gas and ammonia deposits that are abundant in Algeria.

“Algeria is one of the largest providers of gas to Europe in a club that includes Russia and Norway. Morocco has almost half the world’s reserves of phosphates, which is needed for fertiliser. Yet much of Africa, including my country Kenya, imports fertiliser from Europe. We could easily get it from here,” the former Prime Minister said.

He said it was regrettable that up to eight billion dollars (Sh733 billion) of private capital leaves the region every year for Europe, adding to an estimated total of $200 billion (Sh18.3 trillion) already gone. Raila said North Africa’s middle class is being formed outside its borders in Europe while few of them move into Sub-Sahara Africa.

He said the regional unrest triggered by the Arab uprisings in 2011 and expanding instability in some countries of the region make it necessary to strengthen security cooperation with partners in Sub-Sahara Africa.

The former Prime Minister was addressing a conference on improving dialogue between Africa, Maghreb and Europe at the 26th Session of the Crans Montana Forum in Dakhla Morocco.

He lauded recent efforts by Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya to expand their outreach to Sub-Saharan Africa.

The CORD leader praised Morocco for collaborating with several Sub-Sahara African countries to expand and improve agricultural production and its effort to train religious scholars and imams from other countries to help combat religious extremism.

“For the cooperation to realise full potential, ties between the countries here, namely Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia must get robust. Strong economic bloc here could make the Maghreb the African Tiger and that would change the fortunes of Sub-Saharan Africa if strong ties were to be developed,” he said.