Statement by Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf at the China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit, Held In Beijing, Peoples Republic of China, November 4-5, 2006

Mr. President,

I am pleased for the opportunity to contribute to this historic exchange on China-Africa cooperation. Permit me also to join my other colleagues in expressing our sincere thanks and appreciation to the government and citizens of the People’s Republic of China for the warm welcome and superb hospitality our delegation has received since arrival in this splendid city of Beijing.

Mr. President,

It is common knowledge that our continent, Africa, with over 900 million people is blessed with vast human and hugely untapped material resources but we have not been able to harness the true potential of our people. We are indeed resource rich though still largely policy poor and for the most part we remain primary exporters, heavily aid dependent and indebted.

Too many of our nations today remain in civil conflict; too many of our people continue to die from HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Not too many of us remain on track for obtaining the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Our development challenges remain huge across the continent with the realities in many of our post conflict economies particularly grim. Nevertheless, we draw strength from the resilience of our people and from the commendable efforts of the government and people of China who have increasingly committed themselves to a growing partnership with the African people.

But, Mr President, this envisaged stronger relationship must not be one of “business as usual”. It must manifest in its corpus the strategic forging of growing multifaceted relationships between the people of Africa and China. Importantly, it must of necessity be a compact between us premised on enhanced trade and investment relationships. Relationships that will result in quick, sustainable wins for our mutual benefit; relationships that will recognize and more adequately value the abundant natural resources that Africa takes to the table with our partners. We should promote transactions and programs that quickly go well beyond Africa’s merely producing primary commodities and goods. While the old order of doing business might still be initially necessary for most of our countries, it simply cannot be sufficient for the longer term well being of our people. The Chinese have admirably demonstrated to the world, the importance that value-added in our economic activities as evidenced from the processing of primary products and natural resources at home. We must therefore, encourage in our partnership with China the need to increasingly locate more of their production and processing activities and plants in our domestic economies. More of our people will be employed, greater social cohesiveness and stability will be engendered and better assured.

Needless to say, our security is inextricably linked to the level of employment, especially among youth, in our countries. For their part, our partners would have created more opportunities for expanding their own markets at lower costs of production in our countries, and away from theirs. In time, this could equally mean larger volumes of tradeables and lower prices for their own people. Neither side is a loser in such stronger and more meaningful and longer term partnerships.

In this way also, as I said when I met President Hu Jintao earlier this week, China can be prouder in years to come of more tangible evidence and concrete intergenerational support for the people of Africa. There will be across our great continent veritable manifestations and legacies that could be second to none, and key beacons of our committed policy of deeper south-south cooperation.

Mr President:

In this wider context, we congratulate the People’s Republic of China for the meaningful role it has been playing in the recent rounds of the World Trade Organization for more equitable and just regimes of commerce and trade for our developing world. We salute your growing leadership in this global forum, and indeed in other multilateral institutions, as you seek to instill a more human face to the challenges of development, while reducing the negative perceptions and impact of the inevitable process of globalization.

Mr President:

As is well known, countries such as Liberia struggling to emerge from the pernicious grip of conflict, are particularly developmentally challenged. Our environments due to undeveloped infrastructure, are largely investment inhospitable. In almost every such case we are externally debt ridden. Moreover, in cases such as Liberia, saddled with crippling debt arrears, our support from our traditional bilateral and multilateral partners is vital and welcome, as we struggle to quickly stabilize our badly broken economies and institutions. But we unquestionably need an even friendlier and at times more understanding hand of support and assistance. Assistance that truly recognizes the severe challenges and risks inherent in not quickly consolidating our hard won peace from conflict, and not relapsing into national upheaval and instability. Yet this timely support must importantly be boldly imaginative in its content and design. In partnership, we must individually and collectively think more “out of the box” as we structure the scope and complexion of our joint responses. We must, for instance, recognize that while large sums of resources expended on peacekeeping operations in many of our countries are highly appreciated, in time such responses must be weighed against the expected positive impact that sums of relatively much smaller sums of those resources, once committed early and disbursed from our partners in a timely manner, would have. Often this much smaller but more timely intervention could mean a huge difference between a desired return to normalcy in our countries and to embark on doing business better and differently.

We in particular must equally find new and better ways of engineering with our partners, including China, their public and private financial support, especially in our early post-conflict years. Among other things, this would greatly aid and abet us in getting over the crucial initial post-conflict hump of three to five years. Given that they have already committed to this course in some of our countries, we are all confident that we will see increasingly more such innovative and constructive responses by the Government and People of China the Government, including their dynamic private sector. We salute you for what you have already done and we eagerly look forward to even more of your innovative and imaginative programs of support and assistance.

Mr. President, what does this all imply for us Africans, as we embark on the implementation of the Declaration and the Beijing Plan of Action today? It implies many things. An important one is the need for us to emulate our Chinese hosts by taking a long view of our respective national and regional development journeys.

As my delegation and I traveled across southern China over the past two weeks, we could not help but be struck by the way the people of China have in a disciplined and strategic way charted the course of their development in recent decades. We were consistently struck, for instance, by the extraordinary transformation in a mere quarter of century of what was in the early 1980s the fishing village of the city of Shenzhen in the South of the country, into a modern, technologically robust city and economic development pole today. This was all largely driven by extraordinary levels of institutional research and development, and of course foresight. Or, by the remarkable progress being made in the agriculture–based Province of Hunan, where we witnessed a major transformation of their rice industry, largely underpinned by path breaking long term research. Nor did the tremendous visible commitment made by the Chinese people in the preservation of their history and culture across their nation, while at the same time moving quickly into the age of technology and communication, escape us at all.

These are sobering testimonies and lessons that we in Africa must quickly internalize and emulate. But we must recognize that these most impressive performances all have their roots in the early and insightful definition of clear, long term national visioning of China’s development path. Indeed, our Chinese friends proverbially remind us from time immemorial that “the longest journey starts with the first step”. But for that journey to be meaningfully undertaken and the path through which those steps must be trodden clearly defined, the journey must be carefully thought out and planned. It is a vital lesson, that we all in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world can ignore, only at our own peril. As a growing number of our own countries are already fortunately evidencing, real and durable development is indeed possible for our people.

But as a people, a nation, a region and as a continent, we must first determine where we want to go, and which road we need to take. That way, our necessary partnerships, including that with the people of China, can more effectively and quickly deliver a better and more meaningful quality of life for our long suffering people.

Mr. President,

As we enter into this new phase of strategic partnership by this Summit of China-Africa cooperation, it is the fervent hope of the government and people of Liberia that within the framework of FOCAC, Africa will be increasingly empowered to realize its ideals of most effective cooperation and integration, and that the FOCAC will be deepened in substance and indeed in spirit.

I thank you.