Far from being hopeless, Africa is full of hope and potential, maybe more so than any other continent. The challenge is to ensure that its potential is utilised.
Mo IbrahimRead
What we need in Africa is balanced development. Economic success cannot be a replacement for human rights or participation or democracy... it doesn't work.
Interpretation
Balanced development in Africa must prioritize human rights and democracy alongside economic success.
In this quote, Mo Ibrahim emphasizes that mere economic growth in Africa is insufficient if it does not coincide with the promotion of human rights, democratic participation, and social equity. He argues that sustainable development must encompass a holistic approach that values the dignity and voices of individuals rather than focusing solely on financial metrics.
In practice
In a speech on international development, one might mention this quote to illustrate the importance of human rights in achieving economic goals.
Far from being hopeless, Africa is full of hope and potential, maybe more so than any other continent. The challenge is to ensure that its potential is utilised.
In the final analysis, finding a way to do clean business and not to pay bribes actually improves your bottom line.
A narrative that branded Africa as little more than an economic, political and social basket case was not likely to provide the investment needed to drive development.
Experience shows that when political governance and economic management diverge, overall development becomes unsustainable.
There is a crisis of leadership and governance in Africa, and we must face it.
If economic progress is not translated into better quality of life and respect for citizens' rights, we will witness more Tahrir Squares in Africa.
Identitarianism assumes that people are condemned to identify with the positive (ethnic/ gender/ nationalistic) predicates they possess, as if their subjectivity were exhausted by those properties. Exactly the opposite is the case: the authentic dimension of subjectivity consists not in any positive identity but in that which makes identifications.
In the Christianity of Christendom the Cross has become something like the childβs hobby-horse and trumpet.
The ascent to the divine Life is the human journey, the Work of works, the acceptable Sacrifice. This alone is man's real business in the world and the justification of his existence, without which he would only be an insect crawling among the ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and water which has managed to form itself amid the appalling immensities of the physical universe.
It was clear to me, as I glanced back over my earlier life, that a loving Providence watched over me, that all was directed for me by a higher power.
If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'
It is a tragic mix-up when the United States spends 500,000 for every enemy soldier killed, and only 53 annually on the victims of poverty.
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