Former Ambassador advocates cancellation of visas among African countries

Mr Ahmed Haggag, Egypt’s former Ambassador to Kenya, on Monday said the use of visas among African countries has restricted the free movement of the Continent’s peoples, goods, and services.

“We are still backward in moving Africans across Africa,” he said, and indicated that there was a project at the African Union, which would ensure that Pan African passports were made to facilitate free and easy movement across the Continent.

He said even though security services were afraid that the initiative may create fertile grounds for terrorists’ invasion, it was important for security officials on the Continent to establish strong coordination in security affairs among themselves.

Mr Haggag, who is the Secretary General of the African Society in Egypt, said this when he schooled young African journalists drawn from 22 African countries on “Chinese African relations between exaggeration and minimisation,” as part of a training programme for some selected young journalists across Africa, in Egypt.

The 20-day training programme, which is organised by the Union of African Journalists (UAJ), in collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Information, attracted journalists from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, and South Africa.

The rest are Gambia, Niger, Cote d' lvoire, Uganda, Djibouti, Tunisia, Namibia, Nairobi, Lesotho, Botswana, Congo, Egypt, Gabon, Angola and Senegal.

Mr Haggag noted that one of the challenges of intra-Africa trade was transportation and that it was unfortunate that most African countries did not have commercial ships and depended on British, Chinese and Danish ships to transport goods.

The former Ambassador who acknowledged the presence of Chinese in Africa, said: “I will like to be advocate for Chinese presence in Africa, they are doing a very good job, but we have to be rational in discussing some of the merits of Chinese presence and what we consider as some of the demerits.”

He commended China for cancelling loans she gives to less developed countries in Africa and said: “Every two years they declare that the loans by the less developed countries in Africa are cancelled, and I think it is a very good gesture. We have to appreciate these things.”

The Secretary General recalled a statement by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which warned that Africa was heading towards a new debt crisis with a number of countries in the category doubling over the past five years.

Likewise, he said, the World Bank classified 18 African countries as high risk debt distress where debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratios surpassed 50 per cent, and expressed worry that some African countries were using their debt to pay salaries of employees, which as not productive,

Mr Haggag said the total amount of external debts for the Continent was estimated at 417 billion United States dollars.

He said African leaders at a summit in Addis Ababa asked western governments to cancel African debts because some of the debts preceded their independence.

“It was used by the colonial powers to finance their presence in our countries, so they are not good loans,” he said.

He urged African countries to be cautious not to exceed the debt ratio and make productive enterprises, which would make yields to finance the debt.

Mr Haggag said most of China’s loans to Africa were used for infrastructure adding; “China now is financing more than 3,000 largely critical infrastructure projects. China has extended more than 86 billion to African governments and state owned entities between 2000 and 2014. An average of about six billion dollars a year,” he added.