Energy becomes utmost prerequisite for Africa’s development: Sudanese minister

KAMPALA, June 8, 2004 (Xinhua) — Energy stands to be the utmost prerequisite for the social-economic development in Africa, a Sudanese minister said here Tuesday at the First Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Business Summit.
Sudan Electricity Minister Tamaim Fartak said Africa as a whole still lags behind the rest of all the continents in many ways especially in the field of energy, adding the total energy produced in Africa is only 3 percent of the world total production.

In order to make fully use of the energy available in the COMESA region, Fartak said drastic measures are immediately required to be taken by COMESA countries.

Some of the measures, he said, are improvement of current investment laws and by-laws so as to create a conducive atmosphere that can encourage and attract domestic and foreign private sectors to get involved in the energy generation.

Meanwhile, central banks of COMESA member states should adopt integrative monetary policies to provide investment incentives and guarantees to private capital money geared to finance power plants.

COMESA countries should encourage cross-border transmission lines among member states, Fartak said.

The two-day COMESA Business Summit together with the COMESA Summit has attracted 9 heads of state from the member states and around 500 delegates.

COMESA, set up in December 1994 to replace the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern Africa, is an African regional grouping of 19 countries with about 380 million people and a combined gross domestic product in excess of 180 billion US dollars.

Its members are Angola, Burundi, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, the Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.