African leaders must act to end conflicts: Kagame

President Paul Kagame has challenged fellow African leaders to move beyond discussions about conflict resolutions and act to quell conflicts that have sprouted in several parts of the continent. Kagame was speaking yesterday at the Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank in Kigali. The interactive session titled, “Ending Conflict and Building Peace in Africa,” sought to engage key speakers, including the former presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, as well as the President of AfDB, Dr Donald Kaberuka, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louise Mushikiwabo, on conflict situations and peace building. Putting solutions to practice Making an intervention from the audience, Kagame said although African leaders have for long discussed solutions to conflicts, they never put resolutions in practice, a situation that has enabled conflicts to continue happening. “When it comes to Africa, I think we must take responsibility and accept our failures in dealing with these matters. The question is; if we have analysed conflicts and their causes, then what? We need the kind of leadership and kind of politics in place to make sure old and new conflicts are resolved” Kagame said. He said he was not proposing that there is a silver bullet for these problems; it is the management of these processes and what we have identified to be the root causes. The President also criticised leaders for waiting for strong directives from developed countries or from international agencies urging them to act in solving conflict in their countries. “Why should our leaders wait until they are invited to Europe to get together to solve our problems. It doesn’t make sense. Why does anybody wait for that? What image does this send about Africa,” Kagame said. “We need to first invite each other, tell each other the actual truth about the problems we are facing and solve them together.” Bad leadership Mbeki told the session that of all the causes of conflicts in the continent, poor leadership is the most rampant. “Conflicts in Africa do not begin because of a youth bulge, or because of inequality, urbanisation or climate change,” Mbeki said. “They constitute a failure of leadership. When you look around the continent, for example in the Central Africa Republic or Sudan, the conflicts there are due to failure of leadership. Leaders must start to own up their mistakes as early as possible to avoid situations of conflict.” Obasanjo, who currently heads the Africa Union Inquiry on South Sudan, said most conflicts are preventable if they are detected early, and also warned leaders from exploiting conflicts in their countries to gain more influence at the detriment of their citizens.

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African leaders must act to end conflicts: Kagame