Youth-Day-Speech

impositions but necessary African responses to its numerous socio-economic challenges. I
will come back to this later.
Concerning security, the other element of our topic tonight, I subscribe to the view that this
concept has for too long been interpreted narrowly: as security of territory from external
aggression, or as protection of national interests in foreign policy or as global security from
the threat of a nuclear holocaust. It has been related more to nation-states than to people.
. . . Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people. . . . for whom security
means protection from the threat of disease, hunger, unemployment, crime, social conflict,
political repression, and environmental hazards. You will no doubt agree with me that
these unconventional security threats are not new to Africa, they have been a fixture of the
continent for a long while.
In contrast to the increasingly discredited state-centric “orthodoxy" of security, the UNDP
offered a paradigm with a much broader definition, calling it “human security” and
portraying it as a “people- centred” (rather than state-centred) approach whose principal
components were “freedom from fear and freedom from want.” This kind of security offers
safety from chronic threats like hunger, disease, and political repression, as well as
“protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns of daily life.”
Security and development are now recognised as intertwined, two sides of the same coin.
The nexus between security and development is becoming increasingly indisputable
particularly in Africa. Most of the world's states that have experienced violent conflict in the
past decades are impoverished, with high levels of underdevelopment and inequality.
Because the nature of conflict has fundamentally changed in the post-Cold War era,
contemporary conflicts are increasingly internal, intense and protracted and their social,
economic and environmental consequences are considerable and long-lasting.
The symbiotic link between security and development was underscored by former UN
Secretary-General, Kofi Annan when he stated, “In an increasingly interconnected world,
progress in the areas of development, security and human rights must go hand in hand.
There will be no development without security and no security without development. And
both development and security also depend on respect for human rights and the rule of
law.”
The shift from the state to the human as the locus of development has created objective
conditions for us to confront the development malaise in the continent, manifested in
factors such as declining standards of living, HIV/AIDS, unemployment and environmental
degradation. Our efforts of launching Africa into a new age of development should be
comprehensive, addressing the three dimensions of development, namely economic,
social and environmental.
How has Africa fared since independence?
In their first decade of independence, African countries enjoyed quite respectable rates of
growth, at least when compared with the anaemic rates of growth of the following decades.
Of the twenty fastest growing economies, nine were African and only three of them were
mineral rich countries. For the period between 1960 and 1975, African economies grew at
the rate of 5.7 per cent.