Saturday, November 08, 2008
The Germany government-sponsored partnership with African Conference opened Friday in Abuja with the targets of good governance and economic advancement on the continent, the News Agency of Nigeria reported on Saturday.
Collins Magalasi, adviser to the President of Malawi, said the Forum must be an avenue for countries to learn and share values to achieve a common vision.
He said trust and sharing should be a common element for participating countries to achieve a common goal, adding that the conference should help Africa and Germany to learn from each other' s culture.
Magalasi urged European leaders to ensure that the Western media stopped painting a bad picture of Africa.
"We must invest in objective information sharing for the growth and development of the world," he added.
Bethuel Kiplagat, chairman of the African Peer Review Mechanism Kenya, said Africa must own and accept her history and should not allow the past to block a great future.
Citing the recent victory of Sen. Barrack Obama as the first African-American president in the United States, Kiplagat said it was a metaphor for Africans not to allow the past to overshadow the future.
In his own remark, Manfred Lahnstein, chairman of the Board of Trustees of ZEIT Foundation, Germany, underscored the need for mutual dialogues that would identify the differences and p offer ways to overcome the challenges.
He said it was noteworthy that both groups had shown commitment to learn new things, in spite of the differences in culture and economy.
The theme of the three-day conference is "Barriers to Partnership and How to overcome them."
Source: Xinhua, Nov 08, 2008