BBC Africa
Debate asks whether Africa will ever benefit
from its natural riches
22 October 2012.
The BBC’s monthly global
debate programme, BBC Africa Debate,
will spearhead special programming across
the BBC Africa output on BBC World Service,
asking whether Africa will ever fully
benefit from its vast natural resources. The
Friday 26 October edition of
BBC Africa Debate
is organised in partnership with the
Coalition for Dialogue on Africa (CoDA)
and will feature its chairman, the former
president of Botswana, Festus Mogae, as a
key speaker.
Presented by
the BBC’s Audrey Brown and Justin Rowlatt
from Addis Ababa, the programme will set the
agenda for other BBC Africa flagship
programmes – such as Focus on Africa
on radio and TV, and Newsday – which
will explore the subject as well. BBC
Swahili will also debate the subject in
Addis Ababa.
Africa is
endowed with natural wealth, and the past
year has seen major new discoveries of
resources in several African countries:
coal, oil and gas in, among others, Kenya,
Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda.
This year has
seen violent clashes between Sudan and South
Sudan over oil, and Malawi and Tanzania have
yet to resolve their dispute over who owns
the oil and gas in Lake Malawi. From Algeria
to Angola and from petroleum to platinum,
the scramble for Africa’s resources
has often caused problems rather than
created prosperity.
Audrey Brown
says: ‘African
resources were largely unacknowledged
as wealth but treated as just raw material
and used to build wealth elsewhere. I think
it’s only when we connect the wellbeing of
African people to the extraction of their
countries’ resources that we start asking
the right questions – and perhaps start
finding the right solutions. So for me the
question at the heart of this is: why is it
that Africa is so rich yet so many Africans
are so poor? Will Africans ever benefit from
their natural riches?’
As they lead the discussion,
Audrey Brown and Justin Rowlatt will
also engage their audiences in a quest for
possible solutions – from
renegotiation of contracts to better
transparency mechanisms, higher taxation, to
resource nationalism.
CoDA is an
organisation supported by the United
Nations, African Union, African Development
Bank and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, and
BBC Africa Debate will engage with the
participants of CoDA’s forum on Africa’s
natural resources taking place in Addis
Ababa, as well as the delegates of the
Africa Development Forum held in the
Ethiopian capital on the issue of governing
and harnessing natural resources for
Africa’s development. Politicians,
activists, industry experts, business people
and lawyers from across the continent and
beyond, attending these conventions, will be
part of the programme’s live audience – as
well as ordinary Ethiopians.
This edition of BBC
Africa Debate will be recorded on
Thursday 25 October between 18.00 and 20.00
local time at Africa Hall,
Menelik II Ave, Addis Ababa.
It will be broadcast by
BBC World Service at 19.00 GMT on Friday 26
October, and repeated at 13.00 GMT on Sunday
28 October. The debate will also be online
at
bbcafrica.com, on Twitter #bbcafricadebate
and #resourceafrica, @bbcafrica on Facebook
and Google+ on the BBCAfrica page. The BBC
Swahili debate from Addis Ababa will be
broadcast at 15.30 GMT on Friday 26 October.
