Senegal diplomat speaking at ECSU: "Education is key to introducing democracy throughout parts of Africa"

 Education is key to introducing democracy throughout parts of Africa, says Senegal's ambassador to the United States.

Amadou Lamine Ba, Senegal's top diplomatic official in the U.S., spoke Wednesday at Elizabeth City State University as part of ECSU's Global Leadership Academy's Distinguished Lecture Series.

Approximately 30 students and faculty attended Ba's lecture at the G.R. Little Theater on campus.

"If you want to have a democracy you want to have a majority of the people having a say" in the political process, Ba said.

But to have democracy, Africans must first be educated to understand the current political and economic trends that affect their lives, Ba said.

"Education is the best investment to the people in Africa," he said.

ECSU's Senegal connection stems from a grant awarded to the university by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

ECSU was one of six U.S. universities selected by USAID to participate in the agency's Africa Education Initiative Textbook and Learning Materials program. Last fall USAID awarded ECSU a $3 million grant to create at least 600,000 textbooks for children in Senegal over the next three years.

The other five U.S. universities and their African partners in the project are Alabama A&M University and Ethiopia; Chicago State University and Ghana; the Mississippi Consortium of International Development and Zambia; South Carolina State University and Tanzania and the University of Texas at San Antonio and South Africa.

Ba, 53, said he has five principles essential for Africans to consider if they are to keep pace with globalization. The principles include:

- good governance;

- peace and stability;

- state promotion of economic development;

- an increased role by the private sector; and

- creation of regional or continental economic development partnerships.

"I would like to propose a strategy aimed at changing poverty into wealth, improving the quality of lives of people in the developing nations and allowing the same nations to compete with equal chance in the global economy," Ba said.

Senegal is one of 53 African nations that make up the African Union, which was founded in 2002 and is governed by a parliament. Ba says the Pan-African organization is key to Africa's future.

"We believe the only way we can survive in the global world is to be bigger and interconnected," Ba said. "We have to move fast ... we don't have time. We have to go with the African Union."

African leaders must follow the example of the U.S. and other developed nations and work harder to encourage the growth of private businesses, he said.

"The United States has achieved (an) unprecedented level of development in 200 years; whereas a country like Taiwan became a model by achieving an economic miracle in 40 years," Ba said.

Africa is a wealthy continent with many natural resources that aren't being exploited to their full potential, he said. Some of those resources include oil, diamonds, uranium, plutonium and gold.

"It's not a poor continent ... it's actually rich," he said.

The United States is now importing 25 percent of its oil from Africa because of the continent's vast oil resources, Ba said.

Senegal, located in West Africa, is bordered on the west by the Atlantic Ocean. Its population is 90 percent Muslim.

Since its independence from France in 1960, Senegal has enjoyed increasingly better relations with the United States, Ba said.