G7 Summit: Macky Sall gets a ticket for the AU at the G20 and reaps the benefits

The leaders of the world’s seven largest economies agreed yesterday in Elmau, Bavaria, to a request by African Union (AU) President Macky Sall.

According to Le Quotidien, the next G20 summit, to be held in Bali, Indonesia, in November, will make room at the table for the African Union as a permanent member.

Macky Sall’s arguments were that Africa has a cumulative GDP of more than 2600 billion dollars, and is home to 1.3 billion people. It is therefore only fair that it be counted among the organizations where the future of the world is discussed.

In this period when the opinion of Senegal is courted, the leaders of the G7 have not been able to say no to Macky Sall. But this was not the only request of the Senegalese leader.

In his address to his Western peers, Macky Sall called for « the effective implementation of the G20 Initiative on debt service suspension to support our economic and social resilience efforts.

This initiative, which was unanimously approved at the time, has been delayed in its application. As well as the reallocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) of the International Monetary Fund, decided in the fever of the measures to fight against the effects of Covid-19.

Macky Sall welcomed the exceptional drawdown of 650 billion as well as the early establishment of the Resilience and Sustainability Trust (Rst), in anticipation of the said reallocation of SDRs. But since then, things have not really moved, as the AU President deplores.

In the area of health, too, Macky Sall began by thanking all the partner countries and institutions for « the solidarity of support given to Africa under the Covax initiative.

This allowed him to strongly remind that for the moment, « our health challenges in the face of Covid and the risk of new pandemics are twofold: the implementation of vaccine production projects and access to distribution platforms such as Gavi ».

In this period of high heat and the effects of climate change, the Senegalese leader recalled that Africa is strongly committed to the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate.

Giving Senegal as an example, President Macky Sall informed that 30% of the electrical energy produced in this country comes from renewable resources.

We must not forget either, the Great Green Wall, a pan-African initiative, which brings together 11 countries in the Sudano-Sahelian zone, from Senegal to Djibouti, and which consists of reforesting and restoring land, while developing income-generating activities for the benefit of rural populations in the areas crossed.

The problem is that the leaders of the so-called developed world had made commitments to mobilize 100 billion dollars per year to support efforts to adapt to climate change in developing countries.

To date, there has been no progress in this area. Worse, at a time when many developing countries, including Senegal, are preparing to enter the circle of oil and gas producing countries, the rich countries, at the initiative of the G7, have decided to stop financing fossil fuels abroad.

Macky Sall said that « this decision is considered in Africa as a major impediment to its development process and a great injustice against more than 600 million Africans who still live without electricity; while at the same time industrialized countries continue to exploit sources much more polluting as coal.

The Senegalese Head of State also recalled a recent report by the International Energy Agency which indicates that « even if Africa exploited all its gas discoveries (more than 5,000 billion m3), over 30 years, the cumulative African emissions would represent barely 3.5% of global emissions.

However, it is almost certain that not all gas discoveries on the continent will be exploited within 30 years. This gave President Sall the opportunity to call, once again, for a fair and equitable compromise. As he had already called for at the last Africa-Europe Summit.