Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, participated yesterday in Addis Ababa in the ministerial meeting of the Executive Council of the African Union (AU), in which he announced that Spain will contribute 70 million euros to the development agenda designed by this organization in view of the year 2063.
“The Government of Spain is initiating a new stage in relations with the African continent based on the increasingly important role that Africa is playing as a global player,” the minister told his African counterparts. José Manuel Albares is the second Spanish Foreign Minister to address the Executive Council, following Miguel Ángel Moratinos‘ speech in January 2008.
Albares is in the Ethiopian capital to participate in the AU Summit, which includes the XLII meeting of the Executive Council (which began yesterday and will conclude today) and the XXXVI ordinary session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government (the supreme policy and decision-making body of the AU), to be held from February 18 to 19. Apart from that, the minister held bilateral meetings with his counterparts from Egypt, Rwanda, Chad and Mauritania and with the African Commissioner for Political Affairs, Peace and Security, Bankole Adeoye.
“Spain’s Mediterranean, Atlantic and African dimensions have marked our history and our foreign action and have allowed us to establish close ties of friendship and cooperation with both Mediterranean countries and those located south of them,” Albares continued in his speech. “That is why, in addition to our friendship, today we have a particularly ambitious objective: the commitment to open a new page in our common history,” because “Spain wants to work for a partnership with Africa based above all on mutual respect, accepting our differences and sovereign decisions, but joining forces in the defense of shared interests and values, of which there are many,” he added.
“We are convinced that African solutions to African challenges must come from Africa,” he continued. “The most authoritative voice of Africa is, of course, the African Union and the role of Spain and the EU is to support and accompany African leadership in its own sphere,” Albares assured. For this reason, the minister announced a financial contribution of 70 million euros from Spain to support the African Union in the implementation of its Agenda 2063, with a special focus on food security. Agenda 2063, the AU’s strategic concept for the socio-economic transformation of Africa in 2063, was adopted on January 31, 2015 during the 24th Ordinary Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Union.
With this contribution, Spain wants to contribute to the stability and prosperity of a continent whose “geopolitical weight”, in this “moment of change at the global level”, constitutes “a reality that must be recognized by the entire international community”, continued Albares, who also advanced that the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU (in the second half of this year) will promote a high-level Euro-African meeting on transformative investments “that emphasizes value chains in Africa and job creation for youth”.
José Manuel Albares was also yesterday the first Spanish Foreign Minister to address the Executive Council in Spanish, a language currently studied by more than two million people on the African continent. “It is a joy for me to address you in Spanish, the official and working language of this organization, and I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the countries whose support resulted in the recognition of Spanish as a working language at the proposal of Equatorial Guinea,” he said.
