Nobel winner warns Africans
2004-12-21 09:14
New York - Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai warned fellow Africans on Monday that they will not improve their lives unless they commit to peace, better management of natural resources and democratic principles.
"That's a choice that we in Africa must make," she said. "That's the challenge that we leaders in Africa are being given, and we can choose to embrace. We can also choose to ignore."
Maathai came to United Nations headquarters in New York 10 days after accepting the prize in Oslo, Norway, to promote a day dedicated to "south-south cooperation" between poorer, developing countries, which comprise most of the world's nations and the majority of its population.
The Kenyan environmentalist won the award for her role in founding the Green Belt Movement, which has sought to empower women, improve the environment and fight corruption in Africa for nearly 30 years. She also won acclaim for planting 30 million trees in Africa.
In much of Africa, Maathai said, people have been moving backward and are poorer than they were 30 or 40 years ago.
"We need peace," she told a news conference. "We need to manage our resources sustainably. We need to share these resources more equitably and we need to remember that there is not a limitless amount of resources in this world, and that there will be others after us."
"We also know that unless you have democratic space, you really cannot hold those who are in power accountable. Therefore, you need democratic space so that you can indeed demand that your rights be respected, that you be allowed to play a part," Maathai said.
"Then you are more likely to enjoy a society that does not have dissension and therefore conflict," she said.
Maathai, who is now Kenya's deputy environment minister, urged Africans to adopt this "bottom up approach".
"Unless we have these three pillars," she warned, "we will not move forward, we will not develop."
Maathai expressed hope that the first Nobel Peace Prize to an African woman would "help to raise our consciousness a little higher, raise our commitment... to do this century what our forefathers were fighting for when we were fighting colonialism."
- AP