Abdoulaye Wade

"Europe would benefit greatly from turning more to Africa. The world is evolving such that the upcoming big powers will be the US, China, India, and possibly Brazil. Europe is not one of the major powers. And Africa even less so of course. But Africa has what Europe lacks: space, human resources, and natural resources while Europe has the technological innovation that Africa lacks. Together we can become a power which can count in the future. I’m not interested in being sentimental about Africa. I’m an economist and I am here because Germany has a role to play economically and financially. The discussions I had in Berlin show that we have a lot in common."

"When I look around at these major projects which are being set up in Senegal right now, they are all being run by young graduates who have come back after having studied at international institutes in the US and France. For some of them this is their first job. They want to come back and my problem is finding good enough jobs for all of them. The young people who are migrating in boats to the Canary Islands are not graduates. Our objective is to give them a chance to earn money quickly. I met up with some of them who had been brought back from Spain. I asked them what it was all about. They said, 'Mr. President, we have no work here. We have to do something. If you give us jobs we will stay. The other thing is that there are prejudices against the traditional peasant life which our grandfathers lived.' But modern farms are different. I know graduates in Senegal, who have banana farms, and have come back with new ideas and use modern materials."

"We have solar power, and we are doing everything in our power to support it. Right now we have 1,400 solar powered television sets. But it is expensive. What I said to the German investors is that they need to reach out to villages all over the country. We have 24,000 villages in Senegal, and they could all use solar power. My aim is to use solar power for heating, for schools, for public buildings. This I will do because it is in our interests. We don’t have oil, which is why I helped created set up an organization of non-oil producing countries, with the aim of developing alternative energy sources and solar power. That’s why I invited those German companies to Senegal. I told them, we are ready to work with you."