Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu says his administration will engage the African Union Commission in collaboration with member states to ensure that the African Central Bank takes off as scheduled in 2028.
He expressed readiness to host the Bank in line with the vision of the Abuja Treaty.
President Tinubu made this known on Saturday while addressing leaders at the 37th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
He affirmed that Africa’s success in addressing its challenges hinges on the firmness of its resolution, built on a foundation of deep-rooted solidarity, if it is to avoid perpetuating existing problems and creating new ones.
“As a continent and as individual nations, we face strong headwinds and difficult hurdles threatening to complicate our mission to bring qualitative democratic governance and economic development to our people. Many of these obstacles, such as climate change and unfair patterns of global trade, are largely not of our making. However, some of the pitfalls, including coup-birthed autocracies and the deleterious tinkering with constitutional tenure provisions, are developmental cancers we as Africans are giving to ourselves,” he stated.
On education, which is the theme of this year’s summit, the President said education is the core ingredient in the process of evolving creative solutions to the unique challenges confronting the continent.
“In helping to achieve the Agenda 2063 objective of a peaceful, united and prosperous Africa, I consider African education, not only in the narrow context of the benign use of science and technology to improve the material standards of our people, but also in the nuanced appreciation of the fact that Africa must also become better educated in the humane art of democratic practice, diplomacy, and conflict resolution without violence.
“This year’s theme encourages us to remodel our educational systems to fit these goals. In Nigeria, my administration is devoting ample resources to education at all levels. From redesigning our school feeding programmes and academic curricula to making ourselves an Information and Communication Technology hub, through which we shall bring more youths into the classroom and furnish them with the tools required to flourish in the global economy of the 21st century,” he said.
VON