EAM Jaishankar says India 'betting on Africa's rise', seeks to take India-Nigeria ties to "higher level"
India-Nigeria ties to a «higher level,» External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Tuesday said India is «betting on Africa's rise» and the rebalancing and the multi-polarity of the world will not be complete until the continent takes its due place. Addressing the Nigeria-India Business Council (NIBC) here, the minister said the rebalancing and reordering of a new global order will only happen «when the core of it is economic… which is the rise of Africa has to be the economic rise of Africa.»
The minister, who arrived in Nigeria on Sunday after attending the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Uganda, concluded his two-nation tour with an address to the NIBC.
«Now, that obviously presents choices, because it is very difficult to go up in the global order by being a market for others or just by being a provider of resources,» he said.
«Africa,» Jaishankar said, «is rising, and India is betting on Africa's rise.»
India is betting on Africa's rise because, «by any objective assessment, today there is so much growing for Africa in terms of demography, in terms of resources, in terms of ambition, in terms of, increasingly, of policy alignments.
That clearly potent, a very different, much more positive future in the very short term, he said.
»We are betting on Africa because...we have a shared past, not always a happy history, not between us, but between us and some other people.
But it is a history which has engendered an enormous solidarity.
And that solidarity today makes me say very clearly that for us, when we speak about a changing global order...the reordering of the world, the rebalancing, the multipolarity of the world will not be complete until Africa takes its due place," Jaishankar said.
