I believe that the underdevelopment of Africa is primarily due to the lack of infrastructure that encourages investment in the continent.

We have the problem that there are many African leaders who are not honest. In the 60-70s Africa became independent from the European colonial powers, and I believe that now it has to become independent from many of its own leaders. There is a lot of corruption, a lot of nepotism. Leaders are untouchable. When Africa became independent, it hardly had any trained people to confront, argue or propose to politicians. The university and intellectual world is growing now, and they may start to oppose it. The independence of these politicians may also be achieved, who entered following the same ideology as the Europeans. Perhaps they have changed the color, but not the mentality, to take advantage of the power to benefit themselves.

There is also an international problem. Africa has a very strong agriculture and produces a lot, but the prices are set in Europe. Africa cannot discuss prices. The governments here cannot support their farmers as the European and American governments do, so they cannot compete with market prices, causing the economy to collapse. There are people who grew coffee and can no longer, neither cotton nor sugar, because of this unfair competition in the international market, which is clearly criminal. This is a very serious cause of poverty in Africa.

Then there are also the tax havens that European governments have set up, where they are tax-free when it comes to selling their products, and yet they come here, and there are a lot of taxes that they do not pay, and they demand from the people of here that if it does. There are many powerful international companies in this situation, and governments have no power over them.

We have a lot to do with here, but the international economic system plays very in favor of Europe, and in a very unfair way. It is like taking a person’s daily bread away from here, in case he may be missing from a banquet in Europe. We take the bread away from here to bring that money to a society that is almost crumbling for wealth.

I read some statistics after everything that Blair and people like him have said that it is the time of Africa, and that the population listens to and thinks that something is being done, but only in Africa there are 450 million more people who live worse than 2 years ago. I think that forgiving the debt are small patches, since on the one hand you forgive the debt, but on the other you do not change the economic system that is creating such debts.

Everything that is aid for development encounters many obstacles, but we do not see that there are any so that in this country, or in African countries, there are warplanes or military weapons. We have never heard of a war here that ended because the ammunition ran out, however many people die because it is impossible to get food to them. And I believe that there is no serious will, neither political, nor economic, nor religious to solve the problem.

Then there is globalization, which is a fact that we cannot get off of, and not because Africa does not want to, but because Europe – the first world – needs it to take advantage of the third world.

I would like to imagine a group of men and women who automatically kill 30,000 children each year. There would be an unthinkable reaction, they would be criminals, terrorists, public enemy number one. However, this system causes the death of millions of children, or that as many millions, as young as 13 or 14, have to prostitute themselves, and nobody puts their hands on their heads.

Many of these girls are forced into prostitution, because they have no other way out. And they prostitute her body, but not her soul. Instead, many of Europe’s power groups do not prostitute their bodies, but prostitute their souls on a daily basis. And it is this prostitution of their soul that makes these girls have to prostitute their bodies.

Some consider that taking care of a child is care work, which has nothing to do with human rights. However, one of the first rights a person has is food. It is not a welfare thing. Food, health, education and shelter are inalienable rights”.