ANCHOR FOR GLOBALIZATION
While Senegal, like many West African countries, is not an official partner in the Belt and Road Initiative, the to China, Abdoulaye Fall, described to reporters Sudeshna Sarkar and Ge Lijun how his country can contribute to, and benefit from, the initiative. The following is an edited excerpt of the interview: succeeded in bringing together 56 ethnic groups. If we have achieved this on a regional scale, we must now aim to do this at the continental level through the unification process designed by the AU.
The last point is the development level that China is achieving with success, maintaining a very strong strategic partnership with Africa. This is what we must aim for and [a path where] China intends to accompany the continent through a very strong strategic partnership.
Senegal has a strategic plan for its economic and social development. The Emerging Senegal Plan is a 20-year plan issued in 2015, aiming at restructuring the economy in an inclusive and sustainable way with good governance. We want to restructure our economy to reach a minimum growth rate of 7 percent by 2018 and maintain this for at least 10 years. When the plan was initialized, the growth rate was around 4.5 percent, but in the last two years we managed 6.4 and 6.5 percent respectively, implying we are on the right track to achieve our objective.
Now, Africa’s priority after modernizing and boosting agriculture for food security is industrialization. Without industrialization you cannot develop your country [and this can be helped by] Chinese industries delocalizing in Africa. This is mutually beneficial because China has to delocalize. Manpower in China is becoming more and more expensive. So a product produced in China will no longer be as competitive as it used to be. Chinese enterprises have to delocalize. They have started doing this in Asia and then in Africa.
[ Chinese enterprises] extended their delocalization in Ethiopia. Ethiopia stands as a success story and my country, Senegal, is now on the radar. Senegal is developing its own industrial park. The first stage is already completed. As the Chinese proverb goes, you have to build a nest to attract the phoenix.