The bilateral and multilateral external debts of Africa countries are currently estimated to be around 300 billion US dollars. He said there is a need for the Economic Commission for Africa and the Organisation of African Unity to become an international interface for dealing with the debt problem, essentially aimed at debt cancellation. If our lenders do not listen to us, we should push for automatic debt repudiation which simply means we should refuse to pay, providing reasons and grounds why we are doing that and the amount that we are refusing to pay. The key multilateral creditors, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have consistently rejected the idea of debt forgiveness, saying this would disrupt the workings of the international finance system. Instead, they have evolved series of debt reduction palliatives for developing countries, the latest being the enhances Highly Indebted Poor Countries Debt relief initiative from which only one African country, Uganda, has derived marginal relief.
Debt is power.
We can use that power to force them to cancel. If We come together as African and we issue an ultimatum or a moratorium that in the next six months, if you don't cancel the debts, we shall all refuse to pay. The results of the meeting would be presented to African leaders at the July OAU summit in Lome, Togo, and later to the General Assembly of the UN in New York in September. Prof. Albert Tevoedjre of Benin with the support of UN secretary-general Kofi Annan initiated the Millennium for Africa project in 1998. The independent Commission, which was inaugurated in Abuja in January this year, is composed of 28 prominent African academics, politicians, parliamentarians, religious leaders, bankers and international civil servants among others.