"How Europe is Losing Africa" Op-Ed, Business Daily, (Nairobi)
December 13, 2007 Author: Calestous Juma, Professor of the
Practice of International Development; Director, Science,
Technology, and Globalization Project; Principal Investigator,
Agricultural Innovation in Africa In a hopeful tone about the
recent summit of European and African leaders, Portuguese Prime
Minister José Sócrates declared: "We are here to write an
entirely new page in the history of relations between Europe and
Africa." He said the summit made Lisbon "once again the perfect
bridge" between the two continents. Despite Lisbon's genuine
interest to serve "once again as a bridge"between the two
continents, the summit came decades too late. Most of Europe has
not woken up to the fact there is a new Africa that is unlikely
to cross a bridge built with remnants from a previous era. New
design criteria are needed to reconstruct relations between
Africa and Europe. In the last two decades, Europe has been pre-
occupied with its integration and