Hakainde Hichilema after Successfully debt restructuring 🇿🇲

It's a question of pulling it together and targeting it. Let me also indicate here one of the lessons of our debt restructuring that is applicable to poverty reduction and climate change is the issue around speed at which we do things. G20 framework: when we took office 21 months ago, this discussion was already in trade. Now we've been in office 21 months. Yes, we are very pleased that it happened yesterday, but for the countries that are coming after us, there is need to expedite the processes. Just that, whether it's, if you like, the transition, as Senegal was involved, is involved in that, we must just be conscious of time. Every day we don't deliver these things that are within our control, we are basically increasing the cost and the damage gets compounded. I think it's very important. The next lesson I want to suggest here, relevant to the subject on the table, is that the German Chancellor's point yesterday at dinner, repeated today, is so important: for us as a global community to mobilize resources, yes, but these resources must be invested to help grow the economies of the less developed countries. Very important, because by doing that we are creating capacity in those economies to mitigate against climate change and obviously poverty reduction. So value addition, not just with the electric vehicle industry that is coming through, huge industry. It is important, President Macron, that we look at deliberately investing in extraction of critical minerals, for example, in value adding these minerals in country. Obviously that will help the growth side of the GDP, create jobs, business opportunities, and fuel the transactional change, if I may call it that. So I think this must be deliberate as well, rather than generic discussions. We must dive deep into the envelope and begin to say these are requirements, these are needs, these are minimums, and it will mutually benefit. As somebody said yesterday, not to paralyze the conversation, the North and the South, it would definitely be structured properly to benefit the North and the South. That's not the debate we must be engaging in, but mutuality for greater good, for a safe world, for a world that we can pass on to the next generation in a responsible manner. Lastly, I simply want to indicate that I like the spirit of partnership that I hear. I like what I hear from leaders, all of you who have spoken. I think that's the way it should be, but the thing is now to pull all this in one basket, draw an action plan which is time-bound, and we get a job done. If the political leadership is there, business leadership is there, decisions are clear, we now need to get our technical people not to sit on the work that needs to be done. So supervision, monitoring is important. Lastly, and this is the last one really, I want to thank what I hear from the Chinese premier, what I hear from Secretary Yellen, and indeed all the leaders that have spoken on the issue of conflict. We cannot achieve what we want to achieve if we allow our global community to focus time, resources, everything, technology on conflict. I think there's a duty for us all to keep our individual countries peaceful, out of conflict, and not export instability to other countries, neighboring or far away. As we now know, instability anywhere is instability everywhere. I think it's very important that we work on that issue and focus the resources, focus the time, and all the other capital provisions on the developmental agenda to mitigate climate change, to reduce poverty. And I must also indicate here the cost of capital must sit in this basket, that it must be lowered. The inequity around the cost of capital: Africa, for example, pays the highest cost of capital. It is not correct, it doesn't help anyone at all, it's just worse than the situation. We must address this situation. Thank you very much.