Kadhafi pleads on the need to harness water resources
Libyan President Moammar Kadhafi, Sunday in Sirte (450 km east of Tripoli) reiterated the importance for Arab business to invest in Africa's various development sectors, especially in the development of water resources.
The Pan-African news agency (PANA) quoted the Libyan head of state as saying in a meeting with the heads of Arab and African parliamentarian delegations attending the General Congress of the People, Kadhafi also called on the need for building roads and railways across the Sahara Desert.
Such initiatives would contribute to reaching and tapping vast water reserves, lakes and rivers (the Nile, Senegal and Congo rivers) on the continent, he said.
Kadhafi warned that water will prove to be a global problem and future conflicts will be related to the control of water, the more so as the average volume required for the survival of each human being should go down below 2,000 cubic meters a year.
The Libyan leader added several Arab countries will be facing a chronic water shortage because of the exhaustion of water resources and because other countries will have full control over the water resources of rivers crossing their territories.
Kadhafi also wondered about the reason why the Arabs were not interested in Chad or Niger, or in water sources and lakes located not very far from their countries, in Abu Soumbel or Wadi Halafa and which, so far, are untapped and uncontaminated by diseases.
In this respect, he insisted on the need to control diseases on the continent and to make Africa a disease-free geographical space.
Kadhafi, for a month now, has consistently called on the Arabs, specially those in Asia, to join the African Union which, according to him, "represents, for the third of the Arab population living outside Africa, a unique opportunity to form a gathering capable of taking up the challenges of the third millennium and globalization."
In October 2000, he toured a number of Arab countries in Asia (Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia) where he delivered the same message to leaders, intellectuals, writers and businessmen reminding them on the need to join the new space.