Give us support, not sympathy, Africa tells West

SIRTE, Libya, Monday (Reuters) African Union (AU) chairman Olusegun Obasanjo called on rich nations on Monday to provide the continent with money rather than sympathy in its fight against poverty at their summit in Scotland this week.

Obasanjo rejected a call to African leaders by AU host Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi that they should not go begging to the rich nations' summit but instead embrace self-reliance.

Obasanjo, president of Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, said he hoped the Group of Eight (G8) summit would extend a recent debt cancellation beyond the 14 African countries that benefited from it.

"This is not the time for a lot of talk but more of a time for serious and concerted action," he told the opening session of a half-yearly summit of the 53-nation African Union.

He praised a British-backed report recommending more help for Africa to be presented to the G8 summit chaired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday and Thursday.

Gadaffi told AU leaders earlier to reject conditional aid from the West. "Begging will not make the future of Africa, (instead) it creates a greater gap between the great ones and the small ones," he said.

But it is Obasanjo who will be the key influence behind the wording of a message that African leaders are expected to send to the G8 summit about rescuing the continent of 800 million from poverty, war and disease, diplomats say.

AU spokesman Desmond Orjiako, a Nigerian, told Reuters: "We have requested Western partners to expedite debt cancellation for the whole of Africa by 2007. "They should also improve the quality of the aid so that it is really helpful to poor African people."

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the summit nations had a responsibility to protect people from genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing if their own governments failed to do so.