DAKAR, April 6 (Xinhua) -- Senegalese academic and historian Professor Mamadou Fall said he is optimistic about the ability of Africans to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, stressing that they will have to reinvent their own future and rely on their own strengths.
"After this health crisis, Africans have no choice and will be forced to reinvent their own future with their own strengths, their own genius and their own worldview," the professor of history at the University of Dakar told Xinhua.
Considering himself as "very optimistic", Fall said he can't deny the indisputable impact of COVID-19 on economic, financial and human levels.
Speaking of Senegal as an exemple, he said a loss of 2 to 3 percentage points of GDP is expected, which is huge loss for a country in Africa.
"It's a new world that is coming through this pandemic. The asymmetrical, unequal world of marginalization and underdevelopment to which we have been accustomed for long centuries will disappear after COVID-19," he stressed.
For him, this world has shown "its limits", underlining as "dramatic" as it may seem, the appearance of COVID-19 is a "revealing element of the inequalities that were played out on the international scene."
The Senegalese academic took a Senegalese proverb saying "when you fall, the only alternative you have left is to get up", a way of showing his optimism on the capacity of African countries to get up after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
"Humanity is going to rise, as well as Africa. Likewise, Europe will recover by trying to question its economic and social model," he said, adding that this health crisis has revealed the inept nature of patterns of economic and social development in Europe and the United States of America.
Fall believed "the crisis is so deep" that the international community cannot fail to learn "a radical lesson" from it for the future. This future, argued Fall, should lead Africa to "rely on its own strengths, collective energies, to establish self-centered development".
Fall stressed the need to break away from the current development patterns and negotiate new directions based on self-centered development.
He called for further development in fields of education and health to ensure human capitals.
"This is the great lesson that we will not fail to learn from this great health crisis. When the last patient of this virus is cured," Fall said.
