 It's a great pleasure to be here today to witness this historic event, the inaugural Conference of Speakers and Heads of African Parliaments, COSA. This is a conference for African speakers, by African speakers, and for the benefit of all Africans. I bring you the very warm greetings of President Mohammad Ibu Hari, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, who would have loved to be here, but had made previous commitments to an international engagement. He extends his very warm congratulations and his best wishes for successful deliberations here today. We must commend the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the right Honorable Femi Bajabia Mila of Nigeria, and other founding speakers from Ethiopia, from Ghana, from Kenya, from Rwanda, from Senegal and South Africa, for the foresight and vision that gave birth to this conference. Our parliament, in every sense, and parliaments over the world, are true expressions of democracy as the largest representative institutions in government and the closest to the people. Our parliaments indeed ensure a government of the people for the people and by the people. So for an institution such as this, the need for strong visionary leadership is extremely crucial. And in this hall today are the voices and the desires of African people, the voice of the average Nigerian in far away Baelsa state is represented here, the voice of the Algerian far away in Constantin, Rwanda and somewhere in Kigali, or the South African in Johannesburg, all are ably represented here today. The responsibility to have these voices heard and to have their desires met is a noble calling to which everyone here is bound. If there has ever been a strong, a time when strong parliamentary leadership is needed most, it is now. And I think this is so, especially because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its widespread effect on economies across the world, destabilizing health systems, offending supply chains, disrupting industries and above all, precious lives have been lost. The African continent, I believe, has fed better, certainly much better than several other continents of the world, but was not spared from the scarring effect of the pandemic. Many African countries of course have been fairly successful in containing the spread of the virus, but the socioeconomic costs have been high. The African economy generally took a bit of a bashing, recording over 253,000 deaths and we've heard from the African Development Bank president, and over 30 million jobs lost since the pandemic began. According to the World Bank, the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to have pushed between 26 to 40 million people into extreme poverty on the continent of Africa. Most African countries took decisive measures to contain the spread of the virus and limit its socioeconomic impact. There were public health interventions rolled out, several programs and measures were put in place to combat the pandemic, such as lockdowns, stimulus packages, financial support to households and MSMEs and so on. We all achieved some level of progress with those measures. In many of our countries, despite relatively weak economic circumstances, the legislatures had to sit down with the executive to make some of the most breathtaking budgetary provisions in our histories. In Nigeria, our stimulus package was in the order of $2.3 trillion at the time well in excess of our $6 billion. In many countries, the implications of the huge deficits from these supplementary budgets must have kept legislatures and the executives awake at night. But many realized and they performed these hugely risky historical assignments because there was absolutely no choice. But I think it is clear that the post-COVID economic recovery strategy for Africa must go beyond the individual efforts that we have made in our countries. There is a need for increased collaboration and integration of efforts to drive sustainable economic growth and recovery across the African continent. Our parliaments have a central role to play. It is to them that the power to enact laws to oversee government budgeting and international borrowing belong and there are many opportunities for their proactive, collaborative intervention. A crucial concern for all African economies is how to improve liquidity, to reduce the debt burden and improve our balance of payments positions, especially in the wake of the very huge damage done to our finances by the pandemic. Indeed one of the key issues discussed and agreed to at the preparatory meetings for this inaugural meeting was a debt cancellation for African countries and this initiative is already gaining considerable traction. A practical initiative introduced in the immediate aftermath of COVID was a new SDR, the Special Drawing Rights Reallocation of about $650 billion, which was implemented in August 2021. Of course there are arguments around how much of it the African continent and developing economies got. But I think it's important to recognize that it was a lifesaver for us and it came at a very strategic moment. The allocation improved our balance of payments position by increasing the share of SDRs in our reserve assets. So this provided us with direct liquidity without raising our debt burdens and this of course was an important consideration for us all at the time. We needed the liquidity and of course we couldn't go borrowing anymore. So I think African countries speaking in one voice can seek more SDR support. The Economic Commission for Africa recently proposed that our countries could address our development financing needs by leveraging SDR reallocation through on lending vehicles such as the liquidity sustainability facility, the LSF, a trust also for middle income countries and multilateral regional development banks as well as the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust, the PRGT. So these are possible vehicles by which we could use SDR reallocations more effectively especially because these arrangements could provide an appropriate window for financing development and global public goods and we do need that and I'll talk a bit about that when it comes to financing our vaccine facilities. The pandemic exposed our vulnerability, the vulnerability of our healthcare system and has shown how interconnected and interdependent we all are as a continent. Since one country is not excluded from the health crisis that plagued another, we must collectively invest in our health systems, rapid response and emergency management structures so that we are better prepared to handle future pandemics if they arise and we just heard that another pandemic may well be around the corner. But vaccination as we've heard also is key to sustainable post-COVID recovery. But Africa has lagged behind so far compared to the rest of the world with only 16% of our population fully vaccinated. As much as the global vaccine inequality remains a cause for concern, I think a greater call beckons the need for the African continent to free itself from external dependencies. We must guarantee the health security of our own people and we may not be able to do that unless we are able to access the sorts of resources that will make this possible. It's clear that the time has come for us to produce our own vaccines and this is not a feat that is impossible, but it must be a collective push. Legislation must be put in place across the continent to further strengthen research and development capacity to harmonize drug registration regulations to build world-class pharmaceutical facilities. And as we had noted earlier, our SDR rare location along the line suggested by the ECA could release development finance facilities for the creation of a vaccine facility or, in fact, more than one vaccine facility in Africa. So I think we have a unique opportunity to be able to finance relatively cheaply a vaccine facility. As post-COVID economic recovery tragedy must also include increased social protection for all and this is an important issue, social protection, especially because of the levels of poverty that we have. The pandemic revealed the importance of social protection schemes in responding to a wide range of economic shocks as most African countries at the time implemented various social safety nets to protect the poor and the most vulnerable from the very major socioeconomic impact of the pandemic. But going forward, post-COVID, we must leverage this experience and drive progress towards more inclusive, more effective and more equitable social protection. Social protection programs, of course, are expensive and they are often subject to ideological type arguments, but social protection is no longer a left-leaning idea, is no longer a socialist idea, it has become fundamental to economic development and there is no conflict between free markets and social welfare programs, especially those that enhance the capacity of the poor and the vulnerable to access better opportunities and a better life. So I think our legislatures need champions for social development programs and I'm sure that we'll find those champions within the populace of our legislatures. The COVID-19 experience reiterates the need also to leverage technology in building stronger delivery systems for wider coverage towards protection for all. Our legislations across the continent must be designed to support technology and technology innovation. We've seen in Nigeria the rapid growth of fintech companies. Since 2015, there are now at least seven tech companies valued at over a billion dollars each. Many of our countries are also seeing the rise of these types of companies and some are even licensed in our different countries, but we must look for continent-wide legislation that makes the work and reach of these companies easier and you would find that they are able to provide several well-paying jobs for our young people. So I think it's an important time for the legislatures to react to what we're seeing, a phenomenal growth in tech companies, a phenomenal growth in innovation in Africa. This is the way that we can leverage technology to leapfrog our development and economic recovery efforts. Honourable speakers, Africa's post-COVID recovery must leverage the African continent of free trade area. The AFCTA is a unique opportunity also to consolidate Africa's enormously large market and we will create and recover millions of jobs, reduce Africa's import dependency, boost intra-African trade on exports, and strengthen intra-African cross-border ties and trade relations. I think the opportunities are simply mind-boggling, but they will involve the magic word, collaboration. Recently, AFRAXIM and the AFCTA secretariat, working jointly, launched the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, PAPS, which provides a robust financial market infrastructure connecting African markets to each other. So the system enables instant cross-border payments in the respective local African currencies. And this is important because all payment systems almost always involve first converting to an international currency, converting the local currency to an international currency before the payments can be made, and of course that has cost implications of its own. But now we have our own payment system that uses local currencies and there's a clearing system which is affected by AFRAXIM's platform, the PAPS. So this is a big boost for cross-border trade and will save African economies almost five billion US dollars annually. AFRAXIM Bank is the main settlement agent and it provides settlement guarantees on the payment system and it even provides overdraft facilities to all settlement agents in partnership with Africans participating central banks. So for now, there are a few central banks that have agreed to participate, but I expect that in the coming months and years we'll have practically all our central banks participating. I think PAPS will effectively eliminate Africa's financial borders. It will formalize and integrate Africa's payment systems and simply make trade within the African continent using local currencies much easier. And this is the way to go. Domestic legislation will be required as time goes on and I think our legislators must anticipate and be prepared to act on these promptly. The pandemic also induced serious challenges of food security. Food inflation is now expected to rise above 12.2 percent this year. The pandemic also revealed the importance of retaining trade ties and ensuring minimal food chain disruptions. So as a continent, we must maintain open and efficient cross-border supply networks for agricultural inputs. And this will allow robust value chains that connect domestic and regional markets. The agricultural sector is key to overall productivity in our economies in particular. It is 23 percent of our continent's GDP. So we must improve our agricultural productivity. We must produce our own food and reduce import dependency for key commodities. Of course, the conflict in Ukraine has showed us very clearly that we cannot continue to be dependent on other countries, especially for grain that can be grown locally. Once again, Africa's parliamentary leadership must partner with the executive, with the private sector, and with other stakeholders to design and implement frameworks that will support the agricultural sector in tackling food insecurity on the continent. Clearly the journey to a sustainable post-COVID economic recovery is laden with much responsibility for our governments. All hands must be on deck to ensure that Africa rises from the impact of the pandemic to even greater heights. We must build strong collaborative partnerships across the aisles in our parliaments with our judiciaries, with the executive, with the private sector, and with civil society. If we learned anything at all from COVID-19 and its aftermath, it is that no nation, no institution, no group, no individual can succeed alone. Collaboration is the key to making the world work today. Therefore, let us leave this conference not having merely rehashed the continent's very many problems. We should agree on some clear-cut solutions and perhaps even make a few pragmatic decisions on how to go forward, even if only around a few of those issues that we'll be discussing today, to resolve, to collectively execute and drive the next phase of Africa's economic growth and development. We mustn't miss the opportunity of so many African parliamentarians gathered here today and so much experience from across the continent. It's a golden opportunity to do a lot of good work. I look forward to receiving the outcome of this conference and the outcomes of the side deliberations also that will take place here. It is now my very special pleasure and privilege to formally declare open the first conference of speakers and heads of African parliament's Cosa. Thank you very much for listening.