Olisa Agbakoba, former president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), has praised President Bola Tinubu’s recent speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, stating that no African leader has ever represented the continent as effectively.
Tinubu, in his address during the 78th UNGA session, highlighted the issues of unfair treatment and foreign exploitation that have hindered Africa’s development.
In a post on the X platform, Agbakoba described the speech as a “well-received statement” in which President Tinubu asserted that “Africans are not beggars but equal partners.”
He wrote, “A well-received statement at UNGA! Never in the history of UNGA has an African President spoken for the entire African continent, asserting that we are not beggars but equal partners with the geopolitical blocs of the world. Not since Kwame Nkrumah and his vision for a pan-African agenda for development has any African leader delivered a speech on behalf of the 54 nations of Africa.”
Agbakoba also emphasized that Africa would have only itself to blame if it failed to act on the significant policy speech delivered by President Tinubu.
“Let all of us in Africa rally our collective energies and declare to the world that we are awake and not beggars but partners,” Agbakoba concluded.
