Africa requires a new crop of leaders, a new way of doing things and the support of development partners for accelerated economic and political development, according to Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, also the chairman of the African Union.

"First, we must as African leaders and as African people admit that we have under-performed," Obasanjo said in an interview published by the News Agency of Nigeria on Sunday.

"We have done things wrong in the past. We have done what we should not have done, and we have left undone what we should have done," he said.

But Africans must continue to do those that we have identified we have to do rather than succumb to Afro-pessimism propagated by "cynics and skeptics," he stressed.

Obasanjo said Africans compared favorably with any other group of people in the world "in terms of intellectual capacity, in terms of knowledge, in terms of awareness, in terms of dynamism and in terms of value orientation."

Obasanjo, however, stressed the need for the continent to carry its development partners along.

"I have found that there is certain amount of goodwill out there, otherwise how do we get the leaders of the world agreeing to write off the debt of 14 low-income highly-indebted African countries?" he asked.

He was referring to the recent decision by the finance ministers of the G8 industrialized nations to cancel the multilateral debts of 18 of the world's poorest countries, 14 of them in Africa.

Obasanjo had his AU mandate extended until January 2006 at the union's mid-term summit in Abuja, Nigeria's capital last January in recognition of his efforts to troubleshoot the crisis in such hot spots as Sudan, Cote d'Ivoire, Togo and Guinea Bissau.

Source: Xinhua