Africa’s Best Leader” Not Invited To G8 Summit

The G8 summit usually invites the top performing African leaders to attend and participate in the summit, but this year the 37th G8 summit failed to acknowledge and invite ‘Africa’s best leader’, President John Evans Atta-Mills.

On May 21, 2011, five days before the commencement of the summit, Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General, in a stopover at Accra, en route to Yamoussoukro for the investiture of President Alassane Ouattara, according to the NDC propagandists, described President Mills as “Africa’s best leader.”

Many political commentators expected President Mills to be part of Africa’s delegation to the summit since he was supposedly ranked as Africa’s topmost performing leader by the UN Secretary General, but this was not the case.

In the eyes of the G8, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Egypt’s Prime Minister Essam Sharaf, , Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi, Equatorial Guinea’sTeodoro Nguema Obiang, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, South African President Jacob Zuma, Tunisia’s Beji Caid el Sebsi, and Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria, were deemed to be Africa’s top performing leaders and were subsequently invited to participate in the summit.

On June 3, 2007, President John Agyekum Kufuor left Accra for Berlin, to attend the 33rd G8 Summit. That year’s summit focused on economic issues, poverty reduction, intellectual property rights and Africa. Other African leaders invited to the summit were President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal and President Umaru Yar’Adua of Nigeria.

In July 2008, John Agyekum Kufuor left Accra for Toyako-Hokkaido, Japan, to attend the G8 summit that took place from July 7th to 9th, 2008. As expected at the summit were Presidents Umaru Yar’ Adfua of Nigeria, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Avdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia. These same countries have consistently been invited to the summits and Ghana, under the leadership of President Mills, has been conspicuously missing from these summits, a judgment of the leadership provided by the Mills-Mahama NDC administration.

The G8 is an unofficial annual forum for the leaders of the eight main industrialised countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Traditionally, the host country of the G8 summit sets the agenda for negotiations, but world events caused the list of topics to expand, including such issues such as the Fukushima nuclear accident the European sovereign debt crisis, the conflict in Libya, Iran’s nuclear programme, Syria’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests, and the selection of a new managing director for the International Monetary Fund.