One of South Africa’s wealthiest women urged the world’s richest nations on Tuesday to help change perceptions of Africa as a corrupt, badly run continent in order to boost international investment and fight poverty.Wendy Luhabe, a flamboyant entrepreneur voted South Africa’s most powerful woman by leading business weekly Financial Mail last year, told Reuters in an interview that Africa also needed to fight sexism, which she said severely hampered the progress of women in business.

Luhabe, who has helped shape the government’s black economic empowerment policy of transferring a larger portion of the country’s economy to the black majority, said South Africa was making giant steps in driving out poverty and improving Africa’s governance but negative attitudes hurt these efforts “We have to fight unfavorable perceptions about our continent ... We have to demand that we be measured by the same standards the West measures itself, and the G8 can be instrumental in this,” she said.

Luhabe, 48, a friend of President Thabo Mbeki with a reputation as a no-nonsense negotiator, admitted Africa had its problems but argued that countries must not be lumped together in one basket.The Group of Eight industrialized countries will meet in Gleneagles, Scotland, next month partly to discuss how to help Africa defeat poverty and embark on a journey of rapid growth.

The meeting will endorse debt relief for some African countries, but Luhabe sees fighting perceptions and the opening up of Western markets for trade as even bigger issues.She said Africa was already taking steps to change its image, but the G8 could help if it established criteria for corruption and bad governance and then singled out those countries which fell short instead of labeling an entire continent.Luhabe also said full G8 backing for African initiatives like the new peer review system, under which countries rate each others’ performance in democracy, economic development and human rights, would increase investor confidence.

<B>Helping women</B>

“Despite Africa’s various problems, the message is that we ourselves are doing something about it and progress is being made. The support we seek is the type that reinforces some of the actions our leaders have initiated,” she said in the resort of Sun City where she was attending a business function.

Luhabe, who has a degree in business and finance and is known for her designer clothes and expensive jewelry, was a marketing executive before South Africa’s first all-race elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power in 1994. She quit her job to start firms related to human resources and women’s empowerment, and then began quietly negotiating her way into white male-dominated boardrooms and business deals.

Luhabe was already a noted entrepreneur when she married politician Mbhazima Shilowa, the premier of Gauteng – South Africa’s richest region which includes the capital Pretoria and Johannesburg. She has interests ranging from banking and telecommunications to gaming, and she chairs the board of South Africa’s International Marketing Council that promotes her country to foreign investors.

Luhabe said the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the continent’s home-grown rescue plan, showed its desire to help itself. Focusing on improved governance and trade rather than seeking aid was key to putting Africa on a path to growth, she added.Under NEPAD, African leaders have pledged better government management in exchange for more donor and investor dollars.

Luhabe is among the few South African women directors of big firms, including the Johannesburg bourse, cellular operator Vodacom, financial services groups Cycad and Industrial Development Corporation – companies which together are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. She said much more needed to be done to get black women into positions of influence and power. “Women are under-valued. If we can change the perception that women are of less value than men, then we’d really make a difference,” she said.

<B>Manoah ESIPISU</B>