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Sometimes, it is deeply distressing to be African. With the coup in the Republic of Niger, there have been stories of the role the scramble for raw materials by the West is playing in the destructive growth of democracy on the continent, especially with the suspension of the export of uranium and gold to France by the new government in Niger. However, the narrative on the leadership on the continent hurts most when one reviews a recent video of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, where he expressed the helplessness and hopelessness of African leaders before their counterparts in the West.
For emphasis, Museveni stated that at the peak of the political crisis in Libya, African leaders agreed to mediate and find a common ground for peace in the country between its murdered leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and his opponents. The effort led to the dispatch of a mediation team made up of some African Presidents. According to Museveni, the team was already airborne when NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation), ordered it to abort the trip and return to base. Religiously, he said, they obeyed. None of the African Presidents protested the order. None disobeyed it. None complained even openly against it. They all took the order from NATO, aborted the trip, and watched with folded arms until Gaddafi was toppled and murdered by NATO. The last time I checked, NATO is an intergovernmental military alliance between 31 member states made up of 29 European and two North American countries. That was a very distressing confession from Museveni, which goes to show that African leaders owe no allegiance to the African people.
While I rummaged over Museveni’s confession, my mind still raced between details of the confessional by John Perkins in his classic book “The Confessions of the Economic Hit Man” and how Western organisations remotely govern, and hold down, third world countries through the debts that bind these countries to the West. The simple logic here is that your debtor is your slave. And, according to Perkins, these debts are sold to African leaders through the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation to finance projects in exchange for raw materials. Perkins said that third-world leaders who refuse to take the loans and enslave their countries invite the ‘jackals’, a codename for the CIA. The outcome of the visit by the jackals is always an end to the life of the government or an end to the life of the President or both.
Besides Perkins, Prof. Howard Nicholas, a Sri Lankan economist, also voiced his frustration with African leaders at a lecture he delivered at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, titled “Underdevelopment in Africa: What’s the real story?” In that lecture, Prof. Nicholas said: “Sub-Saharan Africa has essentially been fundamental to global prosperity. For the advanced countries, Africa has a role to play. Africa is a raw materials producer. We will not allow sub-Saharan Africa to escape us. We will do everything to keep sub-Saharan Africa where it is, also impoverished. It is absolutely vital for the prosperity of Europe and America. This means that all the economic structures, all the global institutions, and all the economics that we teach everyone are all designed to keep Africa exactly where it is. And whether it is Europe or America or, now, China, it is always the same. We need Africa to remain impoverished because we need those raw materials and we need them cheap. It does not mean to say that there is nothing Africans can do, of course, there is, but this is the position of things. This is what it is about. If Africa does something different, I assure you that the living standard of those in Europe and America, and Asia, is going to fall. That is a big prize to pay and I assure you that the West is not going to let that happen without a big fight.”
This is the practice that African leaders have tolerated and continue to encourage through their actions. Every year, African leaders rush to catch flights to attend summits with the French President, the American President, the Russian President, and the British leadership. They also attend summits in China with Chinese leaders. All the summits tend to achieve one thing: advance the continued enslavement of Africa through the sale of raw materials to the West, and China, at ridiculously cheap prices while spending more to import products made from the raw materials. Think of it, Switzerland is the headquarters of chocolate production in the world. Chocolate is made from cocoa and Switzerland has no cocoa farms. But it regulates how much cocoa grown in Africa by toiling African farmers would be sold. Isn’t that the same thing with Nigeria’s crude oil? The West, through the WB and IMF, manufactures economic arguments that make our leaders believe that it is better to export crude and import petrol and all other by-products of crude, instead of fixing existing refineries or scrapping them, if they have become moribund, and building new ones to refine crude locally.
The fact is this! Africans must begin to demand reverse thinking from their leaders. Reverse thinking would ensure that African leaders begin to utilize their raw materials for manufacturing. This will mean exporting finished goods. What this suggests is that Africa can only change the narrative by encouraging the growth of manufacturing on the continent. The implication is that African leaders must begin to fund the manufacturing sector. This is one basic way to tackle poverty on the continent. Manufacturing will utilize Africa’s ‘cheap’ raw materials to create a better economy and also create more jobs, and divert the wasting energies of African youths into something much more productive. Outside this, these energies become gunpowder that merely needs a lighter to ignite a fire that may consume a lot of Africans, including their leaders. The signals are all over with the increasing support for military coups in the West African sub-region.
Museveni hinted at this when he addressed President Vladimir Putin during the recent Russia-Africa Summit in Moscow. He said: “One facet of neo-colonialism and colonialism was Africa being confined to producing only raw materials, crops, like coffee, and minerals. I can give you an example: the global business for coffee is worth $460 billion. That is the value of the coffee business in the world. But of those $460 billion the coffee-producing countries of the whole world share only $25 billion and Africa shares only $2.4 billion out of $460 billion. This issue is the biggest stunting factor why the African economies are stunted; they do not grow, because all the value is taken by other people. Germany earns more from coffee than the whole of Africa. Germany earns $6.85 billion from coffee, while Africa earns only $2.4 to $2.5 billion. This is the big scandal.”
His proposal: “What I want to propose to Russia and China”, he said, “is to discourage as a policy the importing of raw materials from Africa, to instead work with the Africans to add value at source. This would within a very short time transform the economies of Africa from low- and mid-income to high- and middle-high income.”
To my mind, before Russia and China step in, African leaders must begin to act in reverse.
