Public Agenda (Accra)
Dr. Kwame Osei
17 November 2008
column
In the first installment of the New World Order, I intimated that the financial crisis engulfing western nations are signifying the end of the Anglo-American dominance on the planet and that a New World Order is on the horizon.
As a member of the Afrikan Conscious Study Group, where our motto is "proper knowledge is power", we have been dissecting this issue for some time now at our meetings on Sundays at the Dubois centre.
This feature will explain how despite the end of their dominance, western nations will seek to use Afrika in a vain and failed attempt to rescue themselves.
Whether Afrika and Afrikans as a whole are aware, the stark reality is that there is a new "scramble for Afrika".
The original "scramble for Afrika" was in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin in 1884/1885 where America and her western cousins such as Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands literally carved up Afrika for themselves and in the process stealing vast swathes of Afrikan land and by proxy creating the artificial boundaries we see today and in the course splitting entire families.
The current "scramble for Afrika" is a sinister and deadly attempt by Afrika's so-called development partners in a bid to save themselves from the inordinate financial chaos which is engulfing them.
This new "scramble for Afrika" has even more players with China, India, Turkey and Russia all vying to rape Afrika of its vital resources like Gold, Diamonds, Colthan, Oil and Copper.
Whilst the west, India, China, Russia et al all claim to be Afrika's "development partners" the truth of the matter is that billions of dollars' worth of natural resources are being looted from Afrika sometimes with the help of corrupt Afrikan "leaders". - Many Afrikan people are unaware of this grand theft that comes under the guise of "development partners", "globalization" and "strategic investors".
Instead of enriching Afrikan countries, some big American and European multi-national corporations are facilitating corruption and provoking instability right across the Afrikan continent - AS WE SEE IN D R CONGO.
Simon Taylor, a former director of Global Witness, a UK human rights campaigning organisation, said "Western companies and banks have colluded in stripping Afrika's resources. We need to track revenues from oil, mining and logging into national budgets to make sure that the money is not siphoned off by corrupt officials".
Looting of state assets by corrupt leaders should become a crime under international law, he said "The G8 should take the lead in this".
While the British government claims it leads the world in the "fight against poverty", the reality is that it is creating poverty and misery in Afrika by being the major arms supplier to 10 out of 14 conflict-racked African countries, including Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda.
In South Africa, the former Mbeki government was hoodwinked by British arms companies into buying 24 Hawk fighter jets at £17-million each, "by far the most expensive option", according to a House of Commons report.
Gordon Brown, together with his EU partners, is currently demanding free trade deals such as the sinister EPA's that will destroy whole African industries, such as Ghana's once thriving tomato canning industry. "Europe," says Gyekye Tanoh of the Third World Network in Accra, "is gaining 80% of our markets in exchange for what is effectively 2% of theirs."
However my investigations centre on three African countries rich in mineral resources - Angola, Equatorial Guinea and Liberia. It shows how British based companies have insidiously negotiated deals that are against the interests of Afrikan people.
My investigations focuses on a big gas project in Equatorial Guinea, plans to exploit Liberia's diamonds and western banks' readiness to provide Angola with huge oil-backed loans.
In Equatorial Guinea, BG plc {formerly the British Gas state company} has closed a deal with the regime of President Teodoro Obiang to buy up the country's production of liquefied natural gas for the next 20 years - Britain's own gas supplies are fast running out, this is why they need Africa and the British have the audacity to tell their people in England that Africa is a dark continent with hungry people - if that is the case then why are you in "the dark continent" stealing our gold, oil, gas etc.
Britain's HSBC bank has been accused by a US Senate Committee of helping Mr. Obiang move cash from the country's oil revenues into secret bank accounts in Luxemburg and Cyprus.
The country is threatened with repeated coups by greedy Europeans keen to get their hands on the oil wealth - the last attempt was the aborted coup in 2004 when Mark Thatcher son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was involved in funding the failed coup attempt to oust Obiang that was backed by his former Eaton school/college friend Simon Mann and former south African apartheid military officer Nick Du Toit.
In Liberia, which has just recovered from a brutal civil war engineered by the Americans, LIB a private London bank was behind attempts to monopolize alluvial diamond production and the country's telecommunications. The UN and The World Bank have criticized the schemes as secretive and against the country's interests. LIB has now withdrawn.
And in Angola, the victim of an even more destructive western engineered civil war, one of the UK's leading development banks Standard Chartered, has been accused of damaging the country's economy by providing record multibillion dollar loans which give a stranglehold over future oil production.
Unknown to many Afrikan people a succession of scandals has already revealed how oil wealth was looted in billions from the Abacha military regime in Nigeria with the help of British and western banks and bribes paid by American oil companies.
In Sudan and Chad, Chinese companies are moving in and backing and arming military rulers, whilst at the same time the genocide is happening in Darfur. The Chinese are constructing oil pipelines ready to suck Sudan's oil - By 2020 Afrika will supply China with 30% of its oil.
In France the then state oil company Elf has been accused in corruption investigations of having paid kickbacks and encouraged regimes to run up huge debts as part of a sick and deliberate "African strategy".
Congo-Brazzaville, the fourth largest African oil producer, was dominated by Elf, and now has the highest debt per capita in the world.
What the above shows is that the West, if its past actions are anything to go by, is looking to Afrika to save itself from economic ruin.
One thing that is absolutely important for the reader to recognize is that how did Europe and America attain their wealth?
Europe and America attained their illegal and inordinate wealth from Afrika as a result of the transatlantic slave trade which started in earnest in 1455.
Prior to 1455 Europe and America had been dark, backward, uneducated and uncivilsed places, Europe in particular. But the advent of the transatlantic slave trade that was approved by the Christian church gave Europe and later America the opportunity to enrich itself.
The Romanus Pontifex, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455, sanctioned the seizure of non-Christian lands, and encouraged the enslavement of non-Christian people in Africa and the Americas. Specifically, it gave the green light to "invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed," all for profit, and in the name of Jesus Christ.
The Inter Caetera, signed by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, states, "... we (the Papacy) command you (Spain) ... to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents and dwellers therein in the Catholic faith, and train them in good morals." This papal law sanctioned and paved the way for European colonization and Catholic missions in the New World.
These two edicts opened the floodgates for everything that followed, the raping, pillaging, kidnapping; genocide and enslavement of millions of people particularly Afrikan people. They established the groundwork for the global slave trade of the 15th to 19th centuries, and the Age of Imperialism.
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