Lord Aikins Adusei
4 June 2009
opinion
Surveying a history of exploitation of Africa's people and resources, Lord Aikins Adusei denounces the multinational corporations continuing to plunder the continent's natural wealth.
Situating today's ongoing exploitation of African resources within an established tradition of external interference, Adusei decries the ability of corporations to avoid paying taxes and keep dictators indifferent to their citizens' plight in their pocket. But with the emergence of China as a viable funding alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the author concludes that the 'second colonialism' driving Euro-American globalisation may be at an end.
Before the end of the first period of colonialism African nations were properties of their colonial masters who did what they could to rape the continent of whatever resource they deemed good for the development of their citizens in Europe.
Out of nowhere and without any consultation with the people of the African continent, the Europeans met and divided the continent amongst themselves in what has been termed 'The Scramble for Africa'.
Through this scramble France, Britain, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Germany and Italy all went on a looting spree, raping Africa of her resources without putting any of the proceeds back for the development of the continent.
When US President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Gambia on 13 January 1943, he was so appalled by the conditions of Gambians that he made this lamentation:
'It's the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life... The natives are five thousand years back of us... The British have been there for two hundred years - for every dollar that the British have put into Gambia, they have taken out ten. It's just plain exploitation of those people.'
He continued, telling his son Elliot, 'I must tell [Winston] Churchill what I found out about his British Gambia today. This morning, at about eight-thirty, we drove through Bathurst to the airfield.' (Elliott notes that it was here that his father began speaking with 'real feeling in his voice'.) 'The natives were just getting to work. In rags ... glum-looking...They told us the natives would look happier around noontime, when the sun should have burned off the dew and the chill. I was told the prevailing wages for these men was one and nine. One shilling nine pence. Less than fifty cents.'
'An hour?' Elliott asked.
'A day! Fifty cents a day! Besides which, they're given a half-cup of rice. Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate. I asked. Life expectancy - you'd never guess what it is. Twenty-six years. Those people are treated worse than the livestock. Their cattle live longer!'[1]
And the exploitation was not peculiar to Gambia. The Gold Coast (now Ghana), Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)), Namibia, South Africa, Congo and Angola all suffered from the same colonial exploitation and underinvestment.
For almost 300 years the Europeans, who were supposedly civilised, devout Christians, irresponsibly looted Africa's resources and made slaves of its natives without developing their colonies. When the local population protested against this exploitation without reciprocal investment, they were brutally crushed, as happened in the Congo, where King Leopold II of Belgium looted the resources, made slaves and killed close to 10 million Congolese.
In 1904 to 1907 the German, led by Commander-in-Chief Lothar Von Trotha, committed their first genocide of the 20th century by killing 90 per cent of the Herero and the Namaqua people of South West Africa (now Namibia) when the people protested against the exploitation of their resources. And the sad stories of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Namibia, Kenya and Angola, where people were denied access to land, citizenship and basic rights and had to take up arms before they were granted independence, are in many history books. We know how Nelson Mandela (now a hero in Europe) and a number of freedom fighters endured long prison sentences, torture, exile and deaths in the hands of their 'devout Christians' and 'civilised' European colonisers. The idea was that through The Scramble for Africa they had bought Africa and had power to do as they wish, hence the rape, torture, genocide and mass killings.
While Europeans became richer, Africans became poorer. For example, with the looting of the Congo's resources, enslavement, the amputations of hands and 10 million deaths, Brussels - which now doubles as the capital of the European Union - and Belgium were built.
When they were given their 'freedom', the fathers of independence inherited nothing more than empty treasuries. They realised that after more than 300 hundred years of colonial rule their colonial masters had left them nothing; no money and no infrastructure.
This bad situation and their eagerness to improve the lives of their peoples forced them to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for assistance, and when they went lo and behold their former colonial masters were there waiting for them. The colonisers used their majority votes to dictate to the World Bank and IMF about how these former colonies should be helped. Of the 185 members that make up the IMF, six colonial masters and their allies - comprised of the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Italy - control 42 per cent of the votes.
The colonial masters dictated to the IMF and the World Bank that for Africans to be helped, they had to open their economies to allow European corporations in. This underscores the numerous conditionalities that are associated with loans from these institutions. The conditionalities are nothing more than a smokescreen designed to ensure that Europeans never lose their grip on the resources of their former colonies. Some of these conditionalities include instituting secret memorandums of agreement, subsidies to foreign corporations and massive tax concessions (such as income tax, usage fees and property tax) - the primary source of revenue for 'export-oriented', developing countries.
The sad thing is that Africans thought independence would give them respite to develop, but this was never to be as the colonial masters used their corporations and intelligence services to deliver vengeance on the people. They encouraged and financed civil wars, unashamedly polluted rivers, wells and the soil through their oil and mineral activities, deliberately understated their profits and falsified profit documents, as well as undervaluing their goods, indulging in smuggling, theft and the falsification of invoicing and non-payment of taxes, and employing kickbacks and bribes to public officials. They also overpriced projects, provided save havens for looted funds, promoted the sale of guns, overthrew African leaders, supported dictatorships and assassinated those who disagreed with them. We know, for example, the tragedy of Patrice Lumumba and the support the West gave Mobutu.
The corporations forced onto Africa by the IMF, the World Bank, the US and Europe have been implicated in a number of cases for corrupting African leaders and stealing trillions of dollars worth of resources. Global Financial Integrity says that '$900 billion is secreted each year from underdeveloped economies, with an estimated $11.5 trillion currently stashed in havens. More than one quarter of these hubs belong to the UK, while Switzerland washes one-third of global capital flight.' Of this $900 billion, $150 billion comes from Africa.
'The idea that Switzerland has a clean economy is a joke; it is a dirt-driven economy,' says Richard Murphy, director of Tax Research LLP. The Swiss Bankers Association claims that four-fifths of the nation supports banking secrecy, which reveals a society deeply embedded in a culture of impunity and exploitation. The fact is that those who steal must find a way to hide their loot, and Switzerland provides the ideal environment for such crimes to take place. And it is not Switzerland alone that does not have a clean economy. Britain, France, Germany, Luxembourg can all be described as vampires.
In her article 'Capital flight: gingerbread havens, cannibalised economies', Khadija Sharife writes:
'This policy is especially lethal for developing countries where the poor are now caught in tax brackets, courtesy of the IMF and World Bank's structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), instituting policies ranging from "tax holidays" to the privatisation of state services [and] carving out huge slices of natural capital at corporate auctions... Africa has collectively lost more than $600-billion in capital flight, excluding other mechanisms of flight including ecological debt (globally estimated at a potential $1.8-trillion per annum), the cost of liberalised trade (just under $300-billion) ... and the list goes on...'[2]
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There’s the on-going legacy of Slavery which has taken on another form lynchings, murders, rapes, etc..
Be careful what you ask for..God is Listening to you “ Robbers of our People “ ; as Daniel 11:14 says.
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