Who Owns Africa?

I asked this question years ago (around 1996), as Director General of UNESCO during a meeting on African development.

One of the participants had underscored the difficulties that corruption poses for the proper distribution of aid.

In my intervention I admitted that it might be true in some cases, and that certain corrupt persons were well known. But I added that I was much more concerned about the corrupters. The important question is who are the real owners and who are the real beneficiaries of Africa’s immense (gold, diamonds, oil, bauxite, coltan, uranium) resources?

The exploitation continues. A few multinationals continue to control the energy sources and mineral wealth of the entire continent. Others buy land directly!

There is total impunity at the supranational level, because the G-7, G-8 and G-20 have not been able to replace the United Nations, whether they want to recognize it or not.

The huge oil tankers don’t comply with transportation safety regulations. And the environment is ignored, especially with respect to the exploitation of gold mines…

We recently read about the uranium mines in Arlit, in Niger, which supply French nuclear plants, and where the Maghreb branch of Al-Qaeda kidnapped five employees of the “strategic French multinational” Areva. That same day in the Gulf of Guinea two additional hostages were kidnapped in the oil fields of Taddox, a subsidiary of the Chinese group Sinopec, for which the French company Bourbon provides maritime services…

So let’s take stock. Let’s draw a map showing the real owners of Africa. We will discover many keys for meeting the challenges facing this continent. But we will have to make radical changes. We will have to replace exploitation with cooperation; an economy of speculation and war with an economy of sustainable global development; governance by plutocrats with governance by a renewed United Nations.

And the corrupt? What about the corrupters?

Who owns Africa? (And the world?)

Power (whether it be financial, military, political, technological or the communications media) is in the hands of a very few. But progressively it must change to many. The “peoples” will soon mobilize. They will soon express themselves with voices that are loud and clear. We stand at the dawn of a new era.

International Africa Day

We have been in debt with Africa for centuries, but especially since the 1980s when the wealthy countries took the reins of global governance and forgot their promises of aid and international cooperation…. .

They replaced aid with loans granted with under draconian conditions.

They replaced cooperation with exploitation.

They replaced a multilateral system with a plutocracy (G7, G8…).

They replaced democratic principles with the laws of the market.

They replaced a global development project with an economy of speculation and war.

The corruptors then accused the corrupt who, logically, didn’t deserve subsidies!

The time for “We, the Peoples …” has arrived, in which civil society can no longer remain silent.

It is time for NGOs and the United Nations system, joining their hands and voices to close gaps and heal wounds.

It is time to listen to Africa: to do what Africa’s immense wisdom tells us it needs.

It is time to demand that Europe cease the activities of multinationals that are exhausting fishing stocks, unduly and without compensation exploiting coltan in the Kivu region of the Congo, bauxite in Guinea-Conakry… or gold, with mining procedures that seriously damage the environment.

It is time to demand that the large communications media enterprises generously distribute in Africa the colossal media profits they will reap from the World Cup, huge profits that will otherwise fall into so few hands.

Yes: today, International Africa Day is the time to reaffirm our love for that continent, which has given so much in exchange for so little. And to ask their forgiveness. And to thank them for their smiles, despite it all.

It is time to fulfill what I wrote on the Island of Goreé in July, 1992:

…The last

glimpse…

of his island,

of his homeland

of one

who now sails

the seas of disaffection

toward places unknown.

Today

we do so cherish

that last

fading glance,

so brutally

uprooted,

of the countryside,

of his home,

of its shores.

They were sold

by weight.

We

must pay the price.