The words of the legendary Dr. Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah in his Independence Day speech on March 6, 1957 ring true today. He told the world that political independence was meaningless without economic freedom.
Arguably the largest pan-Africanist on the continent as the African Union and later the Organization for African Unity, Nkrumah’s pro-independence leaders were largely his creation, his mentor Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kenneth Kaunda, Madiba Nelson Mandela, Jomo Kenyatta etc. all together. They failed in one respect: they focused all their energy on the battle to free Africa politically from its Caucasian masters, but they failed to chart a road map for freeing the continent from Western economic control.
This shortsightedness is what manifests today as neocolonialism or imperialism and has haunted the continent like the sword of Damocles from the heady days of the decolonization struggles of the 1960s to date like a terrible dream that will scare even Rip. . Van Winkle.
That the United States is the most powerful nation in the world is not in doubt, as its position has been entrenched in global affairs since the end of World War II in 1945 after it led the Allied Forces ably backed by the United Kingdom and the then USSR. under the leadership of first Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then Harry Truman.
The US-Africa Summit was first held in 2014 under the presidency of Barack Obama, himself an African, since his late father hailed from Kenya. At the inaugural summit, the key issue raised and discussed was the need to ensure Africa had greater access to energy, as it was outrageous that some 85 per cent of residents on the world’s poorest continent lacked access to electricity.
The initial phase of the project was aimed at adding “more than 10,000 MW of cleaner, more efficient electricity generation capacity aimed at increasing access to electricity for at least 20 million new homes, to its ultimate destination of “adding 30 000 MW of cleaning electricity and increasing access to 60 million new connections designed to be invested with around $7 billion went nowhere. Six countries (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania) lined up for the phase ending in 2018.
Prosper Africa, another initiative launched in 2018 under President Donald Trump, was designed to greatly increase two-way trade and investment between the United States and Africa. In late 2021, ahead of the second Washington Summit, it delivered a paltry two-way trade of just $64 billion, less than one percent of total US global trade.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act passed at the turn of the century, renewed in 2015 and set to expire in 2025, less than four years from now, has added little to no impetus to US-Africa economic exchanges. The just concluded US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington was not without its lofty rhetoric and recalled the ‘Holding Talks’ work of Prof. Ola Rotimi. President Joe Biden told his guests, “We are all committed to the future of Africa,” and followed that up by announcing $55 billion in commitments. However, Biden stressed that only $15 billion is a new commitment, which means that most of the $55 billion being spearheaded comes from initiatives that have already been announced in previous forums.
It’s worth critically reflecting on the late Afrobeat master Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s quip, “Dem don’t let you go, but you never let go.” Why are African leaders rushing to Washington DC and other G-7 capitals as if the Continent’s solutions were there? Why do these so-called ‘targeted’ summits to alleviate the plight of the Man on the Clapham Bus in Africa always have to take place at Uncle Sam?
When will these short-sighted and greedy African leaders learn that America is driven by self-interest and nothing else? There really is no love for Africa and all this ‘talk’ is just an opportunity to make more deals for the US as Africa will never be seen as an equal trading or trading partner. What drives international relations is interest, and unfortunately, Africa’s economic interest is never factored into the equation. How have all these summits put food on the tables of the African populace in Lagos, Abuja, Accra, Nairobi, Johannesburg, Cairo, Abidjan, Dakar, etc.?
Singapore did not go from being a third world nation to a first world one thanks to frequent attendance at US summits. The rise of China, which saw some 800 million people lifted out of poverty, was not achieved by any US summit. Brazil, under the visionary leadership of Lula Da Silva, lifted some 400 million people out of poverty without the Latin American country outsourcing its thinking capacity to Washington DC.
In 1997, at the height of the Asian financial crisis, Dr. Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia was regularly ridiculed in the Western media for not accepting an IMF loan on his usual grueling terms. At the end of the day, Malaysia was stronger for it, and the same media was forced to eat the humble cake by acknowledging not only their economic genius but also their rare display of courage in standing up to them.
Africa desperately needs patriotic leaders who can better serve the interests of this continent and not economic saboteurs and shameless rent seekers, as well as apologists for the liberal West who are worse than the African bosses who sold their brothers into slavery for mere mirrors, weapons locals, and gin
Civil society must rise up and challenge these insane rulers masquerading as leaders campaigning for a total boycott of these invitations that are paternalistic and nauseatingly condescending in the manner and manner reminiscent of how high school principals summoned students for the ritual called Morning Assemblies. .
African leaders must develop indigenous economic policies in accordance with the real needs of our economies, developed by public-spirited patriotic African intellectuals and not by some imperialist economists and petty-bourgeois academics. DC and neocolonial London.
We need more Thomas Sankara clones, albeit in African democratic garb and not inferiority complexes and bootlicking hustlers.
Enough of the meaningless talk!
• Tony Ademiluyi is a journalist and writer based in Lagos, Nigeria; he is the chief editorial curator of The Cradle Life Forum, an Afrocentric conservative forum, and can be reached at anthonyademiluyi@yahoo.com and +2348167677075.
