Sundaymail Editor
Fifty-nine (59) years after our forebears huddled together in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to form a united front called the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) — now the African Union (AU) — which was essentially an institutional bulwark that helped dislodge and vanquish colonialism, the continent, although politically free, still reeks of poverty.
In fact, poverty has become the common totem of the African people.
One of the key organs born out of the epoch-defining 1963 indaba was the Liberation Committee headed by that great Tanzanian General Hashim Mbita – may his dear revolutionary soul rest in eternal peace!
It helped provide political, moral, logistical, material and diplomatic support to liberation movements from across the continent, not least our own.It ultimately helped unclasp the stubborn vice-grip hold of imperial European countries that were determined to loot our countries to develop their own.
But, even as the colossal General Mbita breathed his last in his home town of Dar es Salaam, he could still smell both the sweet scent of freedom and the foul stench of poverty that wafted all around him.
It haunted him to the grave.
This is still the story of Africa.
Our roads are horribly potholed and unnavigable. Most people, even in urban areas, do not have access to potable water, while some in rural areas share water sources with animals.
Electricity supplies are epileptic, with Sub-Saharan Africa — boasting close to a billion souls — generating roughly the same amount of power as one European country, Spain, which is home to 45 million people.
Our villages are synonymous with grinding poverty. And most Africans live from hand to mouth.
It would be both sinful and a taboo to compare our decrepit and haunted environs with the neat, palm tree-adorned promenades in the West, including their well-manicured boulevards and swanky neighbourhoods.
Yet, ironically, most African countries are fabulously rich in minerals and other natural resources that have the potential to change the material wellbeing of their populations.
So, why is Africa so rich while its people are dirt-poor?
Well, we are constantly and dutifully reminded that the unenviable circumstances that African countries find themselves in are because of primitive looting by an elite that is inherently incapable of managing a modern state.
And our intelligentsia, who are supposed to provide a marketplace of ideas to guide the evolution of our own civilisation, sheepishly agree.
This is not only a specious claim but a ruse.
Frenzied Looting
Fortuitously, on the eve of Africa Day, an American daily newspaper, New York Times, published an insightful in-depth piece that helps explain why our kith and kin in Haiti – extracted from our continent through the heinous and inhumane practice of Slave Trade and banefully settled in the Caribbean to provide draught power in plantations controlled by the West — have been caught up in vicious and unrelenting cycles of poverty and political instability.
Haiti was recently in the news after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse on July 7 last year by a highly coordinated, highly trained and heavily armed mercenary group linked to the US. It was the latest chapter in the tragic story of this wretched nation.
We, however, now know from empirical research that Haiti, just like other countries particularly in Africa that were under the yoke of colonialism, is poor because for centuries it was saddled by an odious historical debt of paying a bribe to France to guarantee its freedom after winning its independence against the former oppressor through a successful slave revolution in 1791.
In one of the ancient examples of gunboat or big-stick diplomacy, the French actually stationed its warships off the coast of this fledgling nation to intimidate it into agreeing to its absurd terms.
Haiti only finished paying this debt, which was later financed through punitive and insincerely-arranged loans from France, in 1888 (two years before the British South Africa invaded us). All in all, it paid over US$560 million.
“We found that Haitians paid about US$560 million in today’s dollars. But that doesn’t nearly capture the true loss. If that money had simply stayed in the Haitian economy and grown at the nation’s actual pace over the last two centuries — rather than being shipped off to France, without any goods or services being provided in return — it would have added a staggering US$21 billion to Haiti over time … For perspective, that’s much bigger than Haiti’s entire economy in 2020,” claimed the New York Times.
Americans, too, had a chance to exploit this country after the French.
All this had the preponderant impact of undermining the Caribbean nation’s institutions and capacity to develop.
To this day, it remains a pitiable political, economic and social backwater struggling to extricate itself from centuries of plunder.
It is the same pattern in former colonies.
India was one of the countries that actually had it worse, as the frenzied looting at the behest of Britain was on a shocking industrial scale.
Economist Dr Utsa Patnaik scoured through huge volumes of data to find the extent of prejudice, and her revealing findings were published by Columbia University Press in 2018.
They actually showed that during the 173-year period between 1765 to 1938, Britain, through the East India Company (EIC), looted more than US$45 trillion from the South Asian country.
To put this into perspective, this represents almost 17 times more than Britain’s US$2,8 trillion economy. In this elaborate scam, the EIC collected taxes and used a portion — about a third of the revenues — to buy goods from the same people they were taxing.
Put simply, they got the goods, which were either consumed in Britain or re-exported to other jurisdictions, for free.
Britain used the fabulous profits to finance strategic imports such as iron, tar and timber that were essential for its industrialisation.
After 1847, those who wanted to buy goods directly from India had to first buy special council bills in London using silver and gold.
The bills were then paid by the traders to Indian producers, who later encashed them at council offices for rupees.
Remember, council payments were financed through taxes levied on the same people. So, all the gold and silver ended up in London, helping to industrialise and modernise the plunderers.
Imagine what US$45 trillion could have done for India. Clearly, it is New Delhi — not London — that could have developed into a major world metropolis.
So that you know, the US and Chinese economies, which are the world’s largest and second-largest, respectively, presently stand at US$20 trillion and US$14,7 trillion in that order.
Here, in Zimbabwe, we suffered a similar fate, where the British South Africa Company (BSAC) opened the floodgates of industrial-scale looting from 1890 to 1980.
And Bishop Lazi uses the word looting consciously and advisedly.
Matabeleland Loot Rights and Mashonaland Claim Rights and Exploring Co were some of the companies that were listed on the then-Salisbury Stock Exchange.
In addition to being overtaxed, our people were enslaved on farms and lost their cattle, minerals in a period spanning about 100 years.
If only our intelligentsia could research how much we lost as a country to both appreciate the scale of prejudice and press for reparations.
Unfortunately, those who sponsor our scholars and academics now want them to focus on research that xenophobically besmirch the image West’s rivals, China, in Africa.
How sad!
Spoils of Greed & Avarice
You see, these anecdotes help explain why we are so poor and the West is so rich.
It is not rocket science. Those who sponged off us still obscenely flaunt the spoils of their greed and avarice till this day.
The rotting infrastructure in Haiti cannot be compared to the magnificent splendour of the Eiffel Tower in France, which was built from “wild profits” from a French bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, that benefitted from Haiti’s exploitation and controlled its Treasury for decades. America’s Wall Street was also part of the looting frenzy, with the business in Haiti “delivering big margins for the institution that ultimately became Citigroup”.
Similarly, in England, during special occasions, Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Family use crown jewels — symbols of power — adorned by diamonds fashioned out of the 3 104-carat Cullinan Diamond —the largest diamond ever found — that was discovered near Pretoria in South Africa by Thomas Wells on January 26, 1905. The Eiffel Tower (France) and Crown Jewels (England) — which shamelessly display the West’s supposed civilisation, modernity and prosperity — pointedly show how our poor countries contributed to the filthy lucre of the so-called developed world.
It is folly to think the evil looters have repented.
They haven’t!
In fact, the Barbarians are back at the gate again. Ecclesiastes 5:10-12 tells us: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.
When goods increase, they increase who eat them, and what advantage has their owner but to see them with his eyes? Sweet is the sleep of a labourer, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep.”
Matthew 6: 24 adds: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”
Sponsored Intellect, Activism
The same barbarians, who are rich on account of having stolen from us for centuries, are now sponsoring our intelligentsia to look the other way and focus on things that are not in our national interest.
Why Africa is not pushing for reparations from Europe, which ordinarily had the tradition of reparations in its own jurisdictions, is surprising?
Why aren’t our historians telling us how much prejudice we suffered from the Slave Trade up to the end of colonialism, which only ended in 1994 in neighbouring South Africa?
Non-governmental organisations and civil society activists are now happy to receive money from the same plunderers to de-campaign and degrade the Chinese and Russians who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with as when we fought for freedom against the same oppressors.
It takes a special kind of imbecile and stupidity to be sponsored by countries that doggedly exploited, dehumanised us and worked against our freedom to go after our all-weather allies.
China was a relatively poor country when it sacrificed to sponsor our own freedom.
Paid activists have become a disease plaguing the future health of our sacred teapot-shaped Republic.
We need to wise-up!
Bishop out!
Online Reporter