admingreed, corruption, manipulation of leaders, sustenance of dictators and impoverishment of the masses among other things.
Africa has not benefited and will arguably not benefit much from this Western investment which has only tended to favour the capitalists.
Diamond proceeds in the DRC and South Africa are still to trickle down to the poor black masses and so are a small percentage of platinum profits in Zimbabwe to be ceded to the Ngezi community. Africa’s history of foreign investment is in total shambles.
Why would Western investors want the continent to develop the way they are when they whole heartedly know that it is actually Africa which has facilitated their own development through its abundant natural resources? Assisting Africa’s industrial development would mean stiff competition with a continent that is endowed with abundant minerals needed in all sectors of development such as the motor industry, construction, power and energy, military industrial complexes and the list goes on.
Many Africans have always wondered why the continent has never received as much foreign investment as did most parts of Asia. The major reason is that Africa was to provide cheap raw materials, Asia and Latin
America the labour, and the Middle East the energy to drive the North’s economic development. This was a stratagem used by the West to maintain its political and economic hegemony on other continents. Such a ploy is now being challenged and threatened by the BRICS countries.
Africa has great potential to be at par with the West only if it realises that it has the resources that have driven and fuelled the North’s economic growth over all these centuries. If the continent was to boycott the export of its abundant raw materials for only eight months then hell will break loose. Their economies would scream more than what we are witnessing now.
Sadly, Africa in this 21st century still has leaders who believe that the North can uplift the continent from its poverty. China through sheer hard work and the will power of its patriotic citizens actually turned from a backward country into a modern well advanced and developed state.
Only fallible leaders, of which we have so many amongst the African leadership, still imagine that the invasion and rape of Libya by the NATO allies was to save innocent Benghazi civilians from Gaddafi’s dictatorship. Little has been said about how the Northern countries are scrambling for oil and construction deals in this Northern African country.
Libya was merely invaded to loot its abundant oil resources and the interference in Ivory Coast’s internal political affairs was to help sustain the sick French economy with billions of dollars from Ivorian cocoa and oil. Europe and America’s economies are ailing and it is through such open aggression that they loot and plunder Africa’s minerals so as to at least cure the sickness that their economies are going through.
Some parochial African leaders believe that the Western countries are still capable of giving them financial assistance to boost their economic growth. One is actually baffled by such myopism especially when capitalism in this 21st century is ailing. European and American people are fighting to make ends meet as the levels of unemployment and poverty are going up due to the so called austerity measures forced upon them by these capitalists and their multi-national corporations. (Foreign investors)
Some African leaders still have a 20th century mentality were they think that the Northern capitalists are the only states which have the technology and skill to extract the continent’s abundant mineral resources from the ground. It’s a shame that Africa’s future can be entrusted in the hands of such narrow-minded leaders who don’t have a single idea that other continents have actually surpassed Northern technology and expertise in digging deep down the bowels of the earth extracting and searching for minerals.
The 21st century needs a well-focused African leadership with a sound vision for the development of the continent. According to Plato, the ideal ruler must be someone who is endowed with a particular kind of political expertise or skill (politike techne) or charisma.
He must be an ideal ruler because ruling is a job or task that requires some expertise. The ruler must be knowledgeable and be able to execute his political skills to make his citizens have what is beneficial to them and future generations of their particular country. Joy Asongazoh Alemazung observed that, by being morally good, “the governor who is first morally of good will, strives for the moral good or wellbeing of the society and as a statesman with political skills he knows how to attain this objective. The statesman gives the society what he would give to himself.” This century belongs to those who have abundant resources and the intellectual will-power. Africa sits on huge deposits of iron, nickel, platinum, gold, copper, diamonds and many other minerals.
It cannot be disputed that every country in the international system needs Africa’s resources for its own growth and development? Why then do we still have an African leadership which still worship the North as if they are the only ones who can buy the continent’s minerals as well as extract them from deep underground? Foreign investors are not a new thing on the continent.
They have always been there to loot and plunder Africa’s resources. In our last instalment we mentioned about the billions of dollars realised from the sale of Nigeria’s oil yet little of that money has actually been of much benefit to most of its citizens.
South Africa is heavily infested by Western investors but we still wait to hear when all that wealth extracted from its many mines and the billions of dollars gained from its myriad industries are to benefit the majority of its poor citizens. In Africa, with the type of ‘blinkered leaders’ that we have, it will always be a case of ‘riches underground and poverty on the surface’.
The more than a million people who descended on Zimbabwe’s Chiadzwa diamond fields during the ‘anarchical’ diamond rush days or ‘Eldorado’ actually had a chance to experience how foreign investors have benefited from looting Africa’s resources. These uninvited illegal diamond diggers made a lot of money by looting diamonds the same way foreign investors have been looting and exploiting Africa’s abundant mineral resources.
Those who were brave enough to venture at Chiadzwa will tell you that royalties and taxes paid to African governments by foreign mine companies are far less than what these foreigners get from these minerals. The Chiadzwa diamond rush actually brought a consciousness among the poor masses of Zimbabwe on the need for black empowerment and indigenisation.
Most Africans can now see through the thread bare lies made by some of our misguided leaders who still think that Western investors are the panacea for the continent’s development. Africa has tried over the years to woo these Northern investors and there is actually nothing much to show for their presence on the continent other than the manipulation of leaders and the plunder of the continent’s resources.
Despite the fact that foreign investors are found all over Africa more than 60 percent of black South Africans are still poor, 70 percent of Nigerians are still wallowing in poverty, millions of Egyptians are unemployed, millions of Kenyans do not have decent shelter and millions of Ivorians cannot make ends meet. Empowerment of the African masses in various economic sectors can help curb the loss of trillions of dollars which Africa is losing to Westerners who control these vital sectors. Africans are not hewers of wood; neither are they drawers of water and so like everyone else they need a reasonable standard of living.
Foreign investors have stifled the continent’s control of its political and economic systems. They dictate how African leaders should govern as well as how they should carry out business. This is quite evident on the recent trip to the United States of America by the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe where American businessmen were questioning him on the country’s indigenous laws. Foreign investors always advance the interests of their country at the expense of the African continent.
The whole issue of foreign investment is anchored on the belief that the stronger should be free to exercise their strength without moral or legal limitations that protect the poor and weak. Foreign investment is usually a monopoly of the powerful Western countries.
In typical Thucididesian fashion, the economically strong Northern countries do whatever they can and the economically weak African states suffer what they must. African governments should therefore forge relationships with foreign investors which are based on black economic empowerment and value addition of their raw materials.
International politics is changing and if the North does not engage in sound partnership with the continent, then Africa should seriously invite committed investors from the Asian, Latin American, Middle East and East European regions.
- Bowden B. C Mbanje and Darlington N Mahuku and are lecturers in International Relations, and Peace and Governance with Bindura University of Science Education.
Online Reporter