admintelevision, radio broadcasting and several other technological applications such as telemedicine and distance teaching.
And thanks to the WMAX radio bridge, a low cost connection was made available across the continent, including in rural areas.
It began in 1992, when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organisation) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent.
This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual US$500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country.
An African satellite only cost a one-time payment of US$400 million and the continent no longer had to pay a US$500 million annual lease. Which banker wouldn’t finance such a project?
But the problem remained – how can slaves, seeking to free themselves from their master’s exploitation ask the master’s help to achieve that freedom?
Not surprisingly, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the USA, Europe only made vague promises for 14 years. Gaddafi put an end to these futile pleas to the western “benefactors” with their exorbitant interest rates.
The Libyan guide put US$300 million on the table; the African Development Bank added US$50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further US$27 million – and that’s how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.
China and Russia followed suit and shared their technology and helped launch satellites for South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and a second African satellite was launched in July 2010. The first totally indigenously built satellite and manufactured on African soil, in Algeria, is set for 2020.
This satellite is aimed at competing with the best in the world, but at ten times less the cost, a real challenge. This is how a symbolic gesture of a mere US$300 million changed the life of an entire continent.
Gaddafi’s Libya cost the West, not just depriving it of US$500 million per year but the billions of dollars in debt and interest that the initial loan would generate for years to come and in an exponential
manner, thereby helping maintain a system that plundered the continent.
African Monetary Fund The US$30 billion frozen by Mr Obama belongs to the Libyan Central Bank and had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African federation – the African Investment Bank in Sirte, Libya; the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaoundé, Cameroon with a US$42 billion capital fund; and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria, which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc through which Paris has been able to maintain
its hold on some African countries for the last 50 years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.
The African Monetary Fund is expected to totally supplant the African activities of the International Monetary Fund which, with only US$25 billion, was able to bring an entire continent to its knees and make it swallow questionable privatisation like forcing African countries to move from public to private monopolies.
No surprise then that on December 16-17, 2010 the Africans unanimously rejected attempts by Western countries to join the African Monetary Fund, saying it was open only to African nations.
It is increasingly obvious that after Libya, the Western coalition will go after Algeria, because apart from its huge energy resources, the country has cash reserves of around a US$150 billion.
This is what lures the countries that are bombing Libya and they all have one thing in common – they are practically bankrupt. The USA alone has a staggering debt of US$14 trillion; France, Great
Britain and Italy each have a US$2 trillion public deficit compared to less than US$400 billion in public debt for 46 African countries combined.
Inciting spurious wars in Africa in the hope that this will revitalise their economies, which are sinking ever more into the doldrums will ultimately hasten the Western decline that actually began in 1884 during the notorious Berlin Conference.
As the American economist Adam Smith predicted in 1865 when he publicly backed Abraham Lincoln for the abolition of slavery, “the economy of any country which relies on the slavery of blacks is destined to descend into hell the day those countries awaken”. Regionalism an obstacle
To destabilise and destroy the African Union, which was veering dangerously (for the West) towards a United States of Africa under the guiding hand of Gaddafi, the European Union first tried – unsuccessfully – to create the Union for the Mediterranean (UPM).
North Africa somehow had to be cut off from the rest of Africa, using the old tired racist clichés of the 18th and 19th centuries, which claimed that Africans of Arab origin were more evolved and civilised than the rest of the continent.
This failed because Gaddafi refused to buy into it. He soon understood what game was being played when only a handful of African countries were invited to join the Mediterranean grouping without informing the African Union but inviting all 27 members of the European Union.
Without the driving force behind the African Federation, the UPM failed even before it began, still-born with Sarkozy as president and Mubarak as vice president. The French Foreign Minister, Alain Juppe is now attempting to re-launch the idea, banking no doubt on the fall of Gaddafi. What African leaders fail to understand is that as long as the European Union continues to finance the African
Union, the status quo will remain, because no real independence.
This is why the European Union has encouraged and financed regional groupings in Africa. It is obvious that the West African Economic Community (ECOWAS), which has an Embassy in Brussels and depends for the bulk of its funding on the European Union, is a vociferous opponent to the African federation.
That’s why Lincoln fought in the US war of secession because the moment a group of countries come together in a regional political organisation, it weakens the main group.
That is what Europe wanted, and the Africans have never understood the game plan, creating a plethora of regional groupings, Comesa, UDEAC, Sadc, and the Great Maghreb which never saw the light of day thanks to Gaddafi who understood what was happening.
Gaddafi and apartheid for most Africans, Gaddafi is a generous man, a humanist, known for his unselfish support for the struggle against the racist regime in South Africa.
Online Reporter