"When I look at Africa, many questions come to mind. Many times I ask my self, “What would happen if Mwalimu where to Rise up and see what’s happening? Many times I would ask my self what would happen if Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba, Mandela where to rise up and see what’s happening. Because what they would be confronted with is an Africa, where the Democratic Republic of Congo is Unsettled, there is a War going on there but is not on the front pages of pur News Papers because we don’t even control over our newspapers and the media. As we speak to you, the Central African Republic is at War but we talk of it only mutedly, as I speak to you now, Kenya is at war based on religion and terrorism, young men and women are victims.
In South Sudan the youngest nation in Africa, the Nuwera have risen against the Dinkas, as I speak to you now, Eritrea is unsettled, as I speak to you now…there is unease in Egypt as there is unease in Libya, in Niger its no better, in Senegal in the Kasamanzi is no better, Africa is at War with her self, this is what they would be confronted with.
They would be confronted with an Africa which statisticians and romantic economics say is growing but which in truth is stagnated, that is the Africa they would be confronted with. They would be confronted with an Africa which as Prof. Mulama intimated in a presentation, “an Africa which is suffering from no self awareness”, it does not know her self. They would be confronted with an Africa whose young men and women have no interest and no love for her continent.
They would be confronted by an Africa where young men and women are constantly humiliated at the embassies of European Countries and the USA as they seek the mighty Green Card. They would be confronted with an Africa where young men and women from Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali and Mauritania drown in the Mediterranean as they seek to be enslaved in Europe; this time round Africans are not wailing and kicking as they are taken away to be enslaved, they are seen wailing and kicking as they are seeking to be enslaved, this is the tragedy of Africa.
They will be confronted with an Africa where people have lost their self Pride. An Africa where Africans are not proud of their things, an Africa where hotels of Nairobi and Kampala even foods have foreign names, When we fry potatoes and we call them French fries even when they are fried in Kampala, that is the Africa that they would be confronted with.
They would be confronted with another Africa, an Africa which does not tell her story, an Africa whose story is told by Europe and America, The CNN, Radio Dishevel, Radio France, that is the Africa they would be confronted with. They would be confronted with young men and women who have no pride in Africa, when they want to enjoy them selves..they sing praises of foot ball teams of Europe and America, it is Manchester United, it is Arsenal, Real Madrid and Barcelona not Yanga, not Mufulira Wonderers, not Cranes, not FC Leopards No! That’s the Africa that they will be confronted with. They will be confronted with an Africa which does not enjoy the steers and drama, that Africa celebrates Leonardo DiCaprio, it celebrates Angelina Jolie, an Africa that does not celebrate Genevieve Nangi or Ritah Domnic, Olu Jacobs of Nigeria or Bongowood, Nollywood, Riverwood, Ugawood… It celebrates Hollywood, that is the Africa with which they would be confronted. They would be confronted with African women whose greatest source of joy is cheap Greg bee Mexican soap opera, Lapatrona, Latomenta, “the rich also cry” and so on.
Why must we be reminded of these realities because all thought the ages the battle has always been the Battle of the mind and if your mind is conquered then your going no where and that is why in the ages of enlightenment in Europe the great Leonardo.K says, “I think! Therefore Iam” And therefore if Africans are to begin to make a contribution in their affairs, Africans must begin to think, but the question is, “Are we thinking?”
We have universities in their numbers, Tanzania has universities including Kenyatta, Nairobi has universities as indeed Makerere-Kampala, as indeed South Africa Johannesburg; we have all these universities. We have engineers but our roads are not being made by Tanzanian civil Engineers, it is the Chinese who are present in these assemblies who are making our roads. So we have engineers who can not even make roads. We have doctors whom we have trained, but when we are sick, particularly when we are of the political class depending on who colonized you, if you are colonized by the United Kingdom, you rush to London, if your colonized by the French you rush to Paris, Portuguese you rush to Lisbon, If your colonized by the Spaniards you rush to Madrid Spain and recently because the Asians are beginning to get their act together we run to Indian and very lately because the Arabs have also began to get their act together we run to Dubai not withstanding that we have the Kenyatta Hospitals of now, the Muhimbilis of Tanzania, the Chris Han Paragwanafs of South Africa and the Mama Yemos of Kinshasa of Zaire or the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mulago, Nsambya and Kololo International Hospital of Uganda but we have no faith in our doctors.
In the area of education we also don’t have faith; our political class introduced something that they call free education that is free indeed, free of knowledge because they are so suspicious of those institutions that the typical African politicians will not dare take their children to those schools. Their children will be educated in the British or American Systems, so that when they graduate they go to the United Kingdom, to the United States; not that there is something wrong with those institutions but the agenda is wrong because our leaders long lost the script and ought to be described for who they are, our Misleaders.
But we are coauthors of our own misfortune, whenever we are given an opportunity to elect our leaders we are given a blank check and if you permit me a little latitude, if you give me a blank check and you also let me to analogize and you say that am given the blank check to buy a Mercedes Benz, what we do when we are called upon having been so empowered we buy what one calls a TukTuk(BodaBoda) from India and expect it to behave like a Mercedes Benz. How does that happen? Its because what we do is to elect thieves.. We elect hyenas to take care of goats and when the Goats are consumed we wonder why?
Arise Africa!"
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Friday, May 15, 2015
On Revolutionary Medicine
On Revolutionary Medicine
Spoken: August 19, 1960 to the Cuban Militia
Source: Obra Revolucionaria, Ano 1960, No. 24 (Official English translation)
This simple celebration, another among the hundreds of public functions with which the Cuban people daily celebrate their liberty, the progress of all their revolutionary laws, and their advances along the road to complete independence, is of special interest to me.
Almost everyone knows that years ago I began my career as a doctor. And when I began as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I have today, as a revolutionary, were absent from my store of ideals.
Like everyone, I wanted to succeed. I dreamed of becoming a famous medical research scientist; I dreamed of working indefatigably to discover something which would be used to help humanity, but which signified a personal triumph for me. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment.
After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming a famous or making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people.
But I continued to be, as we all continue to be always, a child of my environment, and I wanted to help those people with my own personal efforts. I had already traveled a great deal - I was in Guatemala at the time, the Guatemala of Arbenz- and I had begun to make some notes to guide the conduct of the revolutionary doctor. I began to investigate what was needed to be a revolutionary doctor.
However, aggression broke out, the aggression unleaded by the United Fruit Company, the Department of State, Foster Dulles- in reality the same thing- and their puppet, called Castillo Armas. The aggression was successful, since the people had not achieved the level of maturity of the other Cuban people of today. One fine day, a day like any other, I took the road of exile, or at least, I took the road of flight from Guatemala, since that was not my country.
Then I realized a fundamental thing: For one to be a revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary at all, there must first be a revolution. Isolated individual endeavour, for all its purity of ideals, is of no use, and the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals serves no purpose if one works alone, solitarily, in some corner of America, fighting against adverse governments and social conditions which prevent progress. To create a revolution, one must have what there is in Cuba - the mobilization of a whole people, who learn by the use of arms and the exercise of militant unity to understand the value of arms and the value of unity.
And now we have come to the nucleus of the problem we have before us at this time. Today one finally has the right and even the duty to be, above all things, a revolutionary doctor, that is to say a man who utilizes the technical knowledge of his profession in the service of the revolution and the people. But now old questions reappear: How does one actually carry out a work of social welfare? How does one unite individual endeavour with the needs of society?
We must review again each of our lives, what we did and thought as doctors, or in any function of public health before the revolution. We must do this with profound critical zeal and arrive finally at the conclusion that almost everything we thought and felt in that past period ought to be deposited in an archive, and a new type of human being created. If each one of us expends his maximum effort towards the perfection of that new human type, it will be much easier for the people to create him and let him be the example of the new Cuba.
It is good that I emphasize for you, the inhabitants of Havana who are present here, this idea; in Cuba a new type of man is being created, whom we cannot fully appreciate here in the capital, but who is found in every corner of the country. Those of you who went to the Sierra Maestra on the twenty-sixth of July must have seen two completely unknown things. First, an army with hoes and pickaxes, an army whose greatest pride is to parade in the patriotic festivals of Oreinte with hoes and axes raised, while their military comrades march with rifles. But you must have seen something even more important. You must have seen children whose physical constitutions appeared to be those of eight or nine-year-olds, yet almost all of whom are thirteen or fourteen. They are the most authentic children of the Sierra Maestra, the most authentic offspring of hunger and misery. They are the creatures of malnutrition.
In this tiny Cuba, with its four or five television channels and hundred of radio stations, with all the advances of modern science, when those children arrived at school for the first time at night and saw the electric light bulbs, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night. And those children, some of whom you must have seen, are learning in collective schools skills ranging from reading to trades, and even the very difficult science of becoming revolutionaries.
Those are the new humans being born in Cuba. They are being born in isolated areas, in different parts of the Sierra Maestra, and also in the cooperatives and work centres. All this has a lot to do with the theme of our talk today, the integration of the physician or any other medical worker, into the revolutionary movement. The task of educating and feeding youngsters, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the former absentee landlords to those who laboured every day upon that same land without receiving its benefits, are accomplishments of social medicine which have been performed in Cuba.
The principle upon which the fight against disease should be based is the creation of a robust body; but not the creation of a robust body by the artistic work of a doctor upon a weak organism; rather, the creation of a robust body with the work of the whole collectivity, upon the entire social collectivity.
Some day, therefore, medicine will have to convert itself into a science that serves to prevent disease and orients the public toward carrying out its medical duties. Medicine should only intervene in cases of extreme urgency, to perform surgery or something else which lies outside the skills of the people of the new society we are creating.
The work that today is entrusted to the Ministry of Health and similar organizations is to provide public health services for the greatest possible number of persons, institute a program of preventive medicine, and orient the public to the performance of hygienic practices.
But for this task of organization, as for all the revolutionary tasks, fundamentally it is the individual who is needed. The revolution does not, as some claim, standardize the collective will and the collective initiative. On the contrary, it liberates man's individual talent. What the revolution does is orient that talent. And our task now is to orient the creative abilities of all medical professionals toward the tasks of social medicine.
We are at the end of an era, and not only here in Cuba. No matter what is hoped or said to the contrary, the form of capitalism we have known, in which we were raised, and under which we have suffered, is being defeated all over the world. The monopolies are being overthrown; collective science is coring new and important triumphs daily. In the Americas we have had the proud and devoted duty to be the vanguard of a movement of liberation which began a long time ago on the other subjugated continents, Africa and Asia. Such a profound social change demands equally profound changes in the mental structure of the people.
Individualism, in the form of the individual action of a person alone in a social milieu, must disappear in Cuba. In the future individualism ought to be the efficient utilization of the whole individual for the absolute benefit of a collectivity. It is not enough that this idea is understood today, that you all comprehend the things I am saying and are ready to think a little about the present and the past and what the future ought to be. In order to change a way of thinking, it is necessary to undergo profound internal changes and to witness profound external changes, especially in the performance of our duties and obligations to society.
Those external changes are happening in Cuba every day. One way of getting to know the Revolution and becoming aware of the energies held in reserve, so long asleep within the people, is to visit all Cuba and see the cooperatives and the work centres which are now being created. And one way of getting to the heart of the medical question is not only to visit and become acquainted with the people who make up these cooperatives and work centres, but to find out what diseases they have, what their sufferings are, what have been their chronic miseries for years, and what has been the inheritance of centuries of repression and total submission. The doctor, the medical worker, must go to the core of his new work, which is the man within the mass, the man within the collectivity.
Always, no matter what happens in the world, the doctor is extremely close to his patient and knows the innermost depths of his psyche. Because he is the one who attacks pain and mitigates it, he performs and invaluable labour of much responsibility in society.
A few months ago, here in Havana, it happened that a group of newly graduated doctors did not want to go into the country's rural areas, and demanded remuneration before they would agree to go. From the point of view of the past it is the most logical thing in the world for this to occur; at least, so it seems to me, for I can understand it perfectly. The situation brings back to me the memory of what I was and what I thought a few years ago. [My case is the] story all over again of the gladiator who rebels, the solitary fighter who wants to assure a better future, better conditions, and to make valid the need people have of him.
But what would have happened if instead of these boys, whose families generally were able to pay for their years of study, others of less fortunate means had just finished their schooling and were beginning the exercise of their profession? What would have occurred if two or three hundred peasants had emerged, let us say by magic, from the university halls?
What would have happened, simply, is that the peasants would have run, immediately and with unreserved enthusiasm, to help their brothers. They would have requested the most difficult and responsible jobs in order to demonstrate that the years of study they had received had not been given in vain. What would have happened is what will happen in six or seven years, when the new students, children of workers and peasants, receive professional degrees of all kinds.
But we must not view the future with fatalism and separate all men into either children of the working and peasant classes or counter-revolutionaries, because it is simplistic, because it is not true, and because there is nothing which educates an honorable man more than living in a revolution. None of us, none of the first group which arrived in the Granma, who settled in the Sierra Maestra, and learned to respect the peasant and the worker living with him, had a peasant or working-class background. Naturally, there were those who had had to work, who had known certain privations in childhood; but hunger, what is called real hunger, was something none of us had experienced. But we began to know it in the two long years in the Sierra Maestra. And then many things became very clear.
We, who at first punished severely anyone who touched the property of even a rich peasant or a landowner, brought ten thousand head of cattle to the Sierra one day and said to the peasants, simply, 'Eat'. And the peasants, for the first time in years and years, some for the first time in their lives, ate beef.
The respect which we had had for the sacrosanct property right to those ten thousand head of cattle was lost in the course of armed battle, and we understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth a million time more than all the property of the richest man on earth. And we learned it; we, who were not of the working class nor of the peasant class. And are we going to tell the four winds, we who were the privileged ones, that the rest of the people in Cuba cannot learn it also? Yes, they can learn it, and besides, the Revolution today demands that they learn it, demands that it be well understood that far more important than a good remuneration is the pride of serving one's neighbor; that much more definitive and much more lasting than all the gold that one can accumulate is the gratitude of a people. And each doctor, within the circle of his activities, can and must accumulate that valuable treasure, the gratitude of his people.
We must, then, begin to erase our old concepts and begin to draw closer and closer to the people and to be increasingly aware. We must approach them not as before. You are all going to say, 'No. I like the people. I love talking to workers and peasants, and I go here or there on Sundays to see such and such.' Everybody has done it. But we have done it practising charity, and what we have to practice today is solidarity. We should not go to the people and say, 'Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you our science, to show you your errors, your lack of culture, your ignorance of elementary things.' We should go instead with an inquiring mind and a humble spirit to learn at that great source of wisdom that is the people.
Later we will realize many times how mistaken we were in concepts that were so familiar they became part of us and were an automatic part of our thinking. Often we need to change our concepts, not only the general concepts, the social or philosophical ones, but also sometimes, our medical concepts.
We shall see that diseases need not always be treated as they are in big-city hospitals. We shall see that the doctor has to be a farmer also and plant new foods and sow, by example, the desire to consume new foods, to diversify the Cuban nutritional structure, which is so limited, so poor, in one of the richest countries in the world, agriculturally and potentially. We shall see, then, how we shall have to be, in these circumstances, a bit pedagogical- at times very pedagogical. It will be necessary to be politicians, too, and the first thing we will have to do is not to go to the people to offer them our wisdom. We must go, rather, to demonstrate that we are going to learn with the people, that together we are going to carry out that great and beautiful common experiment: the construction of a new Cuba.
Many steps have already been taken. There is a distance that cannot be measured by conventional means between that first day of January in 1959 and today. The majority of the people understood a long time ago that not only a dictator had fallen here, but also a system. Now comes the part the people must learn, that upon the ruins of a decayed system we must build the new system which will bring about the absolute happiness of the people.
I remember that some time in the early months of last year comrade Guillên arrived from Argentina. He was the same great poet he is today, although perhaps his books had been translated into a language or two less, for he is gaining new readers every day in all languages of the world. But he was the same man he is today. However, it was difficult for Guillên to read his poems here, which were popular poetry, poetry of the people, because that was during the first epoch, the epoch of prejudices. And nobody ever stopped to think that for years and years, with unswerving dedication, the poet Guillên had placed all his extraordinary poetic gift at the service of the people and at the service of the cause in which he believed. People saw him, not as the glory of Cuba, but as the representative of a political party which was taboo.
Now all that has been forgotten. We have learned that there can be no divisions due to the different points of view of certain internal structures of our country if we have a common enemy and a common goal. What we have to agree upon is whether or not we have a common enemy and whether or not we are attempting to reach a common goal.
By now we have become convinced that there definitely is a common enemy. No one looks over his shoulder to see if there is anyone who might overhear- perhaps some agent from the embassy who would transmit the information- before giving an opinion against monopolies, before saying clearly, 'Our enemy, and the enemy of all America, is the monopolistic government of the United States of America.' If now everyone knows that is the enemy, and it is coming to be known also that anyone who fights against that enemy has something in common with us, then we come to the second part. Where and now, for Cuba, what are our goals? What do went want? Do we or do we not want the happiness of the people? Are we, or are we not fighting for the total economic liberation of Cuba?
Are we or are we not struggling to be a free nation among free nations, without belonging to any military bloc, without having to consult the embassy of any great power on earth about any internal or external measure that is going to be taken here? If we plan to redistribute wealth of those who have too much in order to give it to those who have nothing; if we intend to make creative work a daily, dynamic source of all our happiness, then we have goals toward which to work. And anyone who has the same goals is our friend. If he has other concepts besides, if he belongs to some organization or other, those are minor matters.
In moments of great danger, in moments of great tensions and great creations, what count are great enemies and great goals. If we are already agreed, if we all know now where we are going - and let him grieve to whom it will cause grief- then we have to begin our work.
I was telling you that to be a revolutionary you have first to have a revolution. We already have it. Next, you have to know the people with whom you are going to work. I think that we are not yet well acquainted, that we still have to travel a while on that road. You ask me what are the vehicles for getting to know the people beside the vehicle of living in the cooperatives and working in them. Not everyone can do this, and there are many places where the presence of a medical worker is very important. I would say that the revolutionary militias are one of the great manifestations of the solidarity of the Cuban people. Militias now give a new function to the doctor and prepare him for what was, until a short time ago, a sad and almost fatal reality for Cuba, namely, that we are going to be the victim of an armed attack of great breadth.
I ought to warn you that the doctor, in the function of soldier and revolutionary, should always be a doctor. You should not commit the same error which we committed in the Sierra. Or maybe it was not an error, but all the medical comrades of that period know about it. It seemed dishonorable to us to remain at the side of a wounded man or a sick one, and we looked for any way possible of grabbing a rifle and going to prove on the battlefront what we could do.
Now the conditions are different, and the new armies which are being formed to defend the country must be armies with different tactics. The doctor will have an enormous importance within the plan of the new army. He must continue being a doctor, which is one of the most beautiful tasks there is and one of the most important in a war. And not only the doctor, but also the nurses, laboratory technicians, all those who dedicate themselves to this very human profession, are of he utmost importance.
Although we know of latent danger and are preparing ourselves to repel the aggression which still exists in the atmosphere, we must stop thinking about it. If we make war preparations the centre of our concern, we will not be able to devote ourselves to creative work. All the work and all the capital invested in preparing for a military action is wasted work and wasted money. Unfortunately, we have to do it, because there are others who are preparing themselves. But it is- and I say this in all honesty, on my honour as a soldier- the truth is that the outgoing money which most saddens me as I watch it leave the vault of the National Bank is the money that is going to pay for some weapon.
Nevertheless, the militias have a function in peacetime; the militias should be, in populous centres, the tool which unifies the people. An extreme solidarity should be practiced, as I have been told it is practised in the militias of the doctors. In time of danger they should go immediately to solve the problems of the poor people of Cuba. But the militias offer also an opportunity to live together, joined and made equal by a uniform, with men of all social classes of Cuba.
If we medical workers- and permit me to use once again a title which I had forgotten some time ago- are successful, if we use this new weapon of solidarity, if we know the goals, know the enemy, and know the direction we have to take, then all that is left for us to know is the part of the way to be covered each day. And that part no one can show us; that part is the private journey of each individual. It is what he will do every day, what he will gather from his individual experience, and what he will give of himself in the exercise of his profession, dedicated to the well-being of the people.
Now that we have all the elements for our march toward the future, let us remember the advice of Martí. Although at this moment I am ignoring it, one should follow it constantly, "The best way of telling is doing." Let us march, then, toward Cuba's future.
By Ernesto Che Guevara
Wednesday, April 08, 2015
Dear struggle elder
Please stop telling me about respect because you only have oppression, corruption and ageism to give in return. Do not hide your incapacity, insecurity and unintelligibility with age – it’s stale and it’s embarrassing.
And if you went to Robben Island, even for a week, just say so and I will start a fund to thank you. But please, no amount of going to prison in the world, even for political reasons, ever qualifies you to steal my future and the future of my generation.
If you were in Angola or Morogoro in Tanzania, I will learn your songs. If you were in Lusaka, I will even name streets after you. If you were in Kliptown in 1955, I will name my child after you.
But please, these are not enough to buy my time, to ask me to wait for another 20 years before there is a decent, qualified maths teacher in my class.
I have heard over and over how you took a bullet, that they tortured you and left you to die.
I heard that you missed school, maybe all or half of it, trying to fight against unjust laws.
I also heard you had a white girlfriend and were imprisoned for it.
I saw you at a big funeral lately. You looked so good with the white lady next to you. I saw you walk out of a convoy of black cars and the cameras were flashing at you. I heard your speech paying tribute to your comrade who fell. It was moving, poignant and inspiring. Then they sang, chanted and danced along with the gunfire and salutations. Yes, my soul said, yes and yet another yes.
But a burp of nauseating nos was building in my chest and a bitter no finally spewed from my throat because my comrades are taking drugs; they eat nyaope daily. My comrades idle, even in school.
When they fall in death, there are no gun salutes at their funerals, there are no cameras. Only sorrow, darkness and pain. Everyone is angry, from the preacher to the chorus leader, because my comrades die young from disease and drugs.
No I said, because my comrades kill each other, they fight among each other, they fight for each others’ respect. They kill each other to earn the respect of drug-addicted, disease-ridden, illiterate, idle, bastardised foes. My comrades also live in gangs; they carry sticks, knives and at times, guns.
They rob to eat, they rob to dress, they even steal from their parents’ homes.
A few of them, though here and there, find the escape to go to university but come back sometimes to visit us. They remain my comrades, but I can’t pretend they have not progressed while many of us remain here in this place, in this mud, this wasteland, where they frequently visit us.
They also visit their parents because half of them still live here in the mud.
Some work in the malls you built for us, they work in retail stores, earn peanuts, or work in KFC – but no amount of chicken-cooking, finger-licking good is turning their bastardisation around.
These are my comrades, there are no gun salutes when they die, there are no history songs sung, only church hymns. People ask them to rest in peace and in peace they truly go, and are gone for good.
They leave us here in this mud, the slippery mud everyone slips into, eats up and is buried in. Maybe soon we might be eating each other up in the cooked, slippery mud of our mud towns. Their lives have no other meaning except that they were here; like the meaninglessness of your past songs, exile, imprisonment, stayaways and ballot boxes.
This is our life, the life we seek to change and have decided to change. This is the fate, our fate, a fate we have since decided to change.
We want freedom but not your freedom – the freedom to reminisce on days gone by when you were a hero of the people. We do not want your freedom, your place in the past.
It belongs to you and it will always be where you belong.
Our freedom is here, it is now, in our lifetime.
We want our freedom. We have had to call it economic freedom and we want it in our lifetime.
It is the freedom to participate in economic production. To produce, innovate and live under the conditions that are human.
You will remember that we tried to ask for it from you, but every day you demonstrate you are not prepared to give it, that you do not even know how to give it. So, we are going to take it.
And please do not tell me about respect because if we have to listen to you one more day, our future will be lost like all our lost comrades, lost in the mud, swallowed by our own slippery mud.
Please listen, this is our struggle, one that you, with your suffocating demands of respect will not and shall not stop. This is it and the sooner you accept that, the better the present. If you will not accept it, we will accept it on your behalf.
These are the resounding bells of our future and only we can bring it to pass."
Monday, March 23, 2015
I AM AN AFRICAN
"I am an African.
I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.
The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.
The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.
At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.
A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!
I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me.
In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.
My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind`s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.
I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.
I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.
Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.
I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible.
I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.
I know what if signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, sub-human.
I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy.
I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest.
I have seen the corruption of minds and souls as (word not readable) of the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.
I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.
There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.
Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare.
And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.
They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband.
Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past - killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.
All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!
Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines.
I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.
I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice.
The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric.
Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines.
Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.
We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what it means to be African.
The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes and unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins.
It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.
It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual.
It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.
It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic dispersal.
It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, promote them, strive for their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression.
It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule.
It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force.
It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.
As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit.
Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and African minds.
Bit it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.
Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness.
But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after!
Today it feels good to be an African. "
I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.
My body has frozen in our frosts and in our latter day snows. It has thawed in the warmth of our sunshine and melted in the heat of the midday sun. The crack and the rumble of the summer thunders, lashed by startling lightening, have been a cause both of trembling and of hope.
The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.
The dramatic shapes of the Drakensberg, the soil-coloured waters of the Lekoa, iGqili noThukela, and the sands of the Kgalagadi, have all been panels of the set on the natural stage on which we act out the foolish deeds of the theatre of our day.
At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito.
A human presence among all these, a feature on the face of our native land thus defined, I know that none dare challenge me when I say - I am an African!
I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me.
In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.
My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind`s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.
I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.
I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.
Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.
I have seen our country torn asunder as these, all of whom are my people, engaged one another in a titanic battle, the one redress a wrong that had been caused by one to another and the other, to defend the indefensible.
I have seen what happens when one person has superiority of force over another, when the stronger appropriate to themselves the prerogative even to annul the injunction that God created all men and women in His image.
I know what if signifies when race and colour are used to determine who is human and who, sub-human.
I have seen the destruction of all sense of self-esteem, the consequent striving to be what one is not, simply to acquire some of the benefits which those who had improved themselves as masters had ensured that they enjoy.
I have experience of the situation in which race and colour is used to enrich some and impoverish the rest.
I have seen the corruption of minds and souls as (word not readable) of the pursuit of an ignoble effort to perpetrate a veritable crime against humanity.
I have seen concrete expression of the denial of the dignity of a human being emanating from the conscious, systemic and systematic oppressive and repressive activities of other human beings.
There the victims parade with no mask to hide the brutish reality - the beggars, the prostitutes, the street children, those who seek solace in substance abuse, those who have to steal to assuage hunger, those who have to lose their sanity because to be sane is to invite pain.
Perhaps the worst among these, who are my people, are those who have learnt to kill for a wage. To these the extent of death is directly proportional to their personal welfare.
And so, like pawns in the service of demented souls, they kill in furtherance of the political violence in KwaZulu-Natal. They murder the innocent in the taxi wars.
They kill slowly or quickly in order to make profits from the illegal trade in narcotics. They are available for hire when husband wants to murder wife and wife, husband.
Among us prowl the products of our immoral and amoral past - killers who have no sense of the worth of human life, rapists who have absolute disdain for the women of our country, animals who would seek to benefit from the vulnerability of the children, the disabled and the old, the rapacious who brook no obstacle in their quest for self-enrichment.
All this I know and know to be true because I am an African!
Because of that, I am also able to state this fundamental truth that I am born of a people who are heroes and heroines.
I am born of a people who would not tolerate oppression.
I am of a nation that would not allow that fear of death, torture, imprisonment, exile or persecution should result in the perpetuation of injustice.
The great masses who are our mother and father will not permit that the behaviour of the few results in the description of our country and people as barbaric.
Patient because history is on their side, these masses do not despair because today the weather is bad. Nor do they turn triumphalist when, tomorrow, the sun shines.
Whatever the circumstances they have lived through and because of that experience, they are determined to define for themselves who they are and who they should be.
We are assembled here today to mark their victory in acquiring and exercising their right to formulate their own definition of what it means to be African.
The constitution whose adoption we celebrate constitutes and unequivocal statement that we refuse to accept that our Africanness shall be defined by our race, colour, gender of historical origins.
It is a firm assertion made by ourselves that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white.
It gives concrete expression to the sentiment we share as Africans, and will defend to the death, that the people shall govern.
It recognises the fact that the dignity of the individual is both an objective which society must pursue, and is a goal which cannot be separated from the material well-being of that individual.
It seeks to create the situation in which all our people shall be free from fear, including the fear of the oppression of one national group by another, the fear of the disempowerment of one social echelon by another, the fear of the use of state power to deny anybody their fundamental human rights and the fear of tyranny.
It aims to open the doors so that those who were disadvantaged can assume their place in society as equals with their fellow human beings without regard to colour, race, gender, age or geographic dispersal.
It provides the opportunity to enable each one and all to state their views, promote them, strive for their implementation in the process of governance without fear that a contrary view will be met with repression.
It creates a law-governed society which shall be inimical to arbitrary rule.
It enables the resolution of conflicts by peaceful means rather than resort to force.
It rejoices in the diversity of our people and creates the space for all of us voluntarily to define ourselves as one people.
As an African, this is an achievement of which I am proud, proud without reservation and proud without any feeling of conceit.
Our sense of elevation at this moment also derives from the fact that this magnificent product is the unique creation of African hands and African minds.
Bit it is also constitutes a tribute to our loss of vanity that we could, despite the temptation to treat ourselves as an exceptional fragment of humanity, draw on the accumulated experience and wisdom of all humankind, to define for ourselves what we want to be.
Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and short-sightedness.
But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the call to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after!
Today it feels good to be an African. "
Friday, March 20, 2015
Nexus between illicit financial flows and poverty in Africa
Tuesday, 28 January 2014 00:00
Written by Bola Olajuwon
Nigerian Guardian
TO many developmental experts and members of civil societies keen on arresting the devastating outflows of much-needed capital that is essential to achieving economic development and poverty alleviation goals in Nigeria and other African countries, the scheduled Seventh Joint African Union (AU) and Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development coming up on March 27 to April 1, 2014 in Abuja will be pivotal. Ostensibly, the joint meeting with the theme, “Industrialisation for Sustainable and Inclusive Development in Africa,” aims basically to provide a platform for policy-makers to articulate concrete proposals to catalyse implementation of the Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa (AIDA) and increase commitment and actions to advance Africa’s industrial development agenda.
The conference is being organised by the ECA and the African Union Commission (AUC) in collaboration with the Nigerian government and will bring together African ministers responsible for finance, economy and economic development as well as governors of Central Banks and key leaders from the private sector.
Laudable as the aims of the forthcoming industrialisation parley sound, developmental experts and members of civil societies are more interested in the submission of a report by former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa’s High Level Panel (HLP) on Illicit Financial Flows (IFF) from Africa initially estimated at $50 billion yearly.
The Mbeki panel, which includes nine other members, was established by the Joint AU and ECA Conference of Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development and inaugurated in February 2012 in Johannesburg, South Africa with the aim of determining the nature and patterns of illicit financial outflows; establishing the level of such outflows from the continent; assessing the complex and long-term implications of IFF, consulting and sensitising African governments and other stakeholders, including development partners, on the scale of the issue and finally, proposing policies and mobilising support for practices that would reverse these outflows. The panel’s inauguration was further strengthened on a report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington D.C.-based research and advocacy organisation, that Africa lost about $854 billion in illicit financial outflows from 1970 through 2008.
Aside the GFI report claiming that $854 billion was pilfered away, it also claims that total illicit outflows may be as high as $1.8 trillion. Of this, sub-Saharan African countries experienced the bulk of illicit financial outflows with the West and Central African region posting the largest outflow number. Nigeria tops four other countries with $89.5 billion as the highest outflow, follows by Egypt ($70.5 billion), Algeria ($25.7 billion), Morocco ($25 billion), and South Africa ($24.9 billion). The GFI report also asserted that such outflows from the entire region outpaced official development assistance going into the region at a ratio of at least 2 to 1; and growing at an average rate of 11.9 per cent per year.
GFI director, Raymond Baker, emphasised the import of the statistics, saying: “The amount of money that has been drained out of Africa - hundreds of billions decade after decade - is far in excess of the official development assistance going into African countries… Staunching this devastating outflow of much-needed capital is essential to achieving economic development and poverty alleviation goals in these countries.” Continuing, Baker added: “As long as these countries are losing massive amounts of money to illicit financial outflows, economic development and prosperity will remain elusive.”
Technically, IFF is money illegally earned, transferred or used. At origin or during movement or use, the flow of money has broken laws and is thus considered illicit. It is different from capital flight, which is understood as the movement of funds abroad to secure better returns, often as a response to an unfavourable business climate in the country of origin. IFF comprises three major components and these are: Theft, bribery and other forms of corruption by government officials; criminal activities including drug trafficking and funds money laundering, racketeering and counterfeiting as well as international commercial transactions, including tax evasion, trade mis-pricing, over-invoicing, involving mostly multinational corporations. But it excludes smuggling.
However, at the conclusion of its continental-wide consultation with stakeholders which ended with participants from West and Central African countries in Ghana recently, Mbeki himself joined others in seeking concerted and broad-based actions through continental-wide political will, participation of every citizen, global partnership and cooperation among others in fighting the menace of IFF.
Mbeki, while addressing delegates from the two regional groups at the end of a two-day consultative forum, asserted that curtailing the illicit financial flows would allow the continent to address its developmental challenges and retain such funds that illegally evade the continent each year to the developed and developing countries. “Being able to stem illicit financial flows would for instance help Africa bridge the infrastructure gap and address its huge development challenges,” he said.
According to him, the financial loss has had detrimental effects on African countries, a situation that has made them to be unable to garner the domestic resources needed to address their developmental needs. He reasoned that illicit financial flow is an African problem with a global solution and therefore, “solutions need to be found at the origin and destinations of funds.”
The assertion by the former president is not far from the truth, according to members of the civil societies at the consultation. They contended that while African countries, which are “origins of IFF”, must come up with interventions to stop the menace, western economies, which are the “destinations and beneficiaries of funnelling funds through back-doors that are deliberately opened to attract those funds,” must stop paying lip service. They reasoned that international commercial transactions, including tax evasion, trade mis-pricing, over-invoicing, involve mostly multinational corporations from western countries take the largest percentage of IFFs from Africa. In actual fact, multinational companies are responsible for 60 per cent of the IFFs and they are from western countries lampooning the state of underdevelopment in Africa. Essentially, United States (U.S.), Europe, Canada, Japan, Korea, China and India are said to be major destinations of IFFs.
In an interview with The Guardian, a participant put the culpability of western countries in perspective. He said: “Look at the issue of loots by General Sani Abacha from Nigeria. The illegal funds entered accounts in Switzerland, Britain, United States, Germany and other western countries while financial regulators looked the other way. Money stolen by corrupt officeholders in Nigeria ended up in British banks. Abacha alone reportedly laundered more than $4 billion looted from Nigeria and traced to London offices of 15 banks. About £1.5 billion looted from the Nigeria is allegedly currently sitting in British banks. More are still being looted everyday and going into real estates among others in those countries.”
Also commenting on the IFF, Acting Director, International Cooperation Department of Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Alex Ekeanyanwu, submitted that it was very unfortunate that Nigeria is afflicted by this cankerworm.
According to him, “a major consequence of the above scenario is that funds that should have been used to create wealth, develop infrastructure, provide social amenities, develop human capital and create employment are lost. Rather the beneficiaries are the already developed countries where this illicit money is domiciled.
“A number of reasons can be identified as to why Nigeria suffers from illicit financial flows. One is weak regulatory financial framework. Even though the Central Bank of Nigeria keeps improving on its responsibilities in this regard, it appears that those involved are some of the time a step ahead with insider connivance. The number of bank officials reportedly involved in financial crimes on a yearly basis has reached a disturbing proportion. The CBN should work in concert with the management of banks to check such abuses. Another reason is the Human Factor.There have been reported cases of seizures of large sums of money in hard currency from some intending travellers attempting to carry out Nigeria hard currencies through the international gateways. These are cases where the officials on duty at the international airports have integrity. But an observant frequent traveller through the airports will realise that some of the officers can be easily compromised.”
Ekeanyanwu advised that the judicial system should be reformed and the laws with respect to illicit financial flows reviewed periodically to meet the challenges innovations in financial crimes have brought about.
Meanwhile, the participants at the Accra consultative meeting were concerned about what becomes of the report of Mbeki panel after the submission of its report to the Seventh Joint AU and ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, in view of the slow pace and bureaucracy through which AU takes its decisions. It is reasoned that after the submission of the report, the joint meeting will deliberate on it and pass its decision to AU secretariat. And for African leaders to deliberate on it, it must first pass through the continent’s Permanent Representatives Council and the Executive Council. They reasoned that time is against African governments and people to end the menace.
However, the South Africa’s ex-president noted that political will at the level of AU was important and that his members would ensure interventions by African heads of states through protocols, conventions among others. He said it is also necessary to mobilise the youths, civil societies, women to ensure mass ownership of the reports and implementation of the final decisions.
But with yet lack of proper policies in place to reverse the IFF, delegates from the 17 African countries that attended the IFFs consultation in Accra asserted that the levels of inequality and poverty have continued to rise while Africa’s vibrant economic growth continues to benefit very few people. They observed that Africa’s transformation calls for accountable and transparent leadership, and that the time has come for the continent to act together, to fight IFFs.
Tuesday, 28 January 2014 00:00
Written by Bola Olajuwon
Nigerian Guardian
TO many developmental experts and members of civil societies keen on arresting the devastating outflows of much-needed capital that is essential to achieving economic development and poverty alleviation goals in Nigeria and other African countries, the scheduled Seventh Joint African Union (AU) and Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development coming up on March 27 to April 1, 2014 in Abuja will be pivotal. Ostensibly, the joint meeting with the theme, “Industrialisation for Sustainable and Inclusive Development in Africa,” aims basically to provide a platform for policy-makers to articulate concrete proposals to catalyse implementation of the Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa (AIDA) and increase commitment and actions to advance Africa’s industrial development agenda.
The conference is being organised by the ECA and the African Union Commission (AUC) in collaboration with the Nigerian government and will bring together African ministers responsible for finance, economy and economic development as well as governors of Central Banks and key leaders from the private sector.
Laudable as the aims of the forthcoming industrialisation parley sound, developmental experts and members of civil societies are more interested in the submission of a report by former President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa’s High Level Panel (HLP) on Illicit Financial Flows (IFF) from Africa initially estimated at $50 billion yearly.
The Mbeki panel, which includes nine other members, was established by the Joint AU and ECA Conference of Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development and inaugurated in February 2012 in Johannesburg, South Africa with the aim of determining the nature and patterns of illicit financial outflows; establishing the level of such outflows from the continent; assessing the complex and long-term implications of IFF, consulting and sensitising African governments and other stakeholders, including development partners, on the scale of the issue and finally, proposing policies and mobilising support for practices that would reverse these outflows. The panel’s inauguration was further strengthened on a report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington D.C.-based research and advocacy organisation, that Africa lost about $854 billion in illicit financial outflows from 1970 through 2008.
Aside the GFI report claiming that $854 billion was pilfered away, it also claims that total illicit outflows may be as high as $1.8 trillion. Of this, sub-Saharan African countries experienced the bulk of illicit financial outflows with the West and Central African region posting the largest outflow number. Nigeria tops four other countries with $89.5 billion as the highest outflow, follows by Egypt ($70.5 billion), Algeria ($25.7 billion), Morocco ($25 billion), and South Africa ($24.9 billion). The GFI report also asserted that such outflows from the entire region outpaced official development assistance going into the region at a ratio of at least 2 to 1; and growing at an average rate of 11.9 per cent per year.
GFI director, Raymond Baker, emphasised the import of the statistics, saying: “The amount of money that has been drained out of Africa - hundreds of billions decade after decade - is far in excess of the official development assistance going into African countries… Staunching this devastating outflow of much-needed capital is essential to achieving economic development and poverty alleviation goals in these countries.” Continuing, Baker added: “As long as these countries are losing massive amounts of money to illicit financial outflows, economic development and prosperity will remain elusive.”
Technically, IFF is money illegally earned, transferred or used. At origin or during movement or use, the flow of money has broken laws and is thus considered illicit. It is different from capital flight, which is understood as the movement of funds abroad to secure better returns, often as a response to an unfavourable business climate in the country of origin. IFF comprises three major components and these are: Theft, bribery and other forms of corruption by government officials; criminal activities including drug trafficking and funds money laundering, racketeering and counterfeiting as well as international commercial transactions, including tax evasion, trade mis-pricing, over-invoicing, involving mostly multinational corporations. But it excludes smuggling.
However, at the conclusion of its continental-wide consultation with stakeholders which ended with participants from West and Central African countries in Ghana recently, Mbeki himself joined others in seeking concerted and broad-based actions through continental-wide political will, participation of every citizen, global partnership and cooperation among others in fighting the menace of IFF.
Mbeki, while addressing delegates from the two regional groups at the end of a two-day consultative forum, asserted that curtailing the illicit financial flows would allow the continent to address its developmental challenges and retain such funds that illegally evade the continent each year to the developed and developing countries. “Being able to stem illicit financial flows would for instance help Africa bridge the infrastructure gap and address its huge development challenges,” he said.
According to him, the financial loss has had detrimental effects on African countries, a situation that has made them to be unable to garner the domestic resources needed to address their developmental needs. He reasoned that illicit financial flow is an African problem with a global solution and therefore, “solutions need to be found at the origin and destinations of funds.”
The assertion by the former president is not far from the truth, according to members of the civil societies at the consultation. They contended that while African countries, which are “origins of IFF”, must come up with interventions to stop the menace, western economies, which are the “destinations and beneficiaries of funnelling funds through back-doors that are deliberately opened to attract those funds,” must stop paying lip service. They reasoned that international commercial transactions, including tax evasion, trade mis-pricing, over-invoicing, involve mostly multinational corporations from western countries take the largest percentage of IFFs from Africa. In actual fact, multinational companies are responsible for 60 per cent of the IFFs and they are from western countries lampooning the state of underdevelopment in Africa. Essentially, United States (U.S.), Europe, Canada, Japan, Korea, China and India are said to be major destinations of IFFs.
In an interview with The Guardian, a participant put the culpability of western countries in perspective. He said: “Look at the issue of loots by General Sani Abacha from Nigeria. The illegal funds entered accounts in Switzerland, Britain, United States, Germany and other western countries while financial regulators looked the other way. Money stolen by corrupt officeholders in Nigeria ended up in British banks. Abacha alone reportedly laundered more than $4 billion looted from Nigeria and traced to London offices of 15 banks. About £1.5 billion looted from the Nigeria is allegedly currently sitting in British banks. More are still being looted everyday and going into real estates among others in those countries.”
Also commenting on the IFF, Acting Director, International Cooperation Department of Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Alex Ekeanyanwu, submitted that it was very unfortunate that Nigeria is afflicted by this cankerworm.
According to him, “a major consequence of the above scenario is that funds that should have been used to create wealth, develop infrastructure, provide social amenities, develop human capital and create employment are lost. Rather the beneficiaries are the already developed countries where this illicit money is domiciled.
“A number of reasons can be identified as to why Nigeria suffers from illicit financial flows. One is weak regulatory financial framework. Even though the Central Bank of Nigeria keeps improving on its responsibilities in this regard, it appears that those involved are some of the time a step ahead with insider connivance. The number of bank officials reportedly involved in financial crimes on a yearly basis has reached a disturbing proportion. The CBN should work in concert with the management of banks to check such abuses. Another reason is the Human Factor.There have been reported cases of seizures of large sums of money in hard currency from some intending travellers attempting to carry out Nigeria hard currencies through the international gateways. These are cases where the officials on duty at the international airports have integrity. But an observant frequent traveller through the airports will realise that some of the officers can be easily compromised.”
Ekeanyanwu advised that the judicial system should be reformed and the laws with respect to illicit financial flows reviewed periodically to meet the challenges innovations in financial crimes have brought about.
Meanwhile, the participants at the Accra consultative meeting were concerned about what becomes of the report of Mbeki panel after the submission of its report to the Seventh Joint AU and ECA Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development, in view of the slow pace and bureaucracy through which AU takes its decisions. It is reasoned that after the submission of the report, the joint meeting will deliberate on it and pass its decision to AU secretariat. And for African leaders to deliberate on it, it must first pass through the continent’s Permanent Representatives Council and the Executive Council. They reasoned that time is against African governments and people to end the menace.
However, the South Africa’s ex-president noted that political will at the level of AU was important and that his members would ensure interventions by African heads of states through protocols, conventions among others. He said it is also necessary to mobilise the youths, civil societies, women to ensure mass ownership of the reports and implementation of the final decisions.
But with yet lack of proper policies in place to reverse the IFF, delegates from the 17 African countries that attended the IFFs consultation in Accra asserted that the levels of inequality and poverty have continued to rise while Africa’s vibrant economic growth continues to benefit very few people. They observed that Africa’s transformation calls for accountable and transparent leadership, and that the time has come for the continent to act together, to fight IFFs.
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