The Entrepreneur - Cameroon's Premier Economic & Business Journal

Final Call: The exploitation of Africa’s land and people

While images of Africa’s poverty and disease are regularly shown in western media, the corporations responsible for the continuous exploitation of the land’s mineral and human resources resulting in Africa’s dreadful condition see the world’s largest continent as the land of opportunity...Emira Woods, director of Foreign Policy in Focus for the Washington D.C. based Institute for Policy Studies says the strategic resources coming out the African continent are the prize, the African people are the victims and multinational corporations driven by excessive greed are the culprits...More

The Entrepreneur NewsOnline Book Club: Supplementary Reading

Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation

Paperback: 224 pages; Publisher: Zed Books (October 14, 2006); Language: English; ISBN-10: 1842778110

By Patrick Bond

"...In Looting Africa, Patrick Bond basically updates Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. While Africa is often portrayed in global media as the hapless beneficiary of well intentioned aid and charitable campaigns, Bond emphasizes the many ways wealth is pulled out of the continent--through dividend and debt payments, unequal exchange, brain drains, and such..." "...In 2005 the World Bank admitted that Africa is drained of wealth, through debt, phantom aid, capital flight, brain drain, unfair trade, export of primary products, and distorted investment. From 1980 to 2002, sub-Saharan Africa's debt rose from $61 billon to $206 billion, while it paid $255 billion in interest. Between 1970 and 1996, it also lost $285 billion in capital flight....""..Patrick Bond, somewhat well-known in radical circles as a political economist, has written "Looting Africa" to summarize how global capital and its comprador elites within Africa have systematically plundered and ruined the continent before and after independence...."

Sarkozy: The new Napoleon Bonaparte?

Small men. Big ideas. Glamorous wives. The similarities between Nicolas Sarkozy - the son of a Hungarian immigrant - and Napoleon are uncanny – and now have been explored in a book by France's foremost political commentator....Both will be remembered as vertically challenged men in a vertiginous hurry. Both were helped into power by beautiful wives, with whom they quarrelled. Both believed that they had a destiny to rebuild France and, above all, to change the way the French think of themselves. Both are known for a weakness for kitsch and anything that glitters....Both came from non-French, minor aristocratic backgrounds and despised the Parisian elite. Both had, from the start of their career, an obsession with image and grasped the importance of controlling the media. Physical stature alone has inevitably encouraged comparisons between Napoleon Bonaparte and Nicolas Sarkozy. President Sarkozy is almost exactly the same height as L'Empéreur, about 5ft 6in, which was, in fact, respectably tall in Napoleon's day...More

Libya: Nicolas Sarkozy’s War

From the outset, the French President saw the battle for Libya in very personal terms -- as both a chance to make his mark in history, and rebound politically...This is his war. Nicolas Sarkozy wants to know every detail of every battle. He learned the names of the districts of Libyan cities that the rebels still had to capture. He studied the maps of the roads that access Tripoli. He was fascinated by this military operation, which he initiated. He followed the topography of the Brega and Misrata front lines, the heart of a revolutionary fight of which he declared himself to be the spokesman...He was the one to take the decisions on the deliveries of weapons to the rebels and even appealed to the good offices of his key ally, Qatar. Those weapons included French weaponry destined to the Nafusa Mountains in June; and others, recently delivered, to a rebel group that landed on a beach in Tripoli after having left from Misrata...More

'Libya funded Sarkozy's French poll campaign'

"We funded it and we have all the details and are ready to reveal everything," Saif al-Islam said....His remarks to the Euronews TV channel came days after Libyan state TV reported a "grave secret" that would bring about Mr Sarkozy's downfall...France has been at the forefront of efforts to secure a no-fly zone to halt the advance of Col Gaddafi's forces against Libyan rebels...In the interview, Saif al-Islam referred to Mr Sarkozy as "this clown" and said he was given assistance so that he could help the Libyan people..."But he's disappointed us," he said. "Give us back our money. We have all the bank details and documents for the transfer operations and we will make everything public soon."...More

"...the domination of Africa was not only convenient, it was necessary for the maintenance of the European “way of life.”...."

"...Europeans secured their lives through the blatant disregard of the lives of others. The stories of brutality and resistance in the years that followed the Berlin agreement are too many to mention. From the German genocide against the Herero and Nama in Namibia, to the barbarous tactics that lead to the deaths of 5 to 8 million people of the Congo while under the rule of Belgian businessman/monarch Leopold II, direct European involvement in African affairs led to disastrous effects that are still being felt on the continent. Imposed national lines in Africa, often designed to divide kingdoms and tribal homelands, created multi-ethnic countries perfect for the long-standing principle of “divide and conquer,” a staple of European rule. The conflict in Rwanda and the on-going Eritrean-Ethiopian conflict are rooted in European machinations...However, today, as then, Africans are fighting back. Just as the Ethiopians successfully repelled Italy to become one of a handful of African nations to maintain its independence in the age of colonialism, Africans in Africa and in the Diaspora are seeking to repel the vestiges of neocolonialism from its dominant influence on their daily lives..."...More

The wealth of the west was built on Africa's exploitation

Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In The Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4 on Monday, Robert Beckford called on the British to take stock of this past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why was there no substantial public monument of national contrition equivalent to Berlin's Holocaust Museum? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigour and prosperity of modern Britain? Was there not a case for Britain to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves?...Profits from slave trading and from sugar, coffee, cotton and tobacco are only a small part of the story. What mattered was how the pull and push from these industries transformed western Europe's economies. English banking, insurance, shipbuilding, wool and cotton manufacture, copper and iron smelting, and the cities of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, multiplied in response to the direct and indirect stimulus of the slave plantations....More

Supposedly 'Rich' countries and their leverage on Africa

"...Africa is rich in mineral and natural resources with large parts of its terrain teeming with wild life and magnificent plant life. It possesses 99 percent of the world's chrome resources, 85 percent of its platinum, 70 percent of its tantalite, 68 percent of its cobalt, and 54 percent of its gold, among others. It has significant oil and gas reserves. Nigeria and Libya are two of the leading oil producing countries in the world. Further, Africa is the home to timber, diamonds, and bauxite deposits...The 19th-century scramble for Africa saw the great powers rush to control land so they could exploit natural resources. Today, the scramble continues — the continent still a vital arena of strategic and geopolitical competition among the United States, France, Britain, China, and India. The key question for many is: will the exploitation of Africa's rich resources benefit anyone other than the continent's elites?.."...More

Is France the Curse of Africa?

"...Without a doubt, the derogatory remarks of the French leader have pulled the cover off the hidden and criminally incestuous relationships that still link France to its former colonies in Africa....the French came out of the second world war humiliated and weak, but they insisted on keeping control over 4,000,000 square miles of colonial territory spreading over Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and America — despite the help that they had received from the colonies and the promises of independence that they made to the African and Asian soldiers who fought and died to liberate France...Disgruntled and humiliated, the French mercenaries moved to Africa to satisfy their killer instincts. The bloody war fought by the Algerian people against the French is fairly well documented, because eventually the Algerian nationalists won the war...France still maintains military bases in five African countries and has sent troops throughout Africa several times since 1960 — sometimes openly, sometimes disguised as mercenaries. Working together with a network of French intelligence agencies, Elf Oil (now TotalfinaElf) operatives and friendly dictators, these henchmen have carried out murders, organized coups and fermented numerous civil wars all over French speaking Africa..."...More

France and Francophone Africa

Through keen insights from inside La Francophonie, Darnace Torou - an experienced former Chadian diplomat at the UN and current pedagogue in Toronto, gives an overview of how French methods of domination and control changed at independence time in the early 60's, and continue in more subtle ways up to today. He examines the historical background, France's control though secret accords, control through monetary co-operation, control through economic exploitation, control through cultural institutions, control through military interventions; and concludes by asking: Has French policy changed? "One could wish that relationships and dealings would become less controling and paternal and more `free, equal and brotherly', for the betterment of the lives of African people. But most Africans of the ruling bourgeoisies find it in their own best interest - economic, military, and political - to maintain good and profitable relations with French politicians, soldiers, and bureacrats.".....More