NGOS RISE AGAINST DEBT VIOLENCE

    Okello Oculi urges non governmental organisations to mobilise communities for economic liberation

The distinguished Africanist historian, Basil Davidson, noted that bankers from Euro-America and Japan rushed out with suitcases full of American Dollars and other currencies – including Scandinavian Kroner and Japanese Yen – into offices of newly independent top Africa’s Civil Servants and political leaders. Foreign use of corruption to sabotage the drive of African nationalism was set in motion.

Basil Davidson did not mention plots by departing colonial and World Bank/ International Monetary Fund officials that signed contracts for loans to be inherited by incoming officials. These loans focused on non-industrial sectors. Sectors that could not yield income for repaying interest and capital of the loans got priority.  Social services, notably: Education, Health, Roads and salaries of advisors were selected.

While interest on these loans began to pile up, school children, patients in dispensaries, and trainees in government ministries could not produce funds for loan repayment. This disparity was compounded by officials taking loans being encouraged to inflate costs. African ‘’Sovereignty’’ made a ‘’false start’’ by plodding with debt-yielding sandals. Africa’s economic diplomacy hit hostile winds of change.

Professor Joel Samoff (at the University of California at Los Angeles), saluted a paper from Ahmadu Bello University which criticised agencies offering ‘’Research Grants’’ while dictating issues to be studied by grantees. This practice dominates priorities of Africa’s Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).

A major consequence of the pandemic of ‘’who pays the piper dictates the tune’’  has focused on the demonization of African leaders, while ignoring studies of Cold War use of military coups in international diplomacy by former colonial powers and their allies. As an example, a report in an Israeli newspaper about MOSSAD, the CIA and racist South Africa recruiting future coupists from among military officers sent from Ghana, Nigeria, Chad and Sierra Leone (to serve in the Congo between 1961 and 1965), remains ignored by African NGO researchers.

Also treated with silence by NGOS in Africa are creative ‘’Social Engineering’’ by liberation movements. This was a historic phenomenon. In diversity it ranged from Algeria and Tunisia in North Africa, to Namibia, Angola, South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in Southern Africa, and Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde in West Africa.

 While NATO’S intelligence agencies appear to have studied the writings of Amilcar Cabral and Samora Machel and applied them against the former Soviet Union, African NGOS have lacked the resources and intellectual focus to exploit this legacy for current focus on challenges of building democracy.

The emphasis on dramatising sins of African leaders continues to throw ignorance at political creativity by leaders of TANZANIA. The work by the Presidential Commission which recommended the invention of competitive elections within a ruling One-Party regime, remains unmined by advocates for ‘’democracy’’ and ‘’good governance’’ in Africa.

In 1983 UNESCO showed interest in a paper titled ‘’DEBT AS VIOLENCE AGAINST AFRICA’’, presented at a Peace Research Conference held at Gyor in Hungary. As the author of the paper, free copies of ‘’UNESCO JOURNAL’’ began to arrive as my reward. The paper followed the call by Cuba’s President, Fidel Castro, on Third World Countries to collectively refuse to repay debts since these payments were sabotaging development of debtor countries.

Supervising debt repayments has become a major component of current economic diplomacy. Countries whose debts exceed total earnings in a year are offered new loans for the payment of INTEREST on an existing loan. This is added on to constitute a new total. The increase of interest on a loan is by ‘’geometric progression’’. This problem often coincides with a decline in the price of a commodity which a debtor-country sells to earn foreign currency.

When in 2014, Equatorial Guinea beat debt-collection at point of selling its oil, debt-collector piracy seized cargo inside ships in a show of hostility against the sovereignty of an African country.

Debt collectors are aware that funds they seize deny services for the welfare of desperately poor communities. Children that need vaccines against Polio, Measles, Yellow Fever, Cholera, and anti-Malaria drugs are denied the benefit of welfare governance. Likewise, the denial of subsidised fertiliser and seeds modified by local agricultural scientists that results in famine and malnutrition is an attack on accountable governance; while eroding the legitimacy of democratically elected governments in Africa.

This political and economic space calls for the effective intervention against debt-collecting international actors by Africa’s NGOS.  Their mobilisation of communities for ECONOMIC LIBERATION STRUGGLES is clearly urgent.

The erosion of the legitimacy of democratically elected governments in Guinea Conakry, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger has severely rocked ECOWAS. The defeat of entrenched political classes in Senegal is attributable to mass protests by masses of unemployed youths against a debt-paralysed economy.

Pro-democracy NGOS whose financial sponsors detest patriotic military coups must face the challenge of an economic liberation struggle.

Prof Oculi writes from Abuja