The re-posting of a few of my reflective articles in this November 2024 is motivated by several recent events of global importance that demands from Africa more leadership and less cheftainship. Events in Mozambique, where the youth is saying BASTA, events in Kenya where the youth also said BASTA. Events in West Africa, Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, that are talking the same language and reclaiming sovereignty, with or without the old guard. Far away, events in french New Caledonia, in New Zealand parliament, in Australian parliament on the reception of the King of the wealth that he considers common. Back in complex Africa: events in South Africa, (1) with anti-black racism expressed by blacks who have hijacked the role of the relevant Minsiter dealing with "illegal foreigners", (2) now the closure of spazzas under the pretext of food poisoning coming from there - there is suppressed proof that the poisoning comes from homes (watch who is waiting on the sidelines to take over the space violently vacated), (3) the exclusive white town, (4) the starving to death of the Zama-zamas desperately eeking out aliving in abandoned mines, and (5) the expulsion of people who are not born in Eastern Cape (in fact, people from Western Cape), meaning, once you have killed and chased away all foreigners, you will have nothing left but to now turn on your brother and neighhbour fo decades. A maelstrom that shows the dire need for leadership in Africa. To seize this global movement. The article
From a very anguished Mozambican national
Dear Presidents
Introduction
You all seem to be out of tune with us your peoples. You seem to have lost the art of dialogue with the peoples, or you do not seem to be able to demonstrate that you know how, except with a protective protocol between you and the said peoples who apparently elected you. Now you are afraid of those who voted you into comfort and opulence.
No wonder people are being chased from their ancestral lands in the fallacious name of conservation, only to find that actually there are foreign interests in our land, our water, our game reserves. Planes are landing in runways built clandestinely, game is flown out to constitute new reserves outside of Africa. It never occurred to you to manage the reserves differently. You do not have a budget for managing national natural reserves because a myriad of foreign NGOs precipitate themselves to do that for us. You do not seem to understand that the African manages better the game reserve, because he does not hunt for the fun of it but to feed his family. To do that, he does not go hunting ten antelopes, but just the one unfortunate slow antelope, enough to feed his family. What other ways of conservation and living with nature you are looking at?
No wonder America finds in Kenya an ally to advance its strategies in Haiti: a black man used against another black man. Just like during the slave trade, just like during the colonial occupation.
No wonder the youth in Kenya are saying “Basta!”[1]. They have dramatically visited their own Parliament to make the case and have caused a governance crisis, whose victims are still going to be counted, as shown by the saga of the Deputy President.
No wonder in Mozambique the entire political establishment has been shaken by a youth that is getting the courage to say “Basta” to being poor. They do not understand how one can be dirt poor in a dirt rich country. They do not understand the war in Cabo Delgado taking place precisely where the ruling class is getting richest, a war that has not been declared as such. They do not understand the lack of justice on the post-election murders, while emphasis is excessively focused on destroyed property. Whose property and whose lives, that should be the double discourse.
No wonder nobody understands the UAE business models in Africa[2]. The UAE that is now fronting as a climate champion by buying extensive tracts of land in countries such as Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Liberia etc. Is it climate action or is it a double barrel for (a) exemption from the global duty to reduce pollution and (b) to ensure future food security for their country?
No wonder foreign forces promote and sustain the war in the Sudan, to ensure the permanent supply of meat from the Darfur to the Middle East, by feeding an internal conflict between black farmers and Arab nomadic cattle keepers. Perpetuating a genocide against the black population that has subsisted in the Darfur for decades. Slavery in Dar for is not new, despite the European newsman who almost accused UNHCR Chad, when I was the Representative, of enjoying a perennial refugee situation. Wrong victim, wrong cause. The real cause is ages-old Arab slavery[3].
No wonder Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have firmly said NO to neocolonialism, NO to being told they are poorest, while sustaining the economy of France and Europe. No wonder “Motherland or death” is their set of choices.
This is a sobering introduction. While people are being sacrificed in the altar of foreign interests, those same foreign interests are providing you with the comfortable visa to deposit money and to buy properties in their countries, they impress you into buying $500,000 watches that work no better than a $100 device. Meanwhile, children are still sitting on the bare floor in schools, entire cities do not have running water and suffer from cholera every time it rains. Bridges are falling, roads are not maintained, teachers are not paid their regular salaries, those who have different opinions are excluded from justice, from jobs, and the list can go on.
This is the context in which I have messages for you, having followed the youth movements in West, East and Southern Africa for some time. The youth is a Tsunami that has already started and may surprise all of us all of a sudden.
Core message: you alone can earn respect for Africa
You and us, we all know that respect is not demanded, it is self-imposed and earned through shock and awe. So, stop pretending that through speeches at the UN or G20 meetings you will be earning respect for us. You want a chair at the table? You either bring the chair yourself and elbow your space at it, or forget the ambition to join, go ahead and create your own table. In the full knowledge that you will be combatted, not least by a resourceful fascist western media. If you can endure that like Cuba has for more than 60 years, remaining poor but free… Just take the people with you. Or continue wallowing in the corridors of the West.
Talking of respect, there is need for you to understand that you are not important in your personal capacities. The protocol accorded to you is not for you, but for the people you represent. None of you individually, not even collectively, compare to the President of China. Not until you stand for us that President Xi will order the 21-gun salute he also gets, as he represents his billion Chinese people.
So, prove that you represent us. Among so many other agencies and avenues available and open to you, individually and collectively, consider the following:
1. INTERNATIONALLY
Our claim for a permanent powerful seat at the UN Security Council: the cry has been heard, but we wait for others to find a chair for us to go sit. And of course they still want us in the second row. I argued in my earlier letter to you[4], that we need you to define for us your peoples, how we will benefit from that seat. How that will advance the cause of Africa, not of the country(ies) actually sitting on that/those chair(s). That, you have not told us, and we wonder whether we should really continue this argument of the seat before you do.
If that is to represent the individual country, then no.
If that is to go and spend time aligning with one or the other power, then no.
If it is a seat without a veto, then no.
If it is to continue the status quo, then no.
Bring to bear some African innovation into multilateral diplomacy. Make the UN actually prevent wars by forcing a modification of the international order. You have not been able to give us some indication of imagination for that, so far. Sorry, we are not ready to support you to get that seat for us until you show us the added value once Africa is installed in the seat. If it is for demonstrating how big and powerful an African country is, enough already!
Our claim for compensation for the slave trade and colonial genocides[5]: we spend time claiming compensation, but we have not defined the type of compensation, the management of that compensation in a manner that fifty years from being compensated, our grandchildren will not be barking up the same tree, seeking another compensation to the same colonial powers of yesteryears! Compensation, once granted, should be perennially visible so history can record, and we get out of this toxic lopsided relationship, build another one. For that to happen, compensation shall not be to a government, less so to a political party, but to African peoples, including those in the diaspora that constituted their own countries: Haiti, Jamaica all other Caribbean islands, etc. Compensation should change relations between peoples.
Most importantly, compensation may not necessarily be about money. As far as I am concerned, I would make a list of demands on the issue of international commercial relations, on trade, on patents, on migration, much more than expect that millions of dollars will do the trick. They do not, because those monies always attract local vultures, perched in powerful positions above our heads, ready to pounce. It has to be people to people. So, dispensing money is not the way to go. Discuss with the peoples before saying you are talking on their behalf. Otherwise, let us live with the gripe.
The fifty or so African heads of State meeting one counterpart from another Continent: How you are invited is not the problem: How you accept the invitation is the issue: you will always be received by one single nice benevolent rich head of state from outside the Continent. Please, find smarter ways of responding, honoring the invitation and acknowledging the power differential without running all of you like schoolchildren to listen to a headmaster. That vexes us Africans who want to be treated as equal. Your collective behaviour makes us wonder: equal to what? There may be other more efficient and more dignified ways of consulting, of deciding how the Continent can be represented each time. In a way that satisfies the host, satisfies each of our nations’ interests and still dignifies us, the represented peoples.
And the stale pageantry around the Commonwealth. May I take a lone exception and interrogate you all by bringing a new theory: that perhaps you have not understood what is common in the wealth you are discussing with the British king. And since when did Mozambique have any historical thing with the king? Maybe when Mac Mahon came to define the border between Mozambique and South Africa[6]. Maybe because Mozambicans have contributed to creating wealth in the mines of South Africa, which wealth was carted away to his kingdom. These are the backward links I can see with the British king, and by extension with the Commonwealth. My knowing English is similar to a British subject knowing Nyanja my language, or Kiswahili. All languages are the heritage of all humankind. When you understand which wealth they are characterizing as common, you will understand what kind of organization it is. Our wealth is being made common. Our land, our seas, our forests are common to humanity. But beware: we are considered as the mere warehouse for that common wealth, managed for some smarter people by a local chief. We are considered, in their own boardrooms away from us, not as participants in that wealth, but as the muscles to lift that wealth to be taken somewhere for conversion and then perhaps sold back to us, preferably second-hand. Just look deeply at it again and give us better guidance.
Otherwise, and perhaps my imagination is going too far ahead, to think that western powers would prefer an African Continent without the Africans.
2. AT HOME
Home is for me the entire Continent. Because, basides being Mozambican, my family is Tanzanian, Congolese, Ivorian. So, I feel I belong in the Continent, not jut in Mozambique. I have a right to the Continent, the same way as I feel the Continent has a right to me. And that is how I have formulated my issues.
Recognizing, analyzing the expressions of the youth of the Continent. Sorry, but the old guard that you are, needs to acknowledge that times have moved and policies need radical revisiting. You either do violence to yourself, and you know how to manage it, or it will be done to you, in which case, then you have no power at all over it. The gaslighting of the people with the talk of democracy has shown its limits. Western institutions, western cultures, western ways of educating our people, are all failing to lift us in the concert of nations in the world. We believe too much that development will be offered to us by way of MDGs or SDGs, or some other iteration that will follow!
They insist on observing our elections: why do we not observe elections in the EU or back in the countries that give themselves the right and the expertise to observe ours!
They demand twenty documents for us to visit their country. Why do we not we demand the same for them to visit us? We need their tourist money! They need our money more than we need theirs, except ours is not in banks! Ours is the gold that they looted from Libya, from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, from Iraq, from Haiti and elsewhere. They abolish the visa? We abolish correspondingly. RECIPROCITY is the game of equals. Reciprocity is something that is only in your hands.
Recognizing, respecting and supporting the struggle of affirmation of sovereignty by the peoples of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. If we know how the French colonial pact works in West Africa, then all countries in West Africa and all of us, including the AU and ECOWAS would understand that we are in a struggle for sovereignty and the dignity of the African peoples. Does that mean anything to our elites?
Do you know that seventeen countries must deposit 50% of their export earnings in France? And that they can only access part of their money as loans, with interest rates charged on their own deposited money?
Do you know that water and sewage in Cote d’Ivoire and other old French colonies in West Africa are the exclusive property of French Companies?
Do you know that 14 (now one less) countries in Africa continue to pay the so-called colonial debt to France, more than 64 years of independence for the infrastructure France built without their consent in their territories?
Did you our Presidents read the history of Haiti at all?
Do you know that Venezuela is in the bad books of the USA because of its oil resources?
Do you see where they intend to take Mozambique because of the Cabo Delgado gas and the rubies?
Foreign military bases in Africa: Presidents, you need to seriously challenge each other on the presence of foreign military establishments in neighbouring countries. There is nothing like “it is just for my country!” Not with current drones, aircraft and Artificial Intelligence technology. Please recognize that war is good business: it has been proven during colonialism, it is being proven in the DRC, in Mozambique, in the Sudan, Ukraine, etc. Where there is war, others set up lucrative businesses and therefore cannot countenance the end to such wars. The role that violence and force play in the subjugation of radical African voices and social movements has been proven beyond doubt.
You, our Presidents should therefore show leadership in reading form history and reviewing situations in light of the perennial needs of capitalism in Africa: energy above all. That understanding may lead you to realize the need for a long-term smart collective African strategy that responds to the following needs:
The need for protecting African sovereignty and above all, human dignity of the African peoples at all costs. Including in Haiti.
The need for prioritizing national development based on the efforts and resources, not on repetitive foreign NGO micro-projects that ensure the perpetuation of poverty and inferiority.
The need to accommodate foreign capital and Western/Eastern countries, after prioritizing us.
The need for a sustainable strategy that does not depend on the strong person at the Presidency, but on strong institutions. If to-day a strong (wo)man is necessary, the youth are tolerating (more than tolerate, they are intimidated by the machinery at your command). In another ten years, only if you can still control all the youth all the time. Take the time to learn how the Presidency is exercised in Switzerland!
The AU:
Budget independence: sorry, but the EU and other foreign powers supporting the operating budget of the AU get their money from our fisheries, from our gold, anyway, from our soil. Draw the obvious conclusions; perhaps they can allow you to change the relationship.
Observer statuses: of course, once I pay for a wedding, I want to be at that wedding, and I will make myself available so you could not possibly forget to invite me. And with me, my wife. “And by the way, can I also bring my 35-year old son, he is not married and is bored at home! In fact, part of the money we contributed to you we had set aside for him to buy a tennis racket for the lonely old boy. What do you say!” Countries subsidizing the AU budget expect to have earned the right to an observer status. And with the observer status, they gain insights into our strategies of regaining sovereignty; they will always have an advance over us and time to counter our efforts, nip our initiatives in the bud by introducing twists in the name of friendship/partnership, to ensure that we remain the table over which they continue to enjoy our resources. Again: where is the RECIPROCITY? Does the AU have an observer status at the EU summits? Is any country in Africa observer in any political processes anywhere in Europe or Americas? Or anywhere else for that matter? Then why would they be entitled? Please review rigorously the criteria and if necessary diplomatically but firmly suspend observer statuses until you obtain for us that reciprocity in writing. A friend should not impose its friendship.
Conflict management[7]: Libya, DRC, Mozambique, Sudan, put brains together and give them the assignment to end conflicts, not manage them. Africa should own the conflicts, in order to own the solutions. Impose negotiated restrictions on foreign meddling in these conflicts and find ways of keeping foreign financiers of these wars at bay. You get the impression that you have no power to impose, but you do. The day two African countries simultaneously threaten to close all European embassies in their territory, then you will realize how powerful we are at generating a flurry of negotiations and repositioning! Try it once.
AU position on foreign military bases in Africa: please bite!
The AU reform: This is an annual song and nothing new happens. You want to put Raila in charge and expect renewal? in his own country he is very powerful, but maybe you tell us what he did as Special Envoy of the AU for infrastructure. His own President is looking for jobs for his youth abroad, precisely in those countries where the African people are racially abused. Finding foreign solutions to a domestic problem. For us to understand the logic, we need to know who owns Kenya, but that is besides the point. That a President seeks solutions to his national problems by exporting the problem, in the hope of importing a solution, we are witnessing a new kind of governance that is anything but leadership. It sounds like a chief managing a farm for some absentee landlord. What reform do we expect with Raila? Really?
Chiefs, take true leadership and lead the way! Get out of your comfortable protection, out of your hundred vehicle escort. If presidency means business for you, you are participating in our oppression and underdevelopment, precisely the agenda of foreign capital: Africa as a warehouse of resources for the perennial needs of the West. With someone local to manage it.
That is certainly not what you bargained for, is it?
Jose
Tete, October 2024
[1] https://www.canhandulatete.com/post/president-ruto-a-deliberate-actor-and-victim-of-history-long-read
[2] https://www.theafricareport.com/349913/ports-farmland-contracts-what-is-uaes-mohamed-bin-zayed-seeking-in-africa/
[6] For which he earned a good Mozambican beer called 2M (MacMahon)
[7] Curious that we emphasize more conflict management than we do conflict prevention. As if to keep the fire burning, just not too much. For what purpose then? Even the UN Security Council convenes to discuss conflict, not to prevent it.
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