by MATTHEW BRAMALL
Children in Ethiopia PHOTO/Max Pixel under a Creative Commons Licence
Tax havens, transnational companies and climate change: the world keeps looting Africa’s resources.
In 1943, US President Roosevelt visited the Gambia. The sheer poverty led him to describe it as ‘the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life’. When he returned to the US, he did some sums: ‘The British have been there for 200 years – for every dollar that the British have put into Gambia, they have taken out 10. It’s just plain exploitation of those people.’ Roosevelt was right.
As the new Honest Accounts 2017 research shows, over 70 years later, and despite the end of colonialism and decades of ‘aid’, the exploitation of the African continent continues unabated.
Honest Accounts 2017 was published on Wednesday 24 May by a group of development campaigners including Global Justice Now, and reports more wealth leaves African countries than enters it every year.
Today, African countries receives £162 billion in resources including aid, loans and foreign investment. Yet it loses £203 billion through activities such as illicit financial outflows (to you and me: tax dodging), transnational corporations taking out their profits (on which they have often paid little tax), and the costs imposed by climate change (which Africa didn’t cause). All in all, an annual deficit of US $41.3 billion.
If Honest Accounts 2017 does one thing, it lays bare that Africa is rich. The problem is that it is those outside the continent, not ordinary Africans, who are benefitting from this wealth. Whilst the methods may have changed, the exploitation that horrified Roosevelt remains. We continue to take with one hand far more than we give with the other.
The consequences of this for the lives of African citizens are stark. Over 50 per cent of people in African countries are denied access to modern health facilities. There are just 14 health professionals for every 10,000 people on average – more than seven times fewer than Europe. The lack of adequate publicly funded health care means that many people in Africa are simply not able to seek healthcare when needed, whilst 11 million are pushed into poverty every year to pay for it.
New Internationalist for more