Africa: No significant change will happen without decolonisation

THE new year has just begun! Like any other year, it wields both positive and negative outcomes. It is a year where the chapter of NATO aggression towards Russia using Ukraine as a proxy is wished to end; it is a year many are hoping South Africa’s case against the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians indicts the Israeli apartheid state; more expect the situation in the Middle-East to de-escalate; and that the USA and China avoid the “Thucydides trap”.

Also, in nearly 10 months, the USA will be holding presidential elections and these have been given global prominence more than some natural disasters and wars that kill hundreds of thousands in Africa. At that time, Africa’s cause seem forgotten and the continent’s place made irrelevant.

For Africa, this year must be the year to continuously entrench the agenda of decolonisation, nothing else. It is a year to pivot the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) to make Africa relevant economically, politically and socially.

This quest is one that is needed because for a long time African governments have been dependent on the structures set up by the oppressor. These structures have not rewarded Africans, but the former coloniser even 70 years after the sun of colonisation set in Africa.

There is, however, a stern warning. The agenda to decolonise is not one that is smooth. Decolonisation is as violent a process as the one of colonisation. In colonisation, the use of force and violence was used to conquer people and make them obedient to the will of the coloniser.

The violence of decolonisation is therefore located when people separate their minds, thought patterns and dependence that was created through colonialism and to achieve that, they have to be ready for the consequences. This was a familiar experience for Zimbabweans.

This explains why in the Sahel region the leaders of Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Niger are prioritising doing away with French dependence because colonialism and neocolonialism have worriedly impoverished Africa. While their condemnation is emanating from taking power unconstitutionally, the praise also comes from their ability to set the agenda of self-dependence.

To show why it is important to decolonise, the analogy of the Democratic Republic of Congo comes to mind. It is a country whose unfortunate circumstances we many want to explain using the immediate narrative. The Congolese re-elected President Felix Tshisekedi in last year’s December 20 elections where he was declared the winner by a landslide. These elections happened at a time M23 rebels were and are heightening internal strife, leading to displacement of citizens, especially in the country’s eastern parts.

Political instability, insecurity and intra-state conflicts have characterised the eastern DRC for a long time now. And this territory in turmoil was once a powerful empire known as the Kongo Kingdom, just like the Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and the Mutapa empires in Zimbabwe.

The biggest question is always asked: “What is wrong with the DRC?” In attempting to answer this question, those that claim to be enlightened do not start by reflecting that from 1885-1908 King Leopold II of Belgium administered that country as a private colonial property then known as the Congo Free State. Later in 1909, the Belgian government for 50 years colonially subjugated the country, denying its people the right to sovereign rule. When it won independence in 1960, the following year its first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated by the CIA and they installed a military dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko that plundered the country for another 35 years.

Afterwards, knowing that colonialism and Mobutu’s dictatorship made the country volatile, companies like Glencore and other western multinational corporations continue extracting and mining precious metals and minerals (cobalt, lithium) from that country using war to avoid paying tax income, hence impoverishing that country.

In simple terms, it is not the DRC that is wrong, but the systems that post independent leaders inherited that are wrong. And to substitute the brutality of King Leopold II, the Belgian government, Mobutu Sese Seko and multinationals and blame the current leadership is some unacceptable narrative.

Because Africa has been dependent on western political, social and economic structures, for instance, during Mobutu’s reign (then known as Zaire), the DRC gave up its economy into the hands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) such that it placed IMF officials in its government’s treasury department.

These officials started shaping the DRC’s economy by focusing primarily on the extractive industries. They extracted minerals as fast as they could without having any benefits accruing to the local population, gigantically ruining the environment, making the Africans miserable.

Because Africans have no globally dominant working financial system, except the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) used in cross-border trade though not fully adopted by Africans, unfortunately the financial and economic architecture used reflects how the dominant power remains the West.

Think of it this way. Financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have forced African countries through what are known as Economic Structural Adjustment Programs (ESAP) to do mono cropping at an industrial scale where they produce what they do not consume but is exported to Europe for the white man’s consumption. This produce includes things like palm oil, tea, rubber and coffee. Before this is implemented, African economies will be performing stronger, and only weaken when they adopt western prescriptions.

In essence, the West and its institutions continue to engineer the

African citizen that in all they do, they should be dependent on the former, which is an absurd and weird position for contemporary Africa.

For the DRC (then called Zaire) in the early 1970s, one Zaire franc was worth one dollar when the IMF officials were co-opted in the Congolese treasury, but by 1995 after the IMF had given billions of dollars to the Mobutu administration, one dollar was worth millions in Zaire currency. What it means is the IMF took a productive economy, collapsed and shrank it.

So the question “What is wrong with the DRC?” needs to be looked at anew and the diagnosis should not distance colonialism and its structures, which Africans hope these structures must be changed.

Decolonising might be difficult to attain at the moment, but as a process, it has to be refined along the way for Africa to be independent and get other continents’ ears when its leaders speak.

An average African citizen is clamouring for prominence to be given to the continent anchored on positive news by having leaders speaking in unison and raise the African Agenda 2063 and the AfCFTA project to give it weight on the global political arena.

On many occasions Africa has been dragged to support and endorse actions that propel the interests of big powers at the expense of its development and destiny. The time to do so is past, the right path to follow is one that is never delinked from the trajectory of further renaissance.

In short, if Africans entrench the decolonisation process, in the end they will ultimately enjoy cultural, psychological and economic freedom with the goal of achieving indigenous sovereignty.

By so doing, it means Africans will start creating new realities and ideas to determine their future. What is wrong in Africa are the existing colonial structures that were inherited after independence and as long as they are not replaced, Africa will remain in the shadows of its former colonisers.

While the continent shares a similar history, there is no reason to share a different destiny!