DESTRUCTION OR DEVELOPMENT?

In 1947, Osaygefo Kwame Nkrumah arrived the then Gold Coast now known as Ghana after a 12- year sojourn in the United States and United Kingdom. He almost did not return as he had suspicions about the conservative leanings of the leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention. He changed his mind shortly after realising that some huge political opportunities awaited him if he accepted the post of the SecretaryGeneral of the party.

In barely a decade, he led the nation to independence using the slogans of self-government now and seek ye first the political kingdom and every other thing shall be added unto you.

However, his maiden speech on March 6, 1957 turned out to be an anti-climax. He said that political independence is nothing without economic liberty. That statement has proven to be the bane of the development of the African continent. It was tragic that Nkrumah for all his Pan-Africanist movement efforts failed to draw up a road map for economic liberty.

The Bretton Woods Institution – the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development as well as the International Monetary Fund have been largely responsible for the underdevelopment of the continent. They coerced many African leaders to remove subsidy from two critical areas of the economy – education and healthcare which led to a mass exodus of the brightest brains to the West. Working in cahoots with the Ford Foundation, British Department for International Development, United States Agency for International Development, John & Catherine Mac Arthur Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Open Society, the United Nations and its various organs, they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars aggressively backing a depopulation agenda, abortion, stem cell research, gay rights, organ harvesting and all sorts of sinister liberal causes that has set Africa backwards by over two centuries.

Let us cast our minds back to 1989 when the then Ibrahim Babangida -led government liberalised the nation’s banking sector. To have a banking license at the time cost N6 million. By 1990 it was N12 million and this saw the emergence of financial super power houses like Zenith, Diamond, GTB which have weathered the storm to become institutions valued at over a billion dollars while providing employment opportunities for thousands of people both within and outside the country. In 1989, a hit song was released by King Sunny Ade and Onyeka Onwenu titled ‘Wait for me, baby dance with me.’ A reliable source in my media network revealed to me that the United States Agency for International Development spent a whopping sum $300,000 to promote the song. Naturally I asked why and the answer was crystal clear that the song had a depopulation message which is a major agenda of USAID. Imagine if that amount of money was used to set up financial institutions or to back the real sector, the ripple effect would have been gargantuan!

History repeats itself because man learns the stories but never the lessons. During the slave trade era, the narrow minded African chiefs gladly colluded with the Caucasian overlords to sell their brothers and sisters into slavery for mere mirrors and gin. That tragedy still happens today albeit in a more subtle form.

Corruption is touted by the west as the greatest plague of African States. They ignore the fact that they provide their banking facilities to aid the African kleptocrats. There is an ominous silence on their refusal to fully repatriate the loot stashed in their banks. Nothing is said of the crisis they cause in Africa and then they show up with placebos as ‘interventionists’.