Western powers use debt to hold sway over their former colonial empire
By Jehron Muhammad – October 16, 2024
The tragic history of being saddled with debt repayments has meant African nations are encouraged and are often forced to “prioritize debt repayments over important investments, affecting their progress toward achieving sustainable development goals.” This is according to the October 8 edition of Business Insider Africa.
Achim Steiner is head of the United Nations Development Program. He recently spoke at an event in Hamburg, Germany, and stressed that increasing financial resources is “absolutely central” to achieving sustainable development goals.
According to Reuters, Steiner noted how this financial strain makes it difficult for countries globally to meet these goals. “For many, least developed countries, they have been priced out of the financial markets.
They cannot borrow any more money,” said Steiner, reported Reuters. He added that these countries must draw down other spending, like healthcare and education, to avoid debt default. “It’s a very extreme situation,” Steiner said, noted reuters.com.
Editor-in-chief of The Ethiopian Herald, Worku Belachew, recently took to task the so-called rule-based, market-driven international order that favors Western industrialized economies over the underdeveloped Global South.
In a commentary published in the Oct. 9 edition of chinadaily.com.cn, he wrote: “The so-called rules-based international order that started its maneuvers on the heels of the end of World War II has not brought about development that Africa needs.
The highly hierarchical order has rather hijacked international multilateral organizations and has been using them to systematically perpetuate hegemonic relations among the wealthiest Western nations and the poorest African countries.”
Belachew later adds a case in point. “The structural adjustment of the 1980s in Africa would lend us a better example in this regard. As schools and health services were liberalized, families were unable to afford healthcare and school fees. Such conditionality put restraints on the choice of development course for countries,” he wrote.
Belachew also discusses in his article, the hierarchical nature of the financial and geopolitical infrastructure created by the imperialist nature of the Global North, with the U.S. leading the way. “Developed countries impose their wills on developing ones.
It is clear that the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations Security Council operate as per the wills of a few countries. Countries in Africa are at the mercy of the decisions of these few nations.
Unless African nations are allowed equal participation on policy decisions that affect them and on international matters as well, the underdevelopment is sure to deepen,” Belachew explains.
However, when countries like Libya under the late Colonel Muammar Gadhafi or China under President Xi Jinping and BRICS members move up through the “ladder of wealth with their rigorous efforts they are then tagged with derogatory terms such as ‘dictatorship,’ ‘undemocratic,’ ‘despots,’” writes Belachew.
Adding insult to injury, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken described some of these other countries in his foreign policy article in the November/December edition of Foreign Affairs as “revisionist powers all want(ing) to entrench autocratic rule at home and assert spheres of influence abroad.”
And with U.S. President Joe Biden’s upcoming Oct. 13 trip to Angola being canceled, because of Hurricane Milton, the outgoing commander and chief’s 2022 promise of visiting the African continent remains unfulfilled.
However, why Biden chose Angola, with its reported human rights violations, according to Amnesty International, may have more to do with U.S./European joint venture plans to extract and transport the Democratic Republic of Congo’s raw mineral reserves, primarily cobalt, via a new rail line.
While the DRC contained an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral resources, it remains mired in poverty and violence that no self-respecting Western power has yet to address seriously. CNBC reported that the mining of the DRC’s mineral reserves is possibly aiding the funding of armed conflict in the region.
While Western media outlets frame the natural and mineral resources of the DRC as a source of conflict, it simultaneously reports that the Global North nations depend on these mineral resources to maintain industrialized societies, the latest being batteries for their electric cars.
The latest iteration of the Cold War is growing, this time with U.S. and European powers versus China and its successful belts and road infrastructure development initiatives.
The existing market-driven capitalist world order as Belachew explained, “is nothing short of institutionalization of exploitation.” The utilization of debt is to hold sway over Western nations’ former colonial empires where mineral and natural resources are tools of oppression instead of a means of development.
“(What) Africa needs (is) a renewed world order where its people can live a dignified life. Such an order should allow the African people to properly utilize their (natural and mineral) resources to extricate themselves from abject poverty.
And it should facilitate the continent’s dearly useful youths to find the proper niche to invest their labor, skills and knowledge and for the good of their society,” Belachew wrote.
Follow @JehronMuhammad on X