Posted on 07/02/2002 7:35:54 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
A "United States of Africa" that would challenge the agro-industrial might of the United States – a dream of late British internationalist Cecil Rhodes – has gained new life as Western powers put their blessing on what might be considered an African "New Deal."
At the same time, some African leaders see the program as a scheme for the West to control the region's nations.
Last week at the Group of Eight summit held in Kananaskis, Canada, South African President Thabo Mbeki and leaders from Senegal, Nigeria, Egypt and Algeria met with top Western power brokers in an attempt to jump start NEPAD, the New Partnership for African Development. They asked for $64 billion in aid and investment from taxpayers and financiers of the G-8 member states. All in all, hundreds of billions are expected to be spent on NEPAD – building critical infrastructure in Africa in the next 12 years. The G-8 members are endorsing NEPAD as part of an African Action Plan.
By 2015, NEPAD, which is based on the idea that foreign investment will help spur development more than foreign aid alone, will have cut Africa's poverty level by half, according to the program's supporters.
But what will NEPAD really mean for the future of Africa, a continent riddled with Marxism, radical Islam, famine, genocide, AIDS and dictators?
A continent in crisis
Almost half of all Africans never attended primary school. Almost 30 percent have AIDS. South Africa will have 5 million AIDS orphans within 10 years. Around 40 percent of Africa's wealth is currently held overseas. Almost 70 percent of Africans live on $1 per day. Access to clean water, flush toilets and electricity is a major challenge. Simple medical problems like dysentery kill scores of African children each year. These problems and others are to be addressed by NEPAD's dollars.
NEPAD is centered on increasing positive governmental approaches to human rights, and increasing trade. Holistic, eco-friendly sustainable development as defined by the United Nations is the cornerstone of all of NEPAD's development projects. Africa advocates are united that Africa needs help and that it can use NEPAD's funding scheme as a tool. Belgium alone has a higher GNP than many groupings of African countries.
The program is the first step of the West's re-industrialization of Africa since colonialism ended and Africa decayed into anarchy in the post-white ruled era. In the 1970s, the U.S. National Security Council created a memorandum that stated population growth in Africa was a national security threat to the United States. This action signaled the beginning of three decades of horrific strife on the African continent.
Since the mid-1970s, the United Nations' abortion programs, Arab-Islamic vs. black African conflict, engineered famines in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia (by the Soviet Union) and HIV/AIDS have devastated the continent.
"The twist is that NEPAD is now being packaged as a black initiative when it is still privatization by European investors and the Anglo-American cabal, including the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. There's no free lunch, as they say," said Nicolette Swede, a Cape Town advertising executive who is studying how NEPAD will be marketed to South Africans.
NEPAD was brought into the public eye recently, but only briefly, when Mbeki endorsed the murderous election tactics of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe. The ruling Labor Party in the UK was so furious that it threatened not to fund NEPAD. Within 24 hours, Mbeki did a 180-degree turn and condemned Mugabe's election "victory."
"Mbeki's reversal was the biggest miracle since Lazarus was seen doing loop the loops over Jerusalem," added Swede.
"That's the kind of clout NEPAD funding carried. It is the Anglo-carrot on a stick for an impoverished Africa," South African businessman Bobby Van Dynaken told WorldNetDaily.
Resources up for grabs
A new world order "gold rush" is sweeping across Africa. In the Congo (once a thriving and rich Belgian colony), North Korean special forces dig for uranium right next door to an American mining giant from Arkansas. China has put troops on the ground in Sudan, set up space-warfare infrastructure in Namibia, grabbed a slice of the deep water Namibian port of Walvis Bay and is considering setting up a sub base near the Cape of Good Hope.
The British government has sent troops to guard mining interests in Sierra Leone and is working feverishly with the United Nations to legalize privately owned mercenary armies like Executive Outcomes and Sandline, both of which are comprised of top ex-SAS and apartheid-era special forces operators. Not suprisingly, the UK is one of the biggest cheerleaders for NEPAD, along with France and Canada.
As a precursor to NEPAD, Mozambique is sprucing up a $1 billion aluminum plant and has invited all of the displaced white Zimbabwean farmers who lost their land to Mugabe's land-confiscation policy to come to Mozambique and begin farming.
"It's sort of akin to the Mennonites being invited to farm in Belize," white Zimbabwean farmer Jack Williams told WorldNetDaily. "The situation is fluid, and the pace of change in Africa is really quite stunning."
Will Alexander, professor emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria, told WND that NEPAD is no guarantee that a new era of prosperity has come to this troubled region of the world.
Alexander is concerned about the "imposition of Northern Hemisphere solutions to African problems. There are examples where overseas institutions have financed development projects in Africa, but the money has ended up in the pockets of appointed planners and contractors from the donor countries. The local communities were saddled with the unaffordable operation and maintenance costs," he said.
He also was critical of the U.N.'s "sustainable-development approach."
"The objective of the much-lauded Agenda 21 of the 1992 Rio Summit was to maximize economic and social welfare without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems. This is an unacceptable order of priority," Alexander said.
"There should be no environmental impediments to the maximization of economic and social welfare. For example, if the current legislation regarding the need for ecologically healthy river systems had been enacted 50 years ago, South Africa would now be dependent on desalinated seawater, and our coalfields would have been depleted to provide the energy required for the desalination. The desalination costs would have comprised a sizable portion of the national economy. This is an intolerable situation where poverty exists. It is unfortunate that there have been no concerted moves by scientists to correct this misapprehension."
Questions about NEPAD
"NEPAD is supposedly Mbeki's idea, yet he himself has been shown to be only a bit player in the grand scheme. Nigeria's president is on board, but even he has let slip he smells a rat in both NEPAD's funding and goals," Swede told WorldNetDaily.
"NEPAD wants to address agricultural issues vis-à-vis the West and price supports for Western farmers. It's very convenient to say that, but by the time NEPAD forms, the white farmers have been destroyed in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe anyway, so that's no reason to support it. Although this is supposedly an African led and managed scheme, it will be accountable to private investors and IMF rules. Does this mean Africa will be privatized eventually, as Argentina surely is now? They've sent in foreign 'experts' from the IMF to run Argentina's finances. It is odd how involved the IMF is in meetings around the world with NEPAD leaders if they are not going to benefit through these private investments. African nations will adopt IMF and World Bank financial standards. We all know that means more debt and more problems, more influence and control from the West."
Continued Swede, "Basically, NEPAD is Cecil Rhodes' dream come true: Cape Town to Cairo. …"
Last March, Nigerian President Obasanjo told the U.N. Conference on Financing Development, "We must guard that NEPAD is not being turned against us as a tool for new conditionality."
Namibia's Marxist President Sam Nujoma, the former leader of the terrorist Southwest Africa People's Organization or "SWAPO" has warned of "the dangers of NEPAD." While hosting a recent victory party for Zimbabwe's Mugabe, Nujoma met with leaders from Angola, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. At this meeting he expressed solidarity with Mugabe's corrupt election tactics and warned of "attempts to install puppet regimes that guarantee the exploitation of our resources."
On May 24, the Zambia Post ran an op-ed piece which read, "No matter how attractively these so-called solutions to Africa's vast problems are being packaged or what they are being named, the Western policies are conveniently put in place not for our benefit, but to continue undermining us. Through this package being called globalization and liberalization, transnational corporations and institutions are fast taking over nearly all sectors."
The industrialization of Africa
Interest in Africa is rising in the West. President Clinton's trip to Africa opened the door to more trips by Western leaders. President Bush is planning a major African trip in the near future, this after Africa had been officially and publicly written off by the Anglo-American powers for the past three decades.
The flurry of diplomatic activity from February through May has been nothing short of astounding.
Consider the following:
Feb. 6-10: British Prime Minister Tony Blair and International Development Minister Clare Short visited Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Senegal.
Feb. 8: Several African presidents met French President Jacques Chirac in Paris.
Feb. 11: Blair and a high-level representative of Chirac met President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal in Dakar. A week later, the G-8 contact group for NEPAD – including representatives of Blair, Chirac, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and the U.S. State Department – met with the NEPAD secretariat (one of six such meetings altogether). Chirac's representative on the contact group is former IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus.
Feb. 18-25: IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler and World Bank President James Wolfensohn toured Africa together, held regional summits in Mali and Tanzania, and visited Nigeria and Kenya.
Feb. 26: The presidents of Angola, Mozambique and Botswana met President George W. Bush in Washington.
April 2-13, Chrétien made a seven-nation tour of Africa that included the four original sponsors of NEPAD – South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal and Algeria.
And finally, with great worldwide fanfare, in late May U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Irish rock star Bono made their celebrated tour of Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda and South Africa.
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And why would they want to do this? This backward mentality is part of the problem - fix the mentality, and then maybe money can help a bit - for now money is not the answer.
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