_Africans sit on tens of trillions of raw wealth but Condescending Macron shows up with $27 billion and everyone is happy, how’s that?… mansa musa writes
The African heads of state attending the Kenyan summit represent nations sitting on tens of trillions worth of raw natural wealth. Yet when the condescending Macron appears with a mere $27 billion paper-money investment package for Black Africans, our leaders seem head over heels with excitement and contentment.
Meanwhile, during Trump’s visit to China, he was accompanied by CEOs of TESLA, APPLE, BOEING, META (Facebook), and NVIDIA. Each of those CEOs is worth tens of billions in paper money. But annoyingly and insultingly, the metion of $27 billion from the French has our heads of states brimming with visible joy. For this, the summit will be described as successful afterwards by pathetic Africans.
But here lies the problem: West Africa alone is capable of holding a summit and raising somewhere between $150 to $200 billion in paper capital, backed by the existence of immense natural wealth within the region itself, all without a colonial interface or European presence.
Yet for some flimsy reasons, conceived and maintained by us Black Africans, we never seem ready for regional or continental capacity-building without the presence and approval of Europeans. So much so that it has become an unwritten and unspoken obligation to have a European face, or faces, at almost every continental or sub-regional meeting.
All this at a time when recent geopolitical developments have clearly shown that it is actually Europe that cannot survive without Africa’s immense resources. Yet this realization still has not fully dawned on Black Africans. Well, not yet.
In West Africa alone, nature has deposited every kind of resourceful wealth imaginable: gas, liquids, minerals, and solid resources of all kinds. Unfortunately, what is worryingly absent is the strong capacity to exert control over what we own and the ability to determine what should be done with it.
And until we regain the ability to control our own affairs — Christianity and Islam permitting, we will remain the world’s circus puppets and performers for eternity.
