Foreign western companies are being given mining licenses to exploit Africa’s non-renewable resources. In the process creating slave wage jobs that enable our people to take debt and drive consumption of western goods. Generating a bit of tax for government coffers to enable our governments to pay back government debt to foreign lenders.
Dambisa Moyo writes that some African countries see up to 30% of their revenue going to paying foreign debt which often includes colonial, infrastructure, social development, healthcare, education and military defense debt.
In return the western companies use the slave labor and resources to generate supernormal profits, which they externalize through transfer pricing, under invoicing, foreign debt repayments, dividend and profit repatriations which end up in western banks.
From here the western mines, retailers, banks and agents in Africa receive new loans and shareholder funds for the colonial exploitation cycle to start all over again just as it did with charter companies for the past century and a half.
It’s colonialism by western corporates or #corporatocracy. A new and more advanced form of colonialism and slavery that exploits our resources, black labor and their savings, which Kwame Nkrumah warned us about in his book Neo-Colonialism. Today’s Anglo America and Gold Fields are the modern incarnation of the VOC and BSAC of old.
Their slave wages now give employees just enough money to buy food from foreign owned retailers, enabling them to take out debt from foreign owned financial institutions to buy foreign manufactured cars, cellphones and electronics made from African resources.
A value chain in which Anglo America and the Oppenheimers have controlling stakes to ensure the collection of the modern equivalent of hut, dog and wife taxes that keep blacks indigent as the taxes of old.
This is how Africa keeps the wheels of western industry and banking turning. Vastly enriching western bankers, entrepreneurs and governments which benefit from transferred taxes. All for them to continue to exploit Africa and perpetuate white supremacy.
In other words African economies are essentially giving over their wealth, resources and future to western companies for temporary wage jobs, taxes and instant consumption. All in the while destroying our capacity to develop, depleting our ability to industrialize, weakening our governments and enriching western capitalists to exploit Africa even more.
What very few Africans ask themselves is what happens when the resources are depleted, the rivers are polluted and the land scarred?
An example is right now South Africa has less than 30yrs of gold and less than 10yrs of iron ore left. So what happens when these resources run out?
The workers will be left jobless, indebted and impoverished with depreciating assets, while the environment is damaged irreparably. Those cities that once had vibrant mines will turn into shanty towns of prostitution and drug abuse like Detroit in the US and then what happens next? We are open to what ever the west wants to use us for.
Mnangagwa is signing deals in secret with european nations to take Zimbabwe back here, something that Robert Mugabe was not open to.
By Rutendo Bereza Matinyarare
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