Page 114 - A People Called Afrika

A PEOPLE CALLED AFRIKA

Heads of State and Government had no real answers, because
they depended (and still do) on external funding to define and
run their programs. They remain largely ineffective because
they cannot even say no to unnecessary Western influence in
Afrika, lest funding be withdrawn or what happened to Zim-
babwe under Mugabe or what happened to Gaddafi, Sankara
or Lumumba, happen to them. Which is sad and ironic, par-
ticularly on a continent whose people shed their blood and
gave their lives in order for Afrika to access a measure of lib-
erty. I wonder if they think that by playing along with what
the West wants that when the time comes for the West to put
its real agenda into play that they will not try to devour them
and us anyway. It is possible, in our view, that aid created a
form of dependence on ‘easy, quick’ foreign funding sources
and opened up Afrika’s appetites for large sums of cash in the
form of debt. But they were neither ‘easy’ nor ‘quick’ because
the price that Afrika is paying for it, at every level, is very high.

Alemayehu Geda, in his 2003 paper, “The Historical Origin
of African Debt Crisis”, provides us with a more holistic per-
spective of the origins of debt in Afrika. In this paper, Ale-
mayehu explains that most viewpoints on the origin of Afrikan
debt tend to look at it through a post-colonial lens. The paper
suggests that several schools of thought have pinned the origin
of Afrika’s debt to ‘the oil price shocks of 1973-74 and 1978-
79, the expansion of the Eurodollar, a rise in public expendi-
ture by African governments following increases in commodity
prices in the early 1970s, a fall in commodity prices, recession
in industrialized nations, lack of internal capacity in Afrikan
countries, interest rate increases and so on’ but that all of these
look at the period of the 1970s and 80s, which is also the
period when credit from the IMF became readily available.

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