Excellencies, Highnesses
I write you this open letter in the knowledge that you are busy reading something more urgent. I write it to convey a message of the youth of Africa, perhaps comprising more than 75% of the people you rule over, youth being everyone below the age of 50 to explain the percentage. In so doing, I am also conveying a few demands. Ignore to your peril and to the peril of the African youth, as we depend on your foresight, initiative and courage.
Our first call is for you to pay attention to your own declarations. You promised that after the Queen of England died, after your experience of being conveyed in buses to her funeral, you would no longer accept to be convened by one gentleman, that you would no longer run there precipitously. Was President Ruto talking on your behalf? In any case, his statement was important to us and remained in our minds: that you would not be representing us adequately if you were to be called by one person and many of you went running. Still you did, or most of you, at least twenty were present in Rome just this January. Is it because it is Europe? Anything special about it?
We do not wish to teach you about protocol, but if you went there representing the youth, then the protocol was wrong in three major ways:
The party wanting to talk about its own strategy should be the party that visits you, and not you go there to listen to what they want: The one with the agenda should be doing the running. And pay their hotel bills in Africa.
One Prime Minister mobilizing twenty Heads of State seems to imply that one European lady is the equivalent of twenty African leaders.
We can hardly see Africa dignified. Do we still wonder that we are treated with contempt, a superiority complex and racism?
We knew from the start that there were two issues of interest to Italy (and Europe): they want our resources, but they do not want our people. Somebody wants the beautiful daughter, but without the mother-in-law. Energy and migration. Having allowed someone to damage the Nordstream, and to close gas from Russia into the rest of Europe, imposing sanctions, now they come for the African gas in Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola, etc. They feel trapped by the American gas, much more expensive than that of Russia or Africa. Around 40 percent of gas supplied to Italy comes from African producers, and this will only increase. In 2023 there have been 158,000 migrants into Europe. Europe has been using countries in North Africa and Niger to keep African migrants at bay. “Keep your people away from us” that is the attitude. They forget how they exploit our resources and that this may be a natural call of nature: follow your resources until the exploitative racist dehumanizing relationship changes. Unfortunately, the role of our brothers in North Africa has been quite negative, with Africans dying in the Mediterranean, Tunisia sending them to die in the desert, and Libya selling Sub-Saharan Africans into slavery. All promoted, financed and encouraged by Europe.
African leaders, show us that you see these issues, and that you are doing something about it.
We are proposing that you go back to what we were told was your proposal that when Africa is convened, the Presidents trust the regional bodies to represent the Continent: ECOWAS, ECCAS, IGAD, EAC, SADC, AU. Just brief them and give them the mandate. And pass that message to the world, before the next summons by Russia, Japan, USA, France, etc.
Our second point is that you pay close attention and analyze more objectively events that are unfolding in the Sahel before you start taking dogmatic self-righteous positions on Mali, Burkina and Niger, countries that are charting their new free history. They have acknowledged that all European forces and the UN contingent that lasted more than a decade there, were not able to combat terrorism; in fact, terrorism was controlling an increasing geographical space. They decided to take their own responsibilities, acknowledging that no foreign force can bring peace to a country. May we plead with you that you stop punishing them for that. They have taken their sovereign responsibilities, and they are equipping themselves. At your level, you may have received detailed information on how national armies were humiliated by their foreign partners. So, we will spare you the details that should allow you to appreciate the situation differently.
Why, pray, are you insisting on elections for countries where parts of the territory are insecure and inaccessible? Are other parts of their territories not entitled to participate in these elections? Why would you rush into transition people that are at war, if not to create more conditions for further destabilization? Someone is walking a tightrope and you want him to rush!
And in the process, you impose sanctions through ECOWAS. Was this a statutory role of ECOWAS? You wanted to wage a war on your (our) brothers, at the request and incitement of a self-entitled foreign non-African power?
We propose instead that you recognize that democracy, as preached to us, is not the only model. Which model is ours? We think and posit that your position as Heads of state gives you a better vision and power to promote a different definition of what is good for Africa. Is what is good for Africa, the same as what is good for Europe or America? We put it to you, and we leave it to you. What we cannot ignore is the importance and import of the set of decisions that these three countries have taken, and which interrogate all of us in a major way.
They have closed their airspace to Air France. All of a sudden, we realized that Air France was not paying taxes for the exploration of the AES market. Why? Because of a regime called double taxation. It consists of an agreement between France and Francophone African countries, whereby French enterprises doing business in Africa do not pay taxes in the host countries where they do business, but in France. Notionally against a reciprocal treatment of African enterprises in France; they would pay their taxes in their countries of origin, not in France. Apparently reciprocal. Except: which African airline competes with Air France and explores the market in France? Who competes with Orange in the telecoms environment in France? Or Bollore? Or TrotalEnergies? There are said to be more than 700 French enterprises in Cote d’Ivoire. How many Ivorian enterprises are there in France and of what size? And if all these French companies do not pay taxes in Cote d’Ivoire (mutatis mutandis for other countries) under the principle, what will you be doing about this situation, on behalf of your governed populations? Do we not see the inequality of the relationship here? In other words, who is financing who?
And the military presence of France is guided by a Status of Forces under which any French serviceman doing anything wrong in Africa, shall be tried in France, not where he committed the crime (same as the SOFA for the Americans). This extra-territoriality means that any aggrieved citizen who may want to take a French service person to court, will have instead to take the host country, his/her own country. French forces are no longer in these countries, but they are still in Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Chad, Benin, Togo, etc. A Senegalese aggrieved would take the Senegal state to court instead. So, the institutions of one country are expected to do the penance for France!
And of course you all are aware of what is happening to the gold in Mali and Burkina and Niger. You would not be blind to the fact that Niger decided to move from receiving from France 0.8 Euro for the kilo of uranium exported, into the market value of 200 Euro the same kilo.
May we be permitted to ask if you do appreciate that reality? If you do, then perhaps you would have reconsidered your suspension of these countries, fighting for their sovereignty, for our sovereignty, from the AU, would you not? We are no longer asking how come they were suspended from ECOWAS because, first, ECOWAS was doing them a lot of harm, on command from self-entitled colonial paymasters. We hear “le Niger appartient à la France, et non à la Russie ». I am sure you also heard that. What we are now hearing from Niamey is “le Niger appartient aux Nigériens”.
May we ask that you use your influence to tell France and other European countries to stop discussing Niger in the absence of Nigeriens themselves. And stop discussing any African country without calling that country’s Ambassador to those discussions, be it in parliament, in special war committees or whatever. In the same way as they do not expect that Mozambique will be discussing France in Maputo in the absence of a French spokesperson.
Please appreciate these struggles: replay the speech of the President of Burkina Faso in the last Russia-Africa Summit: are we really still going asking for food, when the soils of the future are in fact in Africa? If you understood what the UAE’s intentions are in buying huge lands in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania etc, you would understand that it is nothing to do with carbon trading, but with arable land for their future food security. Let us watch and have this conversation with the youth five to seven years from now, if that far.
Of course, after all this recital, allow us to just go silent on what is happening in Senegal, and the variable attitude of the same ECOWAS and AU. Condemning and sanctioning the countries of the AES, including for their sovereign decision to exit ECOWAS. Nothing of the sort for Senegal, the good pupil of democracy. It raises for us a fundamental question: who is after all, our democracy teacher?
Our third point is actually a positive acknowledgment of the diplomatic effort that six of your peers undertook when they visited Ukraine and Russia two years ago, to plead for an end to the war, all the while pleading also for market access to cereals. We wish to gloss over the cereals part, to say that maybe this is a good time for the group of the six African Presidents to attempt again another visit to Moscow and Kiev, after all the human losses in this war. We have now understood that it is the foreign interests that continue to encourage Ukrainians to go and die at the front, and that while Russia has lost perhaps more than a hundred thousand people, Ukraine may perhaps have lost more than five hundred thousand soldiers. Plus the millions of Ukrainians that remain outside of their country.
We posit that African Presidents visit also Brussels and Washington, because the Ukrainians are now fighting a war that is no longer theirs. The war now is owned by the military industrial complex of Washington and the European centres interested in portraying this war as existential to them. One more visit, emphasizing less the food and more the human and political cost to the entire humanity, may be a positive contribution that Africa can bring to the table. And slowly be taken more seriously.
Above all, remember, our lives are literally and constitutionally in your hands. Our natural resources are the focus of Europeans and Americans, some of whom may harbour neocolonial intentions on Africa. We call on leadership, which is your assignment, and we hope that leadership will be shown.
And while you are at it, could you consider letting the populations you lead know what the position of Africa is, our position, on three issues, vis
the ongoing genocide in Palestine, of the fight for freedom of the Palestinian people. Because if you are afraid because of the god of Israel, we wish to let you know, that that is not our God. And that is not how we interpret the statement “promised land”. Not on the back of the blood of thousands of other human beings. Once again, that is not our God.
When you claim a permanent place for Africa in the UN Security Council, have you discussed the outcome: is it an outcome for the Continent (a new form of politics to rejuvenate international politics), or an outcome for a strong African country individually? Is the country, in other words, representing the Continent or representing itself and perpetuating the selfish politics prevailing in the Council? What added value is Africa taking to the international stage? You may wish to discuss that while gathered now.
Many of our leaders have been calling for reparations for the slave trade. Are our leaders still talking about money? How are you calculating the amounts you wish to discuss? What guarantees are there that generations down the line we will not forget that reparations were paid, and we should not raise the issue anymore? Can we propose more imaginative ways of achieving reparations. We may consider the long-term importance of an approach that drops the money discourse and adopts another two-pronged discourse instead: the return of all looted cultural inheritance of Africa, for which a Treaty should be concluded. And an international agreement acknowledging resource sovereignty over our lands, seas, air, and establishing new relationships where the trade terms are defined by the owners of resources. A new trade deal. Short of saying what we really should fight for, using the slave trade as a tool: a new international economic order. As leaders, you know better than any of us how money is fungible and easy to forget once spent. We would not want our grandchildren clamouring for compensation for the slave trade all over again just because they saw no impact on the monies potentially paid now. Namibia seems to give us that lesson. While the government was happy with a small financial compensation from Germany, the people who suffered genocide at the hands of the Germans (nama, Herrero) did not agree with their government!
Our most profound respects
Jose,
Tete, Mozambique
12 February 2024
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