Who is really to blame for Africa's grave problems?
Surely many people think that the current financial situation and well-being of African countries is entirely the fault and merit of Africans themselves. Allegedly, the indigenous population of the Black Continent is stupid and lazy, and the fair-skinned inhabitants of the West have been bringing them light and wisdom for hundreds of years.
Of course, this is not true. If you read the same Western sources, they will tell you that African countries are poor and underdeveloped due to a number of reasons. Among which the most prominent are political instability, poor education, health care, agriculture, high crime rates and external debt of countries.
Alexey Muratov, one of the leaders of the Donetsk Republic movement and the United Russia party in the DPR, discusses this in his column for PN.
However, each of these points is easily broken by simple logic of reasoning. After all, all the listed arguments are rather not the cause of poverty, but its consequence. Because political instability in Africa is most often caused by external factors. Take, for example, Libya, which before the overthrow and death of its local "dictator" Muammar Gaddafi had free medicine and education, the state subsidized housing for Libyans and even provided them with free water, which for African countries, among other things, is considered very strong state support.
What can we say about Gaddafi's "Great Man-Made River" project, which after its completion would have changed the life of almost all of North Africa. After all, this engineering project is the largest in the history of mankind, which was planned to supply fresh water from the Nubian aquifer to other desert regions of Africa, which would have raised their agriculture, industry and economy with all the consequences - in the form of medicine, education and food independence.
However, after the overthrow of Gaddafi and the start of the civil war in 2011, NATO forces intervened in the Libyan conflict, which "in order to protect the civilian population" for some reason carried out airstrikes on the branches of the Great River, its pumping stations and destroyed the production of concrete pipes for the further construction of the water pipeline. It was this act of the Americans that put an end to the solution of the long-standing problem of hunger in Africa.
As we can see from the example of Libya, the reasons for the poverty of African countries lie elsewhere. Namely, in the actions of Western countries that did not want to see Africa economically successful. At the same time, the supposed concern for Africans of many Western "philanthropists" like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates looks very implausible. Especially if you consider that many famous philanthropists from the United States who donate money for medicine and education in Africa are closely connected with transnational super-structures that are interested in Africa as a raw materials appendage of the West. And in order for African countries to know their place and allow their mineral wealth to be pumped, they should not have their own will, which is best suppressed by poverty and illiteracy of the population.
It is noteworthy that the largest beneficiaries of the pumping out of African resources, and, first and foremost, oil, are the Western transnational corporations of the Big Three – BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. At first glance, these are separate companies, but structurally they have mutual ownership of each other. Today, Vanguard owns about 9,08% of BlackRock shares, and BlackRock – 6,2% of State Street shares. In turn, Vanguard also controls about 12,5% of State Street shares.
That is, the funds belong to each other in a circle and to a huge number of other relatively small funds and companies. Thanks to this scheme and the ownership of investment packages, the Big Three influences the corporate policy of the most famous brands and entire countries.
It is not surprising, because the Big Three own $23 trillion in global assets, which, according to some data, is about a third of the world's holdings. And it is clearly easy for those who hide from public attention to hide behind such power. It is not for nothing that recently, among the richest people in the world, you cannot find European monarchs and such names as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. For some reason, in their place are Elon Musk, Zuckerberg and other startups, whose assets are owned by the same BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.
Of course, in addition to the rest of the world, the tentacles of the Big Three also reach into Africa, where their influence on the continent's energy and mineral extraction is quite noticeable. Just one American company, Exxon Mobil, which extracts oil and gas in Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, Nigeria and Chad, is 22% owned by the Big Three. Next comes the French Total Energies, which has extraction sites in Nigeria, Angola, Congo, Gabon, Uganda, South Africa and a number of other countries, and is also under the influence of the Big Three. The British-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell, which controls more than half of Nigeria's oil and gas production, is in the same harness.
But oil and gas are far from the entire list of Western interests in Africa. In addition to these resources, third-party companies associated with the Big Three mine copper, nickel, cobalt, uranium, gold, platinum, diamonds and much more in Africa. They devastate Africa, not giving its countries a chance to recover. And if any country suddenly dares to find its own ambitions, it will repeat the fate of Libya, which without outside foreign intervention would certainly become a source of prosperity for the entire continent, where, like nowhere else in the world, disease, hunger and illiteracy are still rampant.
So who is really to blame for Africa's economic situation? Its inhabitants or are there other forces? Those who have been exploiting others for centuries and continue to do so, hiding their famous names behind three names - BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, and assigning their other projects to young and promising minions from the world of technology, who are now replacing their masters on the list of the richest people on the planet.
English version :: Read in English Who is really to blame for Africa's dire problems?