I have been watching with wry amusements the tete-a-tetes and endless dinners going on between IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn and officials of Burkina Faso, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania. These countries should be forewarned that anybody who dines with the devil will someday end up in his dark belly. The mafias who run International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation are on a roll in black Africa and desperately working hard to carve out new vassals of indebtedness on a massive scale. We need to call out Africa’s guardian angels to guard this continent from falling into the fowler’s snare.

I am therefore appointing myself as a one man riot against Strauss-Kahn from ever setting stall in black Africa. We need to spare this poor region of the world the prospect of future eternal damnation in the hands of her newly assembling creditors. The history of IMF and World Bank are not particularly tidy. The creation of these financial institutions in Bretton Woods in 1944 was primarily to facilitate an access for “American military and its corporate arms to minerals, oil, markets and cheap labour all over the world”. To achieve this aim, a prophet had to be found. Not long, in 1948, an abrasive and enormously confident George Kennan, one of the State Dept’s neo-conservative technocrats, happened to be the anointed economics guru.

In a polemical essay forewarning doom for the poorer regions of the world, he wrote: “.....we have to dispense with all sentimentality......we should cease thinking about human rights, raising standards of living and democratisation”. Till date, IMF and World Bank have not deviated from this prophetic strategy. It was at the time frozen Bretton Woods that globalisation of poverty and the use of debt as a weapon of control was conceived. As far back as 1948, Kennan had set out the psychic, traumatic and physical devastation that would mark the lives of most black Africans in their pursuit of social and economic equality with the dominant West.

Civil society groups, NGOs and environmental bodies are becoming vociferous in their opposition to the secrecy that shrouds IMF and World Bank projects in most of their Country Assistance Strategy for developing nations of the world. For instance, the “Grand Inga”, a massive 40,000 MW hydropower complex in the Inga Falls on the Congo River was not mentioned by name in the Bank’s CAS.

Rich western investors are busy making plans to tap this country’s  hydropower potential in order to power resource-rich mines and smelters and also the huge potential of exporting electricity to part of South Africa, Botswana, Angola, Namibia and other countries of the region. The euphoria generated by the “Grand Inga” project, reputed to be the largest hydropower site in the world is now draped in controversy. The exclusion of the local representatives from the planning process has brought back ugly memories of the Bank’s dirty dealing in Africa. Despite the sugar-coated rhetoric about “lighting up Africa,” the Inga project would remain an albatross on the neck of every Congolese.

The World Bank plan for the Congolese economy conforms to Kennan’s wealth creation theory. The Bank’s money goes into core resources as diamond, gold and copper mining what would give it far more profit and lordly influence over the Congolese government. Presently, the extractive industries like mining and forestry represent 13% of DRC’s GDP. However, recent Panel report has upheld the indigenous peoples’ outcry that the Bank violated many of its policies and procedure, including those design to protect the rights of Pygmies who live on the lands earmarked for mining.

Next are the Ugandans who have been up in arms against the Bank’s proposal to build 250MW Bujagali dam which they reckoned would pose risks to the hydrology of Lake Victoria and cause harmful impacts on local communities, including inadequate compensation for indigenous people whose lands would be dammed. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, the rapacious exploiters of men and materials in the region, recently colluded with the Bank to begin construction of the dam with a spread of investors including International Finance Corporation, European Investment Bank, and African Development Bank.

Liberia’s Finance Minister, Antoinette Sayeh was full of warm laughter when IMF cleared her country’s debt of US$890 million in March this year. Liberia made it the Decision Point, a point at which interim debt relief is provided, under the so called Enhanced Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative. This has now paved the way for Liberia to receive US$900 million under a new refinancing arrangement.

The sharp suited Dr. Shamsudeen Usman, Nigeria’s Minister of Finance, together with some of his officials also had a positive and wonderful meeting with Strauss-Kahn during his recent visit to Abuja.

Strauss-Kahn’s itinerary of entente cordiale with these countries should be a source of worry if we hearken to the warnings of Joseph Stiglitz, the ex-chief economist of the World Bank. He was once a trusted oracle of the organisation. He was fired 6 years ago for expressing strong dissent from the way globalisation was being pursued by his employers. The Country Assistance Strategy, according to Stiglitz, was designed to investigate exploitable resources of every poor nation. In reality, such investigation would not go beyond the perimeter fence of a 5-star hotel. After such ‘in-country investigation,’ Finance Ministers of investigated countries are then expected to go to Washington with a begging bowl for funds.

Therefore, it is safe to conclude that African Finance Ministers who recently dined with Strauss-Kahn are candidates for “restructuring agreement” gas chamber.  In this famous four-step agreement, ailing countries are placed on World Bank and IMF-assisted bitter pill of economic recovery that often leads to death.

Tijani lives in London.

Robot  Villager

# 1 I have been watching with wry amusements the tete-a-tetes and endless dinners going on between I...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 18.05.2008 07:10