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03.07.2021 Feature Article

Given Arable Land & Talents Yet Prodigal Rulers Prefer Alien Toys

Given Arable Land  Talents Yet Prodigal Rulers Prefer Alien Toys
03.07.2021 LISTEN

If you make millions or billions in Africa, where is the safest place to invest it? In this day and age, most Africans think it is better to invest it in Europe or America to protect it from the Devaluation of African currencies. This is the reason International Corporations do not invest their profits in Africa since devaluations benefit them. If it's so good for foreign corporations, it is also good for rich Africans to take their money out before it becomes Zimbabwe currency!

We can argue about Africa’s underdevelopment all we want but if Africans refuse to invest the profits they make in Africa, we cannot blame foreign corporations that have perfected and milked cheap African currencies for decades. Indeed, Multinational corporations and world billionaires search for loopholes at home and shell companies in third world countries to hide their profits. Hiding profit that could be invested, even in rich countries, is a race to the bottom.

Finally the world’s richest G-7 countries have decided to close these loopholes and make profitable companies pay their fair share at home. These are the richest countries in the world that are trying to make their most profitable corporations pay while developing countries are creating Tax Free zones at home to attract the same rogue companies.

Aliko Dangote's bold admission that most of his wealth will be invested outside to preserve his family’s fortune was no surprise. Most businesses in Africa do it as a condition for staying in business. We used to complain about foreign businesses that have been taking out their profits before and after Independence without investing significantly in Africa. We now have African businessmen and politicians impoverishing their countries to “protect” family wealth.

Right now, profits are created in Africa but redistributed outside for phantom profits that never reach the shores of African continent again. Some of us still remember Enron threatening developing countries after they were exposed for sharp fraudulent business practices. It was late Pa Steven Fajemirokun that said he had nothing against socialism but before you can redistribute profit, you have to create it first.

Enron invoked the power of American President Bill Clinton just before they went bankrupt. Similarly, Process and Industrial Developments, P&ID got a whopping $10 billion judgement awarded against Nigeria in foreign courts. Their infectious rationale is that if you want to build infrastructure, grow a civilized way of life; your countries must pay odious loans for technology stolen from one another. But Africa's future generations must be indebted forever.

This notion that you have to get out of your village to make it in life is contrary to those who made their homes attractive to get richer off slave labor. Africans cannot make home poorer by making other people's land that keeps and exploits you at the bottom of the ladder, richer. It does make sense. There is nothing wrong with adventure to an enriched environment but everything wrong with loss of control to others looking for adventure to enrich their homes.

Africans, please hear the cry of ABJECT POVERTY all over our arable land. When barren lands of China and India were starving, they heard and listened to the cries of hungry bellies of their people. Today they have significantly reduced the faces of poverty in their countries and are exporting food. Any country that is not capable of feeding its own people becomes a beggar country. This is why food that is not locally grown must not become our staple food.

Therefore, what price are African countries willing to pay to achieve the success of Cuba in Medicine, nuclear power in North Korea. Even better, what price are Africans willing to pay to achieve the economic success of Indonesia, India and South Korea. In each of the countries listed are dictatorship and democracy. Talent and profits are not only invested at home; talents and profits are imported home from Western world. As African Freedom Fighters had done.

But Kenneth Kaunda, one of the beloved African Independence fighters expressed no regrets of how the Chinese gradually captured Zambia in his BBC 2014 interview. We run away from our own God-given land flowing with abundant resources to barren lands of those who incentivize our political and business leaders to exploit us. Those unable to multiply their talents and resources lose them to glistening vanities in exchange for gold and diamond.

Japan has little natural resources but they are a world exporter using talents not greater than African talents. God created each of us with talents. There is no other land where people that are blessed with God-given talents, arable land, resources and income went in pursuit of foreign glitter as Salvation for Africans. Out of self-hate, Africans intentionally mismanaged themselves to risk money laundering violations and end up in foreign jails.

Africans stoop to be conquered. Many abandoned millions and billions in Europe and America to avoid prosecution for money laundering. No European, American or Asian would abandon millions anywhere made in their own countries, not to mention made illegally outside. Some years ago, 60 Minutes interviewed a Nigerian that made a killing on Wall Street based on researched orders he made. They refused to pay him based on weak financial backing!

Nevertheless, most of the entrepreneurs in Europe and America are immigrants or children of these immigrants. When given the same educational and enabling environment at home, they have been able to create China, Russia, Indonesia or India. Do not forget that most of these countries do not make Western Democracy a condition for development. If they had, there would be no China and Russia, the main superpower challenge to America or Europe.

Youths now believe that by hook or crook, without jobs, Mercedes Benz will be their first car! Like their leaders, they prefer schools, houses and hospitals in foreign countries. Youths also believe it and regale in self-deprecating wars against one another to vote in visionless leaders that promised them Salvation from foreign investments. They even celebrate marriages to outside cultures that disown and reject a single drop of African blood in their daughters.

Please note that these children are innocent products of circumstances that follow the examples of their leaders. Brainwashed to believe that Salvation only comes in white skins. The point here is that if the color of the skins were reversed, Africans would cherish black skins and reject their own white skins. So, it is not the skin pigmentation that matters, it is branding, subjugation and the inferiority complex that cripple arable land and talents.

Farouk Martins Aresa @oomoaresa

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