By Henry Akubuiro
Decades after the Europeans left the African continent as colonial masters, new players have joined the scramble for Africa. Writing on “The New Scramble for Africa” in his quasi-autobiographical book, My Public Service Journey: Issues in Public Policy Administration in Nigeria, which details his practical experience in over three decades as a civil servant, Dr. Bukar Usman evaluates the implications of the new scramble for Africa.
Usman, a former permanent secretary in the presidency, contends that the scramble for Africa has been a continuous project since the era of slave trade to the 19th century partitioning of the continent at the Berlin Conference.
Even after Africa’s political independence, which for some countries was bloody, and throughout the Cold War era, which saw the United States and the then Soviet Union leading distinct ideological blocs, the economic domination continued unabated, he says. Usman states that a new race for Africa has ensued, hot and significantly different from the old race.
The first was through the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) of the World Bank and IMF, which provided for the privatisation of public enterprises and withdrawal of subsidies even from essential commodities before they could attract foreign loans and favourable trading conditions with the Western world.
“A joint US-Europe coalition, incorporating new powers like Japan, and operating under different protocols and conventions —such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) — superintended the devastation of African economies thereby making them even more vulnerable to external control and domination,” he writes.
Also, new non-Western economic superpowers, like China, India and Brazil, were to join the scramble for Africa and have become Africa’s biggest trading partners today, as the West plays a second fiddle. Usman avers that this new scramble for Africa has been engendering conflicts across the region, from Congo DRC where coppers and diamonds have been inspiring mayhem to Niger where the battle over uranium continues to be at the roots of conflicts.
Usman points out that recent pronouncements by world economic and political leave no one in doubt that Africa is greedily eyed as the land of opportunities, as “It is being extolled as a place where the greatest economic return on investment is made.”
In this piece, Usman informs us that the global economic and political powers of the world floated the concept of “globalisation” to mask the exploitative and unbalanced nature of the current world economic order structure.
Ringing the alarm bell, he cautions: “Africa must be mindful of the disastrous effects of the old scramble for its resources in order to avoid the negative consequences of the current scramble. African leaders must ensure that these new ‘partners’ coming to ‘promote trade in Africa’ do not play one African country against another or one section against the other.”
He reminds Africans that the artificial borders created by the initial “Partition of Africa” sowed the seeds of festering wars which have continued to take a toll on human lives and resources on the continent.
He warns again: “The new scramble for Africa’s energy, natural resources, investment and contract opportunities, which has been heightened by the prevailing depressed global economy, might be reminiscent of the old scramble but it does offer Africa a choice it didn’t have in the 19th century —a choice it misused during the late 20th century. African countries are today politically independent,” while encouraging African countries to lay the rules for the new scrambles for their resources.