OPEN LETTER TO COMIC RELIEF - AFRICA'S REAL ISSUES
ISSUED BY STOP ALL IMPERIALIST WARS AGAINST AFRICA AND AFRICAN
CONTACT: AFRICAN LIBERATION SUPPORT CAMPAIGN 07890 738 997 020 8674 0670
PICKET BBC TV CENTRE, WHITE CITY, FRIDAY 14 MARCH, 5pm - 7.30pm
With Red Nose Day comes a time of great sorrow, anger and frustration for
many people who are conscious of the real reasons behind the continuing
poverty, disease, death and other human indignities that blight the daily
lives of most of the world's peoples. For many of us, conscious of the
West's parasitic exploitation of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, this event
represents the pinnacle of hypocrisy, callousness and deceit. Part of the
tragedy is that many decent people have been blinded by the duplicity of
the dominant Western interests and their genuine sympathy has been
misplaced and misdirected into support for one of the biggest con schemes
in history.
STOP ALL IMPERIALIST WARS AGAINST AFRICA AND AFRICANS aligns its deepest
sympathy and expressions of sorrow for the ongoing loss of AfriCan lives as
a direct result of systematised poverty.
Our anger is a reaction to the real facts and underlying root causes which
are hidden from the general public. Further and equal frustration is caused
by the veneer of philanthropy created by European and US corporate
interests in collaboration with the so-called "aid" and "charity"organisations.
We applaud the general public who give their money. Many will testify to
the integrity, devotion and goodwill of staff working in various charities.
But wittingly and otherwise, many individuals and organisations partake in
a fraud of gigantic proportions against humanity by electing not to tackle,
discuss and expose the root causes of the poverty in Africa and elsewhere
in the global south.
This global system of poverty is mainly a direct result of European and US
capitalist interests. The governments of these countries, acting in the
interests of corporate kleptomaniacs and imperialism, continue to
orchestrate proxy wars throughout Africa. They continuously use structures
like the United Nations, World Trade Organisation, International Monetary
Fund and World Bank, along with a network of neo-colonial collaborators -
for example, African rulers - to systematically implement policies which
perpetuate economic impotence, political instability and wholesale and
sustained poverty amongst the vast majority of Afrikan peoples.
Many will rightfully applaud the efforts and money raised by Lenny Henry
and others. But the overseers and effective executives responsible for
these charities often act as fronts for the most scheming exploiters of
African resources, i.e., land, labour and minerals. For example, the World
Bank has documented its strategy of using charities to back up its control
of African economies. The recent farce, the UN World Summit for Sustainable
Development held in Johannesburg in 2002, further highlights the true
nature of the dominant groups of the West and their attitude towards
dispelling poverty in Africa. The truth is that it was really a summit to
sustain corporate advantage in true imperialist manner. Furthermore, the
fact that pharmaceutical industries attempt to stop production of cheaper
anti-retroviral drugs in South Africa dispels any notion of sympathy
towards Africans afflicted with Aids and HIV.
The fact that Lenny Henry and others do not seek to understand and expose
the vested interests in an under-developed Africa is fundamental to this
veneer created of Western charity and goodwill. Along with media
complicity, it perpetuates a myth of white supremacy and African
backwardness aided and abetted by unpatriotic sentiment and mass
embezzlement on the part of the thoroughly colonised 'indigenous' Africanelite.
We recommend charities devote their time too to exposing, denouncing and
lobbying the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity to stop them
from their insensitive actions. The personnel of these charities should
investigate further so that at a later date ignorance will not be seen as a
defence, like at Nuremburg.
Africans at the grassroots organisations have been struggling against the
conditions imposed by the Western governments, international financial
organisations and multinational corporations in collusion with the
neo-colonial governments. But these grassroots groups do not receive media
coverage, let alone support. In this regard, we want to notify everyone
about the African Social Forum, which brings together grassroots forces
fighting against Western-dictated neo-liberalist policies. It thus
represents an alternative to the African Union and its NEPAD.
The African Social Forum dramatises the real failure of the West in Afrika.
The African Social Forum is a democratic grouping of the genuine
representatives of the African peoples who have decided to search for
solutions to their own problems. It is self-reliant and self-determining.
The attitude of this group is: 'With our own direct action we shall relate
with the rest of the world on our own terms'. The attitude of the West has
always been diametrically opposed: 'We will tell you your problems and
solve them for you'. The African puppet governments, often put in place and
always maintained by Western powers, have fully bought into this recipe for
eternal dependency.
Those who wish to help Africa ought to know that under this current
arrangement the West creams off billions from Africa each year, helped by
unequal terms of trade and other undemocratic, immoral and often bullying
means. But this is kept very, very quiet. The West then 'gives' African
puppets a few million in 'aid' - with appropriate 'conditionalities'
designed to provide work for Western 'experts' and industries - and
everyone hears their very loud shouts about this 'philanthropy'. After 500
years of Western medicine this Afrika is still ill. It is time for all
those who genuinely wish to help this patient to consider whether the
physician and his (sic) medicine are not really at least part of the
problem.