This article appears in the July 14, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
AT PARIS FINANCING SUMMIT
Ramaphosa to West: Invest To Electrify Africa, Then We Can Talk Climate Change
[Print version of this article]
July 6—At the closing session of the phony June 22-23 Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris, South African President Ramaphosa told the assembled Western dignitaries that many promises have been made to Africa, but they have not been kept. We no longer believe you. Hundreds of millions of Africans have no electricity, he said. If the West were to invest to electrify the continent, then we could discuss your proposed worldwide climate-change tax.
Participants in the conference had been told that, because of the climate change threat, “we” need a global tax of at least $1 trillion per year, every year through 2030.
In his speech, Ramaphosa said 600 million Africans (40% of all Africans) still have no electricity, even though Africa has the resources to have abundant electricity. He said the Grand Inga Dam project near the mouth of the Congo River would generate sufficient electricity for 12 to 15 African countries. This is a project that has been on the drawing boards for years. Denis Sasso Nguesso, the President of the Republic of the Congo, had already spoken of the Grand Inga project—in which South Africa has long had an interest—in his address to the conference. Ramaphosa said,
Generating electricity and building power stations on the Inga dam is the most important.… Let’s get that done, and then we will be convinced that you are serious with the promises that you make.
That project had an estimated price tag of $80 billion ten years ago, and it may cost $120 billion or more today. The plan for Grand Inga comprises eight dams. Inga I and II have been built and need rehabilitation. The eight combined will yield 44,000 MW—twice the output of China’s famed Three Gorges Dam—with a new transmission network that will distribute electricity to the four sub-Saharan regional electricity power pools. The Zambian copper belt mines will benefit, and so will the rich mines in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that produce lithium, cobalt, copper, coltan, tin, tungsten, tantalum, radium, uranium, gold, and diamonds. Modern mining consumes a good deal of electricity. But contracts can be written to ensure that homes, schools, hospitals, farms, and factories are served.
Hydro power is not nearly as good a choice as nuclear, but it served Ramaphosa’s purposes in Paris.
African Leaders’ New Approach
The Western leaders know that Ramaphosa’s offer is one that they can only refuse. (“If we give ‘them’ electricity, they will start to industrialize. How will that help our agenda to deindustrialize and depopulate the world?”) These leaders also know that Russia has proposed to “light up the African continent.” At the BRICS Summit, July 27, 2018, Russian President Putin had said, “Russia is planning to step up its assistance in development of national energy in African states,” with oil, gas, and nuclear projects. And this is happening.
Never—ever—has an African leader spoken so bluntly to an assembly that included leaders of Western governments such as U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, French President Macron, and German Chancellor Scholz, and the heads of the IMF, World Bank, U.S. Department of the Treasury, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. Never has an African leader put the governments of the Anglo-American axis—and that includes the European Union—in a corner like this.
President Ramaphosa did not stand alone. The presidents of Zambia and Kenya had also spoken in very strong terms, and all three were backed up by the presence of the presidents of Egypt and the Republic of Congo. Recall that the African Peace Mission to Kiev and Moscow in mid-June had included the four presidents of South Africa, Egypt, Zambia, and Republic of Congo, and three others.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was prominent among the Ibero-American leaders present. He tore up his prepared speech after having conversations with African leaders in Paris, and instead spoke about poverty and growing inequality as problems that the right investments can solve. Lula said:
If we don’t discuss this issue of inequality, and if we don’t give it as much priority as the climate issue, we can have a very good climate and people will continue to die of hunger in many countries….
I learned of a plan drawn up by the African Union, called IFAD [the International Fund for Agricultural Development]. It was a plan that anticipated $360 billion in investment for infrastructure throughout the African continent. If the developed world had decided to finance companies to build the infrastructure needs of that plan, Africa would have already made a leap in the quality of its infrastructure.
Yesterday we heard the President of Congo talking about the Congo River … sufficient for building at least three Itaipus, our [Brazil’s] largest hydroelectric plant; but there aren’t any, because there is no money and no financing. We need to stop, at the international level, proselytizing with resources. “Ah, I will help this little thing here, this little thing there,” when in fact we need to make a qualitative leap. And make investments in structural things which change the life of countries. This is why I am optimistic about the creation of the BRICS Bank.
Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema said that “Zambia was used, more or less, like a guinea pig” by western powers.
Before we talk about financing, more financing, new financing, you cannot expect a poor person to carry an additional burden.... Poverty actually exacerbates the climate change mitigation measures.... For us as a global community to mobilize resources—yes, but these resources must be invested to help grow our economies.
Hichilema praised and thanked China for its generosity with development funds offered at 1% interest.
Kenyan President William Ruto rejected the idea of any proposed global tax monies being controlled by the World Bank or IMF, “because at IMF and World Bank you have the final say, we have no say. We want another organization of equals.... You are not hearing us!”
‘Mutiny’ of the Global South
While President Ramaphosa’s declaration of independence and the supporting chorus of voices reverberated throughout Africa and the world, South African ministers continued to spread the good news in other fora. Minister of International Relations Naledi Pandor—famous for her dictum that “Africa will not be bullied”—was in Kinshasa for the July 4 ministerial meeting of the Bi-National Commission of South Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where she promoted African industrialization. In addressing the commission, she said in part,
We must manufacture in the DRC, in South Africa, in Ghana, in Togo, and sell within Africa. Wherever we [may] find ourselves, we become productive and we change our condition.… Everybody is running after the rare minerals resources of the DRC, but they are not establishing factories in the DRC. Don’t sign any agreement, if production is not to happen here. (Applause.) We must refuse. We must ensure that value addition—beneficiation—happens within Africa.…
The time has come for South Africa and the DRC to work at changing our condition, changing our history…. There will be much opposition. So, the challenge is, can we work together—honestly and faithfully? If we can do that, we will change our condition. (Applause.) But, if we allow others to divide us, to direct us as to what should suit us, we will never achieve these ambitions…. Our pan-African ideal and our solidarity ask us to pose difficult questions to ourselves as to what good we are making out of the wealth of the nations of Africa. How do we industrialize? How should we manufacture? How do we create greater opportunity for our people?
And South Africa’s Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, Gwede Mantashe—who has steadfastly championed nuclear power and his country’s continuing use of coal—told South Africa’s Black Business Council Summit June 30,
We must never allow ourselves to be encircled by the developed nations who fund lobbyists to pit our country’s developmental needs against their own self-serving protection of the environment. Our country deserves an opportunity to transition at a pace and scale determined by its citizens.
The outcome of the Paris summit must also be seen on the larger, worldwide canvas. European financial analyst Alex Krainer sees its world impact as profound. He wrote, in a June 29 posting on his TrendCompass blog,
For the first time in centuries, nations of the world have a choice. A mutiny of the global South and abandonment of the western debt servitude risks blowing out much of the collateral that’s underpinning the already collateral-starved western financial system. These tectonic shifts will almost inevitably have an earth-shattering impact on western capital markets over the coming years.
The West Will Not Easily Accept Defeat
Seen from Krainer’s perspective, it is easy to understand that the Anglo-American forces that lead the West are not about to accept defeat. It should come as no surprise that the African leaders involved in the new course are facing harassment and even death threats.
While President Ramaphosa was leading the African Peace Initiative in mid-June, he was subject to a security-stripping operation—involving NATO member-countries Italy, Poland, and Hungary—that prevented the plane carrying most of his security team from reaching him.
An incitement to assassinate Minister Mantashe came ten days later in South Africa. A published writer and Boksburg resident, Nicole Barlow, responded to a June 25 Sunday Times (South Africa) story about Mantashe having addressed a trade union meeting in Boksburg by tweeting, “We missed an opportunity to do a Chris Hani on him.” The influential Chris Hani, General Secretary of the South African Communist Party, was assassinated in 1993.
Barlow may not have been the sole author of the tweet.
Then on June 28, The Daily Maverick published an attack on Mantashe—the minister most responsible for reducing South Africa’s rolling blackouts—titled, “Teflon Gwede Mantashe appears to lead a charmed life despite his frequent (deliberate?) missteps.” In many cases, the preparation for an assassination includes intense defamation in the media. Mantashe has gotten his share in recent months. But this article went further. It opens with a head-and-shoulders photo of Mantashe with a red arrow superimposed on each side, one pointing to his temple and the other pointing just below the ear. Wetworks stringers (and security experts) know how to read these signals.
