CORPORATE COLONIALISM OR CORPORATOCRACY

15/05/2019 #CorporateColonialism

Foreign western companies are being given mining licenses to exploit Africa’s non-renewable resources. In the process creating slave wage jobs that enable our people to take debt and drive consumption of western goods, generating a bit of tax for government coffers to enable our governments to pay back sovereign debt to foreign lenders.

Dambisa Moyo writes that some African countries see up to 30% of their revenue going to paying foreign debt which often includes colonial, infrastructure, social development, healthcare, education and military defense debts.

In return the western companies use the slave labor and resources to generate supernormal profits, which they externalize through transfer pricing, under invoicing, foreign debt repayments, dividend and profit repatriations which end up in western banks.

From here the western mines, retailers, banks and agents in Africa receive new loans and shareholder funds and the colonial exploitation cycle starts all over again just as it has been with charter companies for the past century and a half.

It’s colonialism by corporates or #corporatocracy which is a new form of colonialism and slavery driven by western corporations that exploit our resources and black labor.

In this exploitative process, employees are given just enough money to buy food from foreign owned retailers and to take loans from foreign owned financial institutions to buy western manufactured high value goods made from African resources.

This is how Africa keeps the wheels of western industry and banking turning, vastly enriching western bankers, entrepreneurs and governments which benefit from the taxes. In turn, this enables the west to continue exploiting Africa and perpetuating white supremacy.

In other words, African economies are essentially giving over their wealth, resources and future to western companies for temporary wage jobs, taxes and instant consumption. All in the while this destroys Africa’s capacity to develop, killing our ability to industrialize, weakening our governments and enriching western bankers to exploit Africa even more.

What very few Africans ask themselves is what happens when the resources are depleted, organic seeds are destroyed, the rivers are polluted and the land scarred?

An example is right now South Africa has less than 20yrs of gold and less than 10yrs of iron ore left while all their seeds are non-reproducing GMOs controlled by GURT (genetic use restriction technology). So what happens when these resources run out?

The workers will be left jobless, indebted, impoverished with depreciating assets and no food. The infrastructure will dilapidate as government runs out of money to maintain this costly infrastructure, while the environment remains damaged irreparably.

Cities that once had vibrant mines will turn into shanty towns of prostitution and drug abuse like the rust belt of America, and then we are open to what ever the west wants to use us for.

These are some of the reasons we should reassess our reengagement drive and the presence of AFRICOMM in Southern Africa.

By Rutendo Matinyarare.