Africa

On 20th March 2023, after traveling non-stop all round the world, I returned to Dakar/Senegal where, nine years ago, I had started my trip exactly on the same day.

Since early youth, for some unknown reason, Black Africa had always been my favorite region. I loved the colors, the smiles, the joy, the scenery, the animals… just about everything in this part of the world.

At the same time, I felt sorry for the misery, the suffering, the poverty, the utter destitution one encounters here.

The fact is: Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most disadvantaged regions in the world. The crimes committed against the African people, like colonization, enslavement, exploitation, have never been atoned for.

As long as this flagrant injustice persists, there can be no peace in the world. Something has to be done, something has to change.

Both, the African people themselves and the people who had perpetrated the historical crimes against them, have to make a huge effort to correct the situation, to make amends and change things for the better.

First of all, the Africans themselves have to come together and decide that now is the right time to come up with a comprehensive solution, a concrete proposal as to how the Sub-Saharan region should succeed and prosper in the future.

In my view, there can only be one approach to this end: The whole region has to unite, politically, economically, militarily, to form one single country, with one single government and one single parliament. Internal borders can be redrawn at will, without any regard to the colonial past.

On this basis, all interested, qualified actors should work out a huge development plan for the whole region, covering every field of human needs, including education, medical services, housing, infrastructure (transport, roads, railways, industries, electricity, communication, and so on), and, above all, a secure supply of healthy food and drinking water.

Finally, it's up to the international community (and especially those Western countries that had profited the most of the colonial exploitation of Africa) to evaluate the proposed development plan and to muster the funds needed to bring the plan to fruition, through grants, loans, investments, and the like.

In a comparable case, the so-called Marshall Plan for the economic recovery of Western European countries at the end of World War II, more then 13 billion USD (equivalent to some 150 billion USD today) were spent at the time. In the case of the African Development Plan, a much larger amount will be needed to repay the debt incurred through slavery and economic exploitation.

Between the 16th and the 19th centuries, some 13 million African slaves had been shipped from Africa to the Americas, under the most horrible circumstances imaginable. I think it appropriate to evaluate the financial loss to Africa at least at some 1 million USD per enslaved person, resulting in a total of incurred damages of some 13 trillion USD. This, in my view, would be the adequate minimum amount needed to finance an African Development Plan.