At US-Africa Leaders Summit, master and slave get together

By Gugulethu Hughes

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.

No group of politicians have mastered the art of administering fellatio to imperialists than African politicians. From being transported in a single bus to attend the funeral of head colonizer Queen Elizabeth to converging in London with Bullingdon Club boy Boris Johnson, African leaders are a curse. 

They excel tremendously in prostituting the individual countries they administer more than improving the economic conditions of the people they govern. The latest getaway for the African apparatchiks was the US-Africa Leaders Summit held in Washington DC from December 13-15, 2022.

In inviting the African leaders, POTUS had a list of agendas. These included fostering new economic engagement, reinforcing US-Africa commitment to human rights, mitigating the impact of Covid-19 and future pandemics, promoting food security, advancing peace and security, and responding to the climate crisis. US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was quoted as saying, “Africa is a major geopolitical force. It is one that has shaped our past, it’s shaping our present, and it will shape our future.”

The US-Africa Leaders Summit actually came at the back of Anthony Blinken’s visit to three African countries; South Africa, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of Congo. On the other hand, African leaders went to Washington as servants of POTUS, and not as invitees for discussions on mutual collaboration and engagement.

At the end of the Summit, the US government was able to produce outcomes of the meeting based on the US agenda. The only visible outcome for the African leaders was their return back home after committing to push the continent further down the rabbit hole.

The United States of America’s interest in Africa is not about development of the continent but rather enabling the US to benefit from Africa’s resources. When Anthony Blinken visited South Africa in August 2022, his agenda was trade and investment, public health, climate, and water, etc. For Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo, the agenda was about peace and security.

In 2021, Anthony Blinken visited Kenya with his agenda being regional peace and security in the Horn of Africa, clean energy, food security, protecting the environment, and supporting Kenya elections in 2022. Blinken’s agenda for Nigeria in 2021 was climate change, China, and human rights. When Anthony Blinken met with Senegalese President Macky Sall in 2022, the agenda was cooperation on climate change and security.

The US-Africa Leaders Summit agenda was therefore a culmination of engagements the USA previously embarked on. The countries not visited yet are not strategic enough to warrant a budget at the moment. Therefore, the colonial administrators in those countries, save for Eritrea, Mali, and Burkina Faso, can be managed by the first-tier colonial countries.

What is now important is to link the countries previously visited by Anthony Blinken with the overall agenda of the US-Africa Leaders Summit. In the area of public health, South Africa is a shining beacon in spreading legs for US corporations like Johnson & Johnson. That company collaborated with Aspen Pharmacare in setting up a Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing plant and distribution center for both the African and international market. 

Aspen also received funding worth $30 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop vaccines for Africa. The Gates Foundation also funds a number of South African organizations including regulatory ones like the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority. It is therefore unsurprising that SAHPRA approved Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccines in South Africa. This ensured profits for American pharmaceutical companies while Russian and China manufacturers failed the test.

South African pharmaceutical company Biovac formed a consortium with nine development partners to expand its manufacturing capacity and enable production of Pfizer vaccines for Covid-19 and other diseases. Before backing down, Pfizer demanded that the South African government “puts up sovereign assets guaranteeing indemnity against the cost of any future legal cases.” Nonetheless, Pfizer still got indemnified in the vaccine deal with South Africa and still managed to sell the vaccine to the SA government at prices higher than the other markets.

At the African Union, South African President was made the influencer in chief for Africa Region lockdown regulations and vaccine mandates. Pfizer also has a strong presence in the South African pharmaceutical industry. The USA, together with the UK and the EU, also managed to convince South African kleptocrat Cyril Ramaphosa to agree to a first-of-its-kind $8 billion climate finance deal. The deal involved South Africa abandoning coal as a source of energy. This is ironic, given some of the financiers increased their imports of South African coal after their fallout with Russia. 

In Kenya, Moderna inked a memorandum of understanding with the Kenyan government to construct its first mRNa vaccine manufacturing facility in Africa costing $500 million. On the election front, America chose William Ruto as their candidate of choice. He later emerged the victor. Since then, Ruto has been on a trip to the USA and held countless calls promising to safeguard Washington’s interests in the Horn of Africa.

Ruto is also on a drive to expedite the mass rollout of GMOs in the Kenyan food supply chain and is supported by Bill Gates. Gates last year announced a $7 billion fund for African countries to “accelerate progress in health, agriculture, gender equality, and other critical areas.” So excited was William Ruto about the promises made to him by Bill Gates that he justified robust introduction of GMOs in Kenya by arguing that he has not developed breasts from consuming GMOs. Like South Africa, Kenya is also handing over energy generation to Independent Power Producers, the highest level of state privatization.

In Nigeria, US Special Envoy on Climate Change John Kerry made an announcement that Nigeria would receive a share of $12 Billion from the Joe Biden Emergency Program for Adaptation and Resilience. The US is going to fund Nigeria’s transition to wind and solar energies. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is spending a fortune in funding Nigerian primary healthcare which includes having the country as a testing ground for vaccinations. 

In 2020, Nigeria received $1 million from the Gates Foundation to aid in the Covid-19 response. Nigeria is also one of the biggest recipients of United States’ Agency for International Development donations in Africa. The soon-to-be opened Dangote Petroleum Refinery in Nigeria has got the United States Trade and Development Agency as one of its financiers.

In Rwanda and DRC, the USA is playing the two countries against each other. At the heart of it all is the cobalt in Congo which accounts for 70% of global supply. The US is seeking to promote peace and security in the rich Eastern region between the two countries’ borders. At the same time, they’re allegedly backing the activities of the M23 rebels while calling them out in the media.

If the USA was committed to peace and security, it would long have used its fake morality to topple the Rwandan stooge Paul Kagame. What is clear now is that Kagame’s administration owes its existence to the USA and Europe benefitting from sponsored DRC instability. Rwanda is Africa’s biggest exporter of coltan, a mineral that the DRC accounts for 70% of global supply.

Some of the biggest beneficiaries of DRC cobalt/coltan are US companies like Google, Dell, Apple, and Tesla who are fueling child labor in the DRC mines. The DRC is also the country where the USA got the uranium used for the atomic bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The bad environmental and social conditions left by UA uranium mining activities in Shinkolobwe Mine still affect the livelihoods of residents in the area.

In Ethiopia, the USA is using World Health Organization Director Dr. Tedros to cause instability and war in the Tigray region by enabling TPLF rebels. Ironically, the Horn of Africa is listed by the Congressional Research Service as the number one recipient of US funding for the enhancement of peace and security, yet it is the most unstable region in sub-Saharan Africa.

In Senegal, the USA is using the Senegalese president to monitor and manage the Malian and Burkina Faso presidents who are cutting ties with France while embracing Russia. In Sudan, during the Obama administration, the USA managed to enable a civil war which saw the oil-rich South Sudan secede from Khartoum (North Sudan) which has the bulk of underground oil logistics mechanisms. This was a perfect condition for a lifetime civil war, all created by a country that purports to stand for human rights and peace.

Libya is today a pariah state thanks to the USA and NATO fueling and funding a war which led to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s assassination. In the words of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in reference to Libya, “We came, we saw, and he died…”

The USA slapped Zimbabwe with economic sanctions as punishment for embarking on a land reform and redistribution exercise. Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF and World Bank are used by the USA to keep Africa in debt through structural adjustment programs and predatory loans.

The US has a presence in all 55 African countries through its state institutions, multinational corporations, and non-governmental organizations. Through this cluster, the country influences government policies and “electoral outcomes.” Djibouti, Kenya, Niger, Cameroon, and Egypt are home to USA military bases in Africa. In 2019, The United States Africa Command, also known as Africom, produced a comprehensive list of all US army bases with both an enduring and non-enduring footprint in Africa. In recent years, the USA has also been accused of setting up a Southern Africa military base in Botswana. 

Washington has in the past created policies and duped African countries into being signatories to the impoverishment of Africa. The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) was established by the Clinton administration. The act sought to offer member African countries duty-free access to the USA market. But in reality, western conglomerates own and control the flow of Africa resources and enjoy the export benefits, while the USA dumps waste in Kenya.

In 2018, the USA launched Prosper Africa which seeks to increase US investment in Africa. In April 2022, the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act passed the House of Representatives by a huge margin. This bill gives Washington powers to punish African countries that are seen to be having good relations with the Russian Federation.

Just like the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade had African corroborators who viewed prosperity through self-aggrandizement, the USA still uses the same modus operandi. One key stooge responsible for advising the USA on how to best violate Africa is Dr. Landry Signe, a World Economic Forum protégé from Cameroon. Dr. Signe forms a formidable USA force together with other carefully selected nonwhites. Those include Florizelle Liser, President and CEO of Corporate Council on Africa, and Aubrey Hruby, the Africa Center Atlantic Council senior fellow. At the U.S. Trade and Investment in Africa | United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health Policy in June 2021, the trio made a stellar performance in prostituting Africa. Dr. Signe perhaps exhibited the highest level of coonery when he suggested that African countries cannot wait to be flooded by the US economic phallus. Dr. Signe is also a World Economic Forum agenda contributor.

What emerged from the subcommittee hearing on Africa is that the USA government sought to understand the level of Chinese penetration in the market and how it can formulate counter strategies so that it maintains its role as an authority across Africa.

At the closing of the US-Africa Leaders Summit, the White House released a brief outlining its goals in Africa. They included things like fostering open societies, delivering democratic and security dividends, advancing pandemic recovery and economic opportunity, supporting conservation, and energy transition. Existing US activities in these areas provide enough evidence of a country seeking to undermine African people while gobbling up African resources.

At the Summit, The Zambian and DRC colonial administrators were made to sign Memorandums of Understanding granting the US government control of the cobalt and copper supply chains. While the United States gets African roses, the continent only gets to keep the thorns.