From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Africa Needs Accountable Leaders, Not Reparations   
   By Ebenezer Obadare, Sept. 28, 2023, WSJ   
   None of the African heads of state who addressed the U.N. General Assembly   
   last week held back on the inequities they see in the contemporary world   
   order. And none punched harder than Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo.   
   Taking aim at what he calls “   
   the historical injustices that have fashioned the structures of the world,”   
   Mr. Akufo-Addo lamented that “much of Europe and the United States” was   
   built using “the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and   
   horrors” of the trans-   
   Atlantic slave trade and colonization.   
      
   The Ghanaian president’s solution to this injustice is for Europe and the   
   U.S. to pay reparations to victimized African countries. What Africa needs   
   instead is moral accountability from its leaders and honesty among its   
   intellectuals about what the    
   trans-Atlantic slave trade entailed.   
      
   Mr. Akufo-Addo isn’t interested in money for money’s sake; he acknowledges   
   that “no amount of money will ever make up for the horrors.” He believes   
   it would help make a moral point “that evil was perpetrated, that millions   
   of productive    
   Africans were snatched from the embrace of our continent, and put to work in   
   the Americas and the Caribbean without compensation for their labor.”   
      
   The idea that Africa was dealt a bad hand at inception, and that Europe and   
   America’s wealth comes from their malign impoverishment of the continent, is   
   standard in African political and historical commentary. The demand for   
   reparations tends to bubble    
   up whenever frustration with the continent’s economic plight reaches fever   
   pitch.   
      
   It’s a dubious theory of Western development to say the least, but more   
   unsettling is Mr. Akufo-Addo’s contention that “it cannot be easy to build   
   confident and prosperous societies from nations that, for centuries, had their   
   natural resources    
   looted and their peoples traded as commodities.” Every African should be   
   appalled by the notion that the continent can’t establish a modern society   
   because Africans are constitutionally unable to overcome their past. And they   
   should be offended by    
   the implication that financial compensation is needed to make the continent   
   whole.   
      
   While Mr. Akufo-Addo is right that the slave trade was a “grand inhuman   
   enterprise,” his portrayal of it as a one-sided productivity suck grossly   
   misinterprets the historical facts—namely, forgetting the role of African   
   slave traders. Not only did    
   these entrepreneurs accumulate enormous wealth on the back of an evil   
   enterprise, but history shows that many refused to let go even after moral   
   sentiment in Europe began to turn against slavery. The trans-Atlantic slave   
   trade was exactly that: a trade,    
   one in which, unfortunately, there were willing agents on both sides. If Mr.   
   Akufo-Addo is genuinely interested in confronting that historical evil, he   
   will have to begin with Africa’s partial culpability, an ugly fact that   
   scholarship has copiously    
   documented but from which political commentators often shy away.   
      
   More insidious than the demand for reparations is the underlying sentiment   
   that the outside world owes Africa a living. This ideology of victimhood is of   
   a piece with many African countries’ continued reliance on external   
   financial support, including    
   from countries with a fraction of Africa’s population and natural resources.   
   Mr. Akufo-Addo’s speech encapsulates this mentality, which studiously avoids   
   accountability.   
      
   If African leaders stopped pointing accusing fingers and instead looked in the   
   mirror, they’d grasp the sad truth that what hobbles Africa isn’t   
   colonialism’s legacy but irresponsible contemporary leadership. About the   
   same time that Mr. Akufo-Addo    
   was expounding on the evils of the slave trade and demanding reparations, his   
   Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame, president of his country since 2000 and de   
   facto leader since the end of the genocide in 1994, announced his intention to   
   run for another term.   
      
   This hogging of power, and the institutional stasis that it invariably   
   engenders, is one of the main reasons African countries trail in crucial   
   human-development indexes. When Mr. Akufo-Addo laments “illicit financial   
   outflows” from Africa, estimated    
   at more than $88 billion a year, it seems to have eluded him that much of that   
   is cash bilked by African kleptocracies and stashed in offshore accounts.   
      
   The Ghanaian president says he has the authority of the African Union to hold   
   a global conference on reparations for the slave trade in Accra in November.   
   This jamboree will yield nothing but undignified self-pity—the opposite of   
   the introspection that    
   the continent needs.   
      
   Mr. Obadare is a senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign   
   Relations.   
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/africa-needs-accountable-leaders-no   
   -reparations-forslavery-colonialism-33377f6a   
      
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