President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has demanded that the Western world agree to pay reparations for those countries affected by the transatlantic slave trade.
“No amount of money will ever make up for the horrors, but it would make the 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 labour,” President Akufo-Addo said.
Taking his turn to deliver Ghana’s national statement at the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, Akufo-Addo said the time has come for Europe and the United States to acknowledge that the vast wealth they enjoy was harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and centuries of colonial exploitation.
“Maybe we should also admit 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,” he said.
Time for reparation
President Akufo-Addo said the world has been unwilling and unable to confront the realities of the consequences of the slave trade.
However, he noted, this is changing gradually and it is time to bring the subject of reparations firmly to the fore.
“Granted that current generations are not the ones that engaged in the slave trade; but that grand inhuman enterprise was state-sponsored and deliberate, and its benefits are clearly interwoven with the present-day economic architecture of the nations that designed and executed it,” he said.
“If there is any hesitation in some minds about the paying of reparations, it is worth considering the fact that, when slavery was abolished, the slave owners were compensated for the loss of the slaves, because the human beings were labelled as property, deemed to be commodities.
“Surely, this is a matter that the world must confront, and can no longer ignore. The [African Uion] has authorised Ghana to hold a global conference on the issue in November in Accra.”
Touching on the vexed matter of illegal financial flows from Africa, he referred to the report of a panel, chaired by the highly respected former South African president Thabo Mbeki, on this subject.
The report states that Africa is losing, annually, more than US$88 billion a year through illicit financial outflows.
“Yes, those monies, too, must be returned to the continent,” President Akufo-Addo said. “It is difficult to understand why the recipient countries are comfortable about retaining such funds, and are happy to call those countries from whom the monies are taken as corrupt.”
Damaging outflows
President Akufo-Addo told the General Assembly that he believes a joint task force of the African Union Commission and the OECD Secretariat, under the auspices of the UN, should be charged to find ways of stopping these damaging outflows of capital from the African continent.
On the matter of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the president said that, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ghana, like many other countries, had been making progress on the 17 SDGs and had good reason to believe she would achieve the 2030 target.
“Today, the picture we have on our performance is not very bright. Most of the 21 targets designated for achievement by 2020 have not been met, and we are not on track to achieve many other targets by 2030,” he said.
Indeed, according to the 2023 SDG report, the world is on track to achieve just 12% of the SDGs targets.
“Progress on 50% of the targets is weak. The most disappointing part is that we have stalled or retrogressed more than 30% of the targets,” Akufo-Addo said. “We need to accelerate action on the entire project.”
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