Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

In the June 1, 2005 Guardian, Leigh and Pallister have the headline - Revealed: the new scramble for Africa.

A new "scramble for Africa" is taking place among the world's big powers, who are tapping into the continent for its oil and diamonds.

Tony Blair is pushing hard for African debt relief agreements in the run-up to the G8 summit in Scotland in July. But while sub-Saharan Africa is the object of the west's charitable concern, billions of pounds' worth of natural resources are being removed from it.

A Guardian investigation beginning today reveals that instead of enriching often debt-ridden countries, some big corporations are accused by campaigners of facilitating corruption and provoking instability - so much so that organisations such as Friends of the Earth talk of an "oil curse".

The deals are being made between transnational corporations and whatever political powers they can get to sell out their people. From British Gas in Equatorial New Guinea, to a private bank (LIB) in Liberia, to Chinese providing military support in Chad and the Sudan, the resource wars of Africa are on. Of course, they have been "on" for a very long time. That's what the colonization of Africa was about. Now the power moves largely through corporate interfaces with the backing of national influence of the US Britain, China and others.

Leigh wrote a separate article in the June 2, 2005 Guardian - A rich country being stripped of its wealth. In it he states"... it (Equatorial Guinea) is currently exporting $4.5bn worth (about £2.5bn) a year. Yet such an astonishing bonanza appears to have done most of the country's citizens no good. The IMF reported bluntly in May: "Unfortunately, this wealth has not yet led to measurable improvements in living conditions.""

Meanwhile oil is not the only resource of interest. It is gold in the Congo that is "fueling slaughter and rape."

Would the demand for resources go down is each diamond dripped blood, or each fuel pump had a corpse gracing it's casing? Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. There is lots of discussion in various sectors about the coming possibilities of "resource wars." I believe they are already happening, and have been for quite some time. The question is do we support the processes that keep them running? Do we push our governments to give aid to nations we (via corporations) are stripping, thereby supplementing (or perhaps assuaging anger) at what the true cost of hegemony is?

Just as in the US we have facilitated declining wages for workers, and not forced employers to provide health care, then the tax payers provide what corporate employers do not - supplementing their bottom line. In Africa, Latin and South America, Central Asia, people die daily from the conflicts to control and exploit their resources, while governments, NGOs and International Organizations argue about plans to end world poverty. Let's be honest and let's be real. If the people got the benefit of the resources being removed from their lands, then there wouldn't be a poverty issue, or an epidemic issue.