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-not-reparations-forslavery-colonialism-33377f6a

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