African High-Speed Rail Finance Requires LaRouche Four-Power Pact

by David Cherry and Ramasimong Tsokolibane[fn_1]

June 23—The vital plan for an African Integrated High-Speed Railway Network (AIHSRN), approved by the African Union (AU) in 2014, appears to be going forward energetically. But in fact, Africa is getting only half a loaf at best. Standard gauge rails are being built, but to “save money,” they are not being built to standards permitting the high speeds that the African Union had specified. These “higher”-speed lines are not “high-speed” by any accepted standard. Or, worse, existing lines of the old colonial gauge are being rehabilitated—again because “there is not enough money.”

Yet having “enough money” is not the problem it seems to be: The principle of Hamiltonian credit—credit extended by government, on the strength of nothing but the skills of the population, and earmarked for projects sure to produce leaps in productivity—has been known in theory and practice for 200 years, even if suppressed by the business schools.

Individual African governments, however, do not have enough leverage against the British monetary system and its banks to travel this most efficient path to industrialization in the freedom of sovereignty. It is the world system that must change to favor this path, and for that, Lyndon LaRouche’s prescription for a Four Power Agreement—among China, Russia, India and the United States at least—is the practical answer, incorporating a new Bretton Woods system, very different from the one we have known. It must be, rather, the one that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt—the enemy of the British Empire and of all empire—had intended before his untimely death in 1945.

AU Vision: A High-Speed Rail Network

Railroad planners, specialists and government officials met in Kenya, April 10-11 under the aegis of the African Union Development Agency (AUDA, formerly NEPAD) to chart the way forward for construction of the African Integrated High-Speed Railway Network, a system to connect all 54 national capitals and all major economic centers on the African continent. This objective is meant be achieved by 2063.

A modern, integrated Africa-wide rail system is visionary. But the plan approved by the African Union (AU) transport ministers in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea in 2014 goes even further. It specifies a high-speed rail system—the “HSR” in AIHSRN. “High speed” is defined by the AU as a design speed (maximum speed) of at least 240 kilometers per hour (150 mph). Most trains in Africa today run on tracks of one of the old colonial narrow gauges, and most can only travel at 50 km/h (31 mph) or even less. This proposed jump from today into tomorrow is what China calls technological “leap-frogging,” and the AU has adopted the concept. Perhaps the last shall be among the first.

continue reading HERE: Source:

https://larouchepub.com/other/2019/4625-african_high_speed_rail_finance.html