Make Africa an Economic Powerhouse

LAROUCHE SOUTH AFRICA

www.larouchesouthafrica.com

Schiller Institute Conference on the Internet, April 25-26, 2020

Address of Ramasimong Phillip Tsokolibane, Leader of LaRouche South Africa, to the Conference, published here on the occasion of Africa Day 2020

Make Africa an Economic Powerhouse To Benefit All Mankind

The video of this address may be seen here. The entire conference is here.

Africa is a huge continent, more than three times the size of the United States of America. If this continent, with its vast natural resources and young population were allowed to realize its full potential, it could become an economic powerhouse, helping to drive human progress throughout our planet and beyond. What we need is help in realizing that potential for Africa and all of mankind.

We ask for this, not because we are now, for the most part poor, oppressed, and threatened with genocide by this virus, but because it is our birthright, our inalienable right as human beings, to be entitled to freely develop our creative potentials and to have economies that make that possible.

Africa has been victimized by a global order of usury that first took our people as slaves, and then imposed a slavish colonial order that kept us as slaves to that order. And then, when the empires were forced by the power of the great American President Franklin D. Roosevelt to grant us nominal political freedom, the old imperialists, led by the British Empire, saw to it that the continent was kept in a state of economic underdevelopment, and enslaved to that globalist debt system of the City of London and Wall Street, and its International Monetary Fund thugs and enforcers.

But despite what has been arrayed against Africa, there have been pockets of real development and prospects for even greater achievements, most recently assisted by the efforts of President Xi Jinping of China, and his Belt and Road Initiative.

For the plan of development to be implemented, my country, South Africa, must play a pivotal role. We have the only full-set economy on the continent, and unfortunately one of the very few such countries on this planet.

Our continent has had its share of visionary leaders, who fought for, and often died for, their visions of African development. These included Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt; Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, the father of the Non-Aligned Movement; Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal; Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso; and John Garang in South Sudan, who studied modern mechanized agricultural development in the United States.

But the loudest and most consistent voice outside of Africa calling for economic development, and fighting for a program and means to accomplish this, was the late leader of our movement, Lyndon LaRouche. Both he and his wife, Helga, are the true friends of all Africans, not only because of their opposition to all forms of exploitation and imperialism, but because they “kicked against the pricks” [Acts of the Apostles 9:5] for the right of every African and every person, to realize their true creative human potential.

For the LaRouches, progress is not measured merely in miles of high-speed rail lines built, but for what such development means for the future of all mankind, realizing their human potential. There is no dollar figure that can ever be assigned to a single human life.

So, what must be done, right now, to help Africa and Africans?

First, we must throw aside this collapsing globalist monetarist order, and replace it with a just, new world economic order. This requires the stability of a gold reserve-based system of fixed currency values that we had under the old Bretton Woods system, but which was prevented by the existence and sovereignty-crushing power of the IMF.

Instead, we need a system that pivots around an International Development Bank that would emit large amounts of low-interest credit directed towards development programs in Africa, and elsewhere.

Second, we need to put the existing financial system and its debts through what amounts to a bankruptcy reorganization. While that takes place, we need a full-stop debt moratorium, just as Mrs. LaRouche consistently has called for: No payments to the banks in this dying system!

Third, we will need help in fighting the pandemic. This must come in emergency help, with the building of needed hospital beds and related infrastructure.

Fourth, I strongly support Helga’s call for the development of a global health security system, the creation of which must be a top global priority, to be funded by the new International Development Bank.

To accomplish this, we will all need to change the way we think about ourselves and our relations to each other. LaRouche has said, we need to truly believe and act on what Christ teaches us in the Sermon on the Mount: We can only survive if we truly remember that we are our brother’s keeper. We each have something unique to contribute to the progress of mankind.

Many of our nations, including my own, have highly-developed and active space programs. The day has come when we must say, “Why shouldn’t an African be among the first people on Mars?”

We must understand the enemy that we are fighting, how evil they are. And Mr. LaRouche said, citing Ephesians 6, verse 12, that we are fighting not against flesh and blood, but we are fighting an evil system. Our job must be to always fight to be righteous and true.

Source: LaRouche South Africa

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