It appears we still have unfinished business from the liberation struggle

By Ayo Akinfe

[1] Do you know that between 1960 and 1995, Nigeria spent over $61bn to fight apartheid, more than any other country in the world. This was supposed to be an investment in the future of our continent but alas, typically, we have just wasted that money. Since the end of apartheid in 1994, Nigeria has failed to come up with a coherent pan-African roadmap

[2] On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill emancipating enslaved people in Washington. To ease the effects of this on the slave owners, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act paid those loyal to the Union up to $300 for every enslaved person freed. Did Nigeria ever request that South Africa be compensated for apartheid?

[3] If every black South African had been paid $300 as the Washington DC slave owners, they would have been able to get some vocational training and would not be engaging in xenophobic pogroms against fellow Africans today. Just imagine how much would have been generated if that money had gone into a fund

[4] British slave owners too were compensated following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. A John Austin, for instance, owned 415 slaves and got compensation of £20,511, a sum worth nearly £17m today. Obviously, the poor slaves got nothing. They basically had to start from scratch. Most of the English aristocrats with stiff upper lips you see around to day owe their wealth to the proceeds of slavery. It is these same people who hate the EU and chant Brexit because they are forced to compete with other Europeans on an equal footing

[5] Some of the figures paid out are staggering. George Orwell's great-grandfather, Charles Blair for instance, received £4,442, equal to £3m today, for the 218 slaves he owned. Do you know that the British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that owned slaves for the loss of their "property" when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. This figure represented a staggering 40% of the Treasury's annual spending budget and in today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn

[6] A total of £10m went to slave-owning families in the Caribbean and Africa, while the other half went to absentee owners living in Britain. John Gladstone, the father of 19th-century prime minister William Gladstone received £106,769 (modern equivalent £83m) for the 2,508 slaves he owned across nine plantations

[7] As a continent, Africa did not receive compensation, reparations or even an apology for the slave trade, colonialism, imperialism or apartheid. To add insult to injury, we are handed that insulting handout called foreign aid, which is only designed to keep us impoverished. Africa does not need or want aid, what we demand is the transfer of capital, skills and technology to enable us compete on an equal footing

[8] In South Africa today, the urban youth are attacking fellow Africans simply because they do not have the skills, expertise or capital to compete with Somalian, Nigerian, Ghanaian, Kenyan or Mozambican artisans, petty traders and small businesses. Nigeria should have seen this coming and requested that financial compensation was part of the post-apartheid deal in 1994. No matter how many policemen you deploy in South Africa or how much you educate the masses, xenophobic attacks will continue for as long as poverty reigns. The bony hands of hunger makes people do unreasonable things, including attack those who fought for their liberation

[9] Going forward what do we want? It is time we tell the World Economic Forum that every G7 nation must contribute 5% of its gross domestic product (GDP) to foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa. If Britain can pay 40% of its budget to slave owners, it can grant its private companies tax rebates so they invest in Africa

[10] I for one find it totally unacceptable that companies like Peugeot, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Cadbury's, Tate & Lyle, Phillips, Nissan, Toyota, General Motors, Ford, Microsoft, Siemens, etc do not have at least 10 manufacturing plants each in Africa. Buhari and Ramaphosa, it is up to the two of you to complete the unfinished business of the liberation struggle!