Immorality of African debt

I live in a small village in Northwestern Kenya, and up to the time I am writing this piece, my fellow village mates are not aware that Kenya, my own motherland, is paying a huge part of their taxes every year toward the repayment of foreign debts.

What does this tell you? The majority of Africans are not part of the deal, but only the elite class. It's true that taking and repaying debt is a common phenomenon for many communities in several African countries. However, in some communities loaning to a neighbor was a means for affirming or even maintaining relationships. That is to say, every family or clan, therefore, tried to make sure that someone owes them something because it was a form of insurance or security for future uncertainties.

The only difference between West Africa's debt arrangements is that, again, in my little village when someone owes you one or two cows you don't go around the village announcing that so-and-so has a debt of two cows and he should pay by this date.

Moreover or in any case, loaning was not a one-way affair among these communities. This gesture can tell you that being in debt was not a negative thing. It's the commercialization or the motive behind the giving of debts that is viewed as a negative strategy in Africa today. As a result of the current world's debt arrangements, the world is coming up with a society that takes the nature of "West eats South" (read: African society).

The debt, therefore, creates and sustains unbalanced relationships as far as power and wealth are concerned. That is why African countries who continue repaying debts don't even have a say in the prices of their raw materials. This is because Africans have been frightened and incited by the West to a point that they have come to believe that debt to the African nations is like oxygen to living creatures.

At the same time, Africans have been bombed with information that has reached a point where they are conditioned to think "no aid, no life in Africa." As a matter of fact the beginning of African problems or woes, if you will, is aid. If aid in all its forms; money, weapons or ideas, stops, Africa will take a few years to rediscover herself and, within no time, chart her own destiny which will be more sustainable.

To say the truth, the West cannot survive without Africa. This is because we have had close relationships from time immemorial. It's just that Africans have not yet discovered their value and taken their rightful position in world affairs.

For your information, Kenya has struggled for the better part of the last decade with no aid and managed to survive, amid thriving corruption. Nevertheless, I believe that the person who architectures the debt formula of Africa is the same man/woman who can reserve the process for the betterment of Africa's peoples. Otherwise the irony of debt business to me is a failed ideology being practiced today. I hope I will not disappoint my readers if I say that debt is a neo-colonization tool for the powerful nations to continue remote-controlling Africa, period.

Riwongole is a student in the CJP program.