By Peter Olorunnisomo – Pope Francis’ more recent thoughts seem to strongly include Africa and the crises of humanity that surrounds the nations in it. He recently asked Europe’s giants to put their acts together and reflect a more focused and humane policy approach to the migrant situation which, sincerely, involves not only Africans.
The Pope, in his reflections this time, asked that Europe should stop exploiting Africa and invest in ways that benefit the continent more, including by sharing mineral wealth more equitably, Pope Francis said.
“We must invest in Africa, but invest in an orderly way and create employment, not go there to exploit it,” he was quoted to have told Reuters while discussing the migration of Africans to Europe.
The Pope, who has not only been a world religious leader, is now enjoined to political interventions and advocacy speaking for the oppressed and exploited people, among other religious leaders. The Catholic faith to which his ‘fatherhood’ stemmed has been demonstrable to looking over and after every humanity as a core responsibility of the injunction of love.
By implication, the currency of African states, his concern addresses, the ceaseless exploitation and manipulation of a continent whose colonial heritage translates into amorphous manifestations of foreign policies, socio-economic and bilateral cum multilateral pacts which makes defining a consistent and diplomatic association purely and extremely capitalistic.
“When a country grants independence to an African country it is from the ground up – but the subsoil is not independent. And then people (outside Africa) complain about hungry Africans coming here. There are injustices there!”
The Pope reflected the true position of a much undefined culture of neo-liberalism which has political theorists now bandy to justify certain positions of developed nations whose influence across the globe now charters the course of humanity. Yet this responsibility is so grave that it serves better opportunity than it serve the world.
Touching on the reasons for hunger in Africa, the pope said that “in our collective unconscious there is something inside us that says Africa must be exploited.”
His comments follow moves in some African countries to win more generous terms from international mining companies.
In Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, the government has enacted a new mining code that is designed to earn extra money for the state from copper, cobalt and gold produced there.
Mining companies say the government should reconsider the law in order to respect exemptions that were granted by its predecessor.
The context is replete of foreign governments whose ‘national interests’ encourage them to deploy their ‘resources’ to support illegitimacies and unfit politicians to power in order to prosecute their larger intentions.
Unfortunately, some of these have learnt no other socio-economic activity and relevance to their societies other than being politicians-in-power. Out of office, their lives have little relevance and so perpetuate themselves in office to protect, exploit, deplete the gains of good governance if they ever had one or gave one. The need for African leaders to be patriotic and understand the dynamics of power, democracy, and the culture Europe helped to disintegrate. This is a kernel of migration as a human activity rather than an activity of whim.
The pope said Europe needed to focus on education and investment in Africa if it wanted to stem the flow of migrants, which is also an increasingly divisive issue in Italy, where the new governing coalition is taking a hard line.
“And there’s a problem,” he added. “We send people back to those who have sent them here. They end up in the jails of traffickers.”
The pope then showed Reuters graphic photographs that he said showed victims of human trafficking who had been tortured and killed in an unspecified location in Africa.
Such notions and happenstances they say can only happen in Africa. But of course the Pope has African genes.
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