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TOPIC : In Jeune Afrique, issue of June 6, 2022, Marwane Ben Yahmed, Director of the publication writes in his article entitled POLITICS Why Senegalese gas can change West Africa (POLITIQUE Pourquoi le gaz sénégalais peut changer l’Afrique de l’Ouest): "Why is Guinea striving to sell its bauxite instead of the aluminum it could produce from this ore? Why does Gabon export its wood and not the furniture with which it is made in China and which it is forced to import? Why is Nigeria buying the gasoline it needs when it is an oil giant? The answer is as simple as it is heartbreaking: because they cannot afford to do otherwise! »
Indeed, the peoples of African countries have this propensity to complain of being rich in their basements but paradoxically poor in everyday reality. This is certainly true. But what's the point of having an underground full of natural resources if you can't exploit them yourself, because you don't master the technologies necessary for this purpose and you always have to wait for foreigners strangers come to do it for you before giving you back let's say crumbs. The Blacks have simply forgotten that if the great civilization of ancient Egypt collapsed overnight, it was mainly for lack of scholars to continue to transmit the education that had enabled them to build the greatest civilization of all time. Because knowledge, as a skill, is all that can remain for any man or any people when all his material goods are taken from him and he has lost everything except his life.
“We will search in vain from the concepts of Negritude or “African personality” now marked by the times, for truly new ideas from the brains of our “great” intellectuals. Vocabulary and ideas come to us from elsewhere. Our professors, our engineers and our economists are content to add colors because, from the European universities of which they are the products, they have often only brought back their diplomas and the velvet of adjectives or superlatives”. So said the late President Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso in his speech of October 4, 1984 before the 39th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
QUESTION: Should we not henceforth oblige all the great powers and the emerging powers: Europe, United States, Canada, China, Russia, India, Brazil, etc. in search of natural resources and other raw materials of the continent to set up on-site processing infrastructures in Africa before accessing them? Otherwise, what should be done so that the experience of specialists and other academics trained at great expense abroad have concrete applications on the field in Africa, with in particular the creation of raw materials processing industries which Africa abounds in?
By The Editorial Board
