Activists on Sunday called for a comprehensive audit of Africa’s crippling debt burden, currently estimated at more than $300-billion.
The call was made by representatives of social movements from ten African countries, as well as Brazil, Argentina and the Philippines, at the end of a three-day workshop held in Cape Town under the banner of the Jubilee South network.
In a statement that also attacked South Africa’s “sub-imperial” role on the continent, they said Africa spent over $15-billion a year on debt repayments to wealthy nations and institutions.
This was at the expense of basic social services, food security and diversified economic production.
They demanded total, unconditional cancellation of all Africa’s debt, reparations for damage caused by “debt devastation”, and an immediate halt to the HIPC (heavily indebted poor country) initiative and the “disguised structural adjustment programme” being run through Nepad, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development.
They called for a comprehensive audit to determine the full extent of Africa’s “illegitimate” debt, total payments made to date
and the amount owed to Africa.
One of the participants, Bernardino Mandlate of the Mozambique Debt Group, said that the audit should not only be financial.
“It goes a bit beyond [a] financial audit, because debt has got human implications. The impact of debt to human life, poverty, hunger, health, the water people drink: we want to audit the financial but also the social impact, and the environmental impact.
“So it’s an all-embracing audit.”
He said a similar audit had been recently undertaken by Brazil, which had come out with something that “looks very good”.
“Unless we are able to do those audits in the continent of Africa, our leaders may never take us seriously.”
Anti-debt movements would do the audits themselves if necessary, but it would be better if governments accepted the responsibility themselves.