Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, told African leaders on Saturday that powers from the East, the West and the Gulf are all trying to turn countries on the continent into clients. “Africa is not an empty chessboard for foreign powers to play their games,” he said. “We are not spectators.”
He was speaking in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, at the 12th Tana High-Level Forum on Security in Africa. For readers in the diaspora, the speech is a statement from the head of the country many Black Americans and Black Canadians visit and trace ancestry to, about who decides what happens to the resources and the security of the continent where those roots lie.
“External powers, from the East, the West, and the Gulf, are actively seeking leverage, access, and client states on our soil,” Mahama said. He tied the competition to wars in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where fighting is linked to gold, coltan and cobalt, and pointed to unrest in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado region, failures of governance in Somalia and divisions between ECOWAS, the West African regional bloc, and the Sahel states.
His remedy was to take the decisions home. “Unless we consciously decide to take up the pen and write our own script, someone else will write it for us,” he said.
The money behind the argument
The most concrete point was about who pays. Mahama said the African Union’s Peace Fund has raised less than $20 million toward the cost of the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia, known as AUSSOM, which depends largely on outside donors. Reports of the speech differ on the mission’s annual cost, so The Black Observer does not give a figure for it.
He warned that funding cuts by the United States and European governments could weaken peacekeeping, and that dependence on foreign money leaves African security open to decisions made elsewhere. He urged African Union member states to meet their financial commitments and set up predictable funding for continental peace operations.
The message is consistent with his recent speeches. In an August interview with TRT World, Mahama said: “We don’t reject partnerships, but those partnerships must be on our terms.” He said at the time that Africa “cannot continue to be a dependent continent.”
Mahama also rejects the idea that Ghana must pick a side among the major powers. His government describes its policy as non-alignment, and he has said Ghana welcomes investment from the United States, the European Union, China, Russia and others. The speech asks African states to bargain together, not one by one, so that each deal carries more weight.
The Tana Forum is an annual meeting of African leaders and security officials. The Peace Fund’s shortfall is the number to watch when African Union members next meet to set budgets.
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