By Ozodi Osuji Ph.d
The President of Ghana, Mahama, gave a rather Fidel Castro-ish long speech at the 81st United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting. It seemed that he was selected by the African countries to articulate their issues, their sense of injury by the global North, and how to resolve those issues. He covered the bases, the whole shebang.
He began by telling us the obvious: that Europeans tended to see Africans as an inferior people, so he gave us a disquisition on the equality of all people. Africans, he said, are the same as all people. This is true, but the question is: how come the rest of the world sees Africans as inferior people?
What is it about Africans that makes them seen as inferior people? Arabs see Africans as inferior people; they actually call Africans Abid, slaves. To the Arabs, Africans are slaves, and they have been enslaving Africans since the days of Mohammad. Indeed, Mohammad (570-632 AD) had African slaves.
Arabs enslaved Africans for at least 1300 years (500-1900 AD). Mr. Mahama, with his apparent preplanned speech to make Europeans the sole culprit for enslaving Africans, talked only about the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1500-1900 AD). He talked about the horrors of kidnapping Africans, taking them to the Atlantic coast of West Africa, then shipping them to the New World.
Who exactly kidnapped Africans and marched them to the coast? We know that Europeans did not enter the interior of Africa until the discovery of Quinine in 1820: “Quinine was first isolated from the bark of the Cinchona tree in 1820 by French chemists Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou, from a Peruvian Bark.” AI
It was Africans who captured their people and marched them to the coast and sold them to Europeans.
It was Africans who kidnapped their people and marched them across the Sahara Desert and sold them at Arab slave markets. It was Swahili Africans who sold Africans to Arabs on the East Coast of Africa. See Thomas Parkenham, The Scramble for Africa.
There were African slaves in Egypt, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Persia, Pakistan, India, and elsewhere in the Middle East. There are still African ex-slave communities in those countries today, and they are discriminated against more than they are discriminated against in the Americas!
Mr. Mahama would like us to ignore the fact of the Arab slave trade and instead focus on the European slave trade.
Having made his case that Europeans enslaved Africans, Mahama bragged about his mission of making them pay reparations for slavery. Acknowledging the injustice of the slave trade, as the UN has done, is not enough; he said that those involved must make financial reparations.
In his mind, Europeans must make financial reparations for the slave trade. How about Arabs making financial reparations? How about the African kidnappers of their siblings making reparations to the blacks sold in the Middle East and the Americas? That kind of larger thinking is apparently beyond the scope of Mr. Mahama’s ahistorical perception of the issue.
Mahama is from Ghana; he gladly told us that he is from northern Ghana and learned many languages spoken in his part of the world. Good for you, Mahama. But that bit of extraneous information did not add a thing to your overall thesis of making Europeans feel guilty for slavery and, out of guilt, giving you and your fellow African comprador politicians money- money that will wind up in African thieving politicians’ pockets, and ordinary Africans keep suffering, trying to reach Europe and drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in the process.
How many slaves did the Ashantis capture and sell up north to Arabs and south to Europeans?
In 1897, the British heard that the recently dead Oba of Benin was buried with many life slaves, some say up to 30, 000 such slaves, and put together a military expedition and stormed Benin and scattered the devils ruling that benighted empire, sent his son, the new Oba, into exile, and annexed Benin.
“Sir Harry Rawson commanded a force of about 1,200 British sailors, marines, and soldiers dispatched from the Niger Coast Protectorate in response to the January 1897 ambush and slaughter of a British consular party led by Acting Consul General James Phillips. The expedition, launched on 9 February 1897, advanced on Benin City, overcame Benin’s defenses, and captured the city on 18 February. Under Rawson’s leadership, the campaign resulted in the destruction of the Oba’s palace, the looting of the renowned Benin Bronzes, the exile of Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, and the annexation of Benin into the Niger Coast Protectorate” Wikipedia.
Ghanaians and Africans must pay financial reparations to slaves in the Middle East and the New World.
Having made his shabby case for reparations, Mahama segued to the current international financial institutions. The Bretton Woods financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and, indeed, Western private banks in general, were structured by Westerners to serve Western colonial and neocolonial interests. As such, they tend to lend money at much higher interest rates to Africans (banks calculate risk factors such as the probability of defaulting on the loans, as African countries do) than they do to other borrowers.
But why are Africans always borrowing? Are the leaders not borrowing to have money they redirect to their pockets and supposedly have their people pay it back?
African leaders like Bola Ahmed Tinubu squander money from their people’s natural resources and then go borrow billions from foreign lenders, redirect them to their pockets, and leave the debt for Africans to pay back.
Thereafter, Africa’s 419 leaders come to the UN trying to make the white man feel guilty for charging them high interest rates. This is an old game that corrupt African leaders play. They angle for the West to forgive the loans. “Oh, we are poor Africans; please forgive us the money we owe you,” and the West foolishly forgives them, and they go and borrow some more, and the charade is repeated.
If the West were to give Africans reparations, African leaders would pocket the funds, and their people would keep suffering.
The sickness is in the African psyche, a mind that justified capturing and selling their people and currently stealing their people’s money while their people starve. And they are so sociopathic and psychopathic that they do not feel guilt or remorse for their crimes against their own people but instead blame white folks for their evil and iniquitous behaviors.
The West should not pay Africans any financial reparations. What must be done is for the West to lend its expertise to Africans and help them manage their economy well, but give them a penny, no.
Mahama called for the change of the UN Security Council and for African representation in it to be made. It seemed to him a matter of fairness to the over one billion Africans.
Poor Mahama! If he had studied why the League of Nations failed, he would not have made the idealistic demand he made.
The League, following Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic and naive Fourteen Points plan to make the world democratic and eliminate wars, failed because it gave all members equal votes.
Well, not all members have the economic and military power to intervene to solve international problems. An example was the League’s inability to solve the dispute between Italy and Ethiopia.
The people who gathered in San Francisco in 1945 to establish the UNO realized that only a handful of nations had the military power to stop conflicts in any part of the world and gave them permanent seats and veto power in the UN Security Council.
And gave all members of the United Nations equal votes in the General Assembly, where they merely talk and do not have the power to end wars.
Has the situation changed? Is any African country sufficiently strong to intervene and stop conflicts in any part of the world? To end conflicts in Africa, only a few countries can pay for the necessary UN military peacekeepers, such as the USA.
The UN’s Budget is about six billion dollars, and the USA pays a quarter of it. The USA pays for most of the cost of peacekeeping!
If political realities have changed since 1945, it is actually not what Mahama probably would like to hear: Germany, India, Japan, and Brazil are emergent economic and political powers and ought to be considered for membership in the UN Security Council, with veto powers, but not African banana republics!
Mr. Mahama rambled on and on, including expressing his anger that the USA is essentially economically strangling Cuba.
In international relations, countries are motivated by their national interests. It is in the US national interest for Cuba and other Latin American countries not to be a proxy of the USSR and Russia Federation, hence threatening it.
He talked about what Israel is doing in Gaza; to him, Jews are killing Arabs in Gaza. His understanding of Middle Eastern politics is so shallow that it does not warrant responding to but let me try some education for the man.
Jews lived in Israel for thousands of years, and due to their issues with the Roman Empire, their temple was destroyed in 70 AD, and subsequently many of them were sent into exile (while some remained in Israel).
Mohammad’s military conquered Jerusalem in 638 AD and brought Arabs, so-called Palestinians, to live in the land of the Jews. These Arab so-called Palestinians now claim ownership of the land of Israel.
Just let that nonsensical claim sink in. Arabs conquered Jerusalem and that, in Mahama’s unrealistic thinking, makes Israel Arabs land.
Arabs in Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco ought to return to the Arab countries they came from and leave North Africa to the Berbers and Africans that own it before Arabs conquered them in the eighth century.
Arabs must vacate Gaza and the West Bank and go live in other Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia.
The two-state solution to the seeming quagmire in Israel-Palestine is unnecessary. Arabs in Israel came from other Arab countries and ought to return to them.
Having an Arab Palestinian country, side by side with Israel, given what we know about these Muslim Arabs, they will not try to peacefully coexist with Jews; they will keep killing Jews, as the events of Oct. 7, 2023, show, and Jews will keep retaliating and killing them.
To avoid such killing and retaliatory killing, Arab Palestinians ought to be resettled in already existing Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria (not in Egypt and other countries in North Africa because those belong to Berbers/Amazigh and Africans, not Arabs).
As I noted earlier, Mahama is not a student of international politics and does not know what he is talking about. He is appealing to our emotions, but as soon as we put on our thinking hats, we know that all he did was make noise, noise to be dismissed immediately.
He should concentrate on governing Ghana and Africa right. Africa’s wannabe leaders need to become real leaders who are dedicated to modernizing their countries. They are, at the moment, treasury looters and corrupt men who steal their people’s wealth and run their countries to the ground and then blame Europeans for their sad position in the world.
Regarding the so-called rare minerals that Mahama talked about, and how the West is about to steal them from Africa, suppose one asks: do Africans even know what rare earth minerals are and what they are for? Can they mine them by themselves?
They have not been able to mine older natural resources like petroleum by themselves and depend on Europeans mining it and paying them royalties.
Left alone, Africans do not have the geological and engineering capacity to mine the gold, diamonds, copper, bauxite, and other resources in Africa, let alone market them.
Africa should concentrate on acquiring engineering skills to do things and then start doing them rather than blaming those with such skills for stealing what they don’t even know how to get out of their ground.
As William Shakespeare would say, Mahama’s speech is full of sound and fury but, in the end, signifies nothing. He is mildly entertaining. If he were a good speaker, he could be listened to; but he lacks eloquence and charisma and comes across as a boring village teacher talking to his fellow villagers. He puts those listening to him to sleep.
His namby-pamby iterations of the ills done to the Global South by the Global North do not change anything; they do not change anything because they are based on sentimentalism, not realism.
The International political arena is a jungle where raw power rules; it is the kingdom of political realism. The powerful sticks to the weak.
And before one cries uncle, one must remember that in Africa, African big men stick it to African poor people. That is the nature of our world.
Don’t cry over spilled milk. Learn power politics, become industrialized, and get the means of balancing other nations’ power with your own power; otherwise, they will stick it to you; that is what real politics is all about, not childish, boring, long-winded speeches by an African wearing discarded Middle Ages Arab robes, robes meant for a feudal society, not an industrial one.
Mahama looked like a clown in that discarded Arab attire of his; it did not make folks take him seriously, as he probably wished, but made them see him as an African aping Arabs.
If an African is going to ape other people, he might as well ape those with power, science, and technology, Europeans.
Ozodi Osuji
September 25, 2026
You can reach me at:
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
541-636-6682
