US - Africa Summit: Scramble for Africa

In what has been seen as an unprecedented move, the President of the USA Barack Obama has hosted the country’s first Africa Leaders Summit there in which 40 leaders from continent have been invited to open greater trade links with the USA.

Both the USA and Europe felt that if they don’t act quickly China will overtake them in a new scramble for African rich resources and business opportunities.

USA and Europe still invest considerably more than China but observers see the recent massive infrastructure investment has a threat to a continent on the verge of global expansion.

In what only can described as a swipe at the China-Africa project, President Obama stated in a speech there:

We don’t look to Africa simply for its natural resources. We recognise Africa for its greatest resource which is its people and its talents and its potential”

He told the largest gathering of African leaders ever held in Washington:

We don’t simply want to extract minerals from the ground for our growth. We want to build partnerships that create jobs and opportunity for all our peoples, that unleash the next era of African growth”

As a clear signal of intent, Obama announced $33bn in new commitments to invest in Africa, mostly from private companies such as Coca-Cola .

The last scramble for Africa 150 years ago witnessed the European countries sit in a room in Berlin, Germany and literally carve up the continent as if they were sharing pieces of a garden they owned between them.

We can only hope that our African leaders this time around not only demand a fair price for their resource rich lands, but also claim reparations and compensations for the rape and pillage during slavery and colonialism, of which most African countries have only found partial freedom in the last 50 years.

Simon Woolley