West Sidelining Africa on Global Stage, Finance Ministers Say
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The African continent, forced to contend with floods and drought as well as regional conflicts, has also borne the brunt of external shocks triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Disruptions in supply chains exacerbated soaring energy and food prices spurred by inflation and the fallout from the conflict in Ukraine.Africa’s finance ministers have accused rich western countries and international financial institutions of deliberately “marginalizing” the continent’s influence on issues of global importance, Bloomberg reported.
“We are at the table and increasingly so, but we occupy a small stool at the table. Most of the time we are recipients of support – of aid, of resources – as opposed to the giver of resources to the rest of the world and that creates a naturally uneven relationship, but we should strengthen ourselves and we should be listened to,” Zimbabwean Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said on Saturday.
Assistance would be “more impactful” if international contributors made an effort to listen to those they are helping, Ncumbe emphasised.Ncube explained to an IMF press conference on Saturday that Zimbabwe is at present working with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on how to clear more than $10Bln in external debt, mostly in arrears.”We’ve begun to make token payments to the World Bank, the AfDB (African Development Bank), European Investment Bank. And all the Paris Club creditors, 17 of them. We will be making token payments to show that we want to be a good debtor,” Ncube said.
AfricaRussia & Africa Should ‘Cement’ Relationship, Head of Africa Oil Week Advisory Board Says13 October, 14:40 GMTSimilar feelings about western countries have been voiced by Zambia’s finance chief. Africa’s space at the table is “very narrow” and it remains “marginalized”, despite the fact that the continent’s population and youth demographic is outrivaled only by Asia, Situmbeko Musokotwane emphasized.Zambia is locked in negotiations over debt restructuring, Musokotwane said. Africa’s second-largest copper producer has been in default for almost two years. Zambia secured a $1.3Bln, three-year loan from the IMF in September, and is seeking a present value $6.3Bln debt reduction. The country’s debts have soared in recent years as it struggled to fund infrastructure projects to help the country supplement drought-affected hydropower plants.Zambia and Chad, together with Ethiopia, were the first to ask the G20 for debt relief help and South African Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana warned that the G20’s debt-restructuring mechanism needs to be reformed.Dier Tong Ngor, South Sudan’s minister of finance and economic planning, echoed the stance of other African finance bosses.“We can’t expect that the development burden of Africa will be on the shoulders of institutions such as the World Bank and IMF and so forth – their resource levels are just too small compared with the needs,” Ngor said, adding:
“There’s a disjoint between what we get out of these institutions and what will be required for private sector money to draw in and complement the effect of the public money from these institutions. That is one of the issues that, hopefully, institutions like the World Bank need to listen to very carefully and adjust the way they do business.”
The African finance chiefs spoke after the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) on between 10 and 16 October in Washington DC.The fiscal challenges come as emerging markets are forced to deal with the fallout from policy decisions taken by the developed nations, including aggressive interest-rate hikes by the US Federal Reserve.With US inflation at some of the highest annual rates in 40 years, reaching 8.3 percent in August, the Fed has raised interest rates to combat it, in turn resulting in raised loan-servicing costs. The fiscal moves by the US to strengthen its currency also raised the cost of dollar-priced energy and food imports, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.The continent of 1.2 billion people, which has been struggling to shake off the self-serving legacy of western colonialism, is at present forced to contend with a plethora of challenges. Years of scarce rainfall across Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia have caused the worst drought in 40 years with the looming threat of famine in the hardest-hit areas. Elsewhere, weeks of heavy rains and floods have affected 5 million people in 19 countries across West and Central Africa, killing hundreds, destroying crops and displacing tens of thousands of people.All this comes amid a broader economic downturn accompanied by rocketing food, fertilizer and fuel prices, fed, in part, by the fallout from the Ukraine crisis. Self-harming sanctions imposed by the so-called collective West on Russia – one of the largest producers and exporters of wheat, sunflower oil, and other agricultural commodities in the world – over its special military operation in Ukraine have only exacerbated the energy crisis and food security on a global scale.
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