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President Akufo-Addo has requested for illicit financial outflows from Africa to be returned to the continent.
He reiterated the call while speaking at the 2023 United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday.
According to President Akufo-Addo, Africa loses more than 88 billion US dollars annually as a result of illicit financial outflows. He cited a panel report by Thabo Mbeki on such outflows.
“Yes those monies too [Illicit financial outflows] must be returned to the continent,” he said.
He noted that “it is difficult to understand why the recipient countries are comfortable to retain such funds and are happy to call those countries from whom those monies are taken as corrupt.”
President Akufo-Addo, in this regard, called for the creation of a joint task force between the African Union Commission and the OECD Secretariat under the auspices of the UN to find solutions to stop the ‘damaging outflows’.
Also, the President called for reparations to be paid to African countries for the slave trade that took place during the colonial times.
He said although the 21st-century generations were not the ones that engaged in the slave trade, the “grand inhumane enterprise was state-sponsored and deliberate and its benefits are clearly interwoven in the present-day economic architecture of the nations that designed and executed it.”
In the light of this, he believes reparations must be paid for the slave trade.”
He asserted that “no amount of money will ever make up for the horrors but it will make the point that evil was perpetuated – that millions of productive Africans were snatched from our continent and put to work in the Americans and Caribbean’s without compensations from their labour.”
“If there is any hesitation in some minds about the paying of reparations, it is worth considering the fact that when slavery was abolished, the slave owners were compensated for the loss of the slave because human beings were labelled as property deemed to be commodities. Surely, this is a matter that the world must confront and can no longer ignore,” he stressed.
He also noted that “it is time to acknowledge openly that much of the European, United States has been from the vast wealth harvested from the sweat, tears, blood and horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the centuries of colonial exploitation.”
He added, “Maybe we should also admit that it cannot be easy to build confident and prosperous societies from nations that from centuries have their natural resources looted and their people traded as commodities.”
“For centuries, the world has been unwilling and unable to confront the realities of the realities of consequences of the slave trade but gradually this is changing and it is time to bring the subject of reparations firmly to the fore,” he said.
