African Countries Forced by France to Pay Colonial Tax
siliconafrica.com
siliconafrica.com
It’s such an evil system even denounced by the European Union, but France is not ready to move from that colonial system which puts about 500 billions dollars from Africa to its treasury year in year out.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_France, that's pretty much equivalent to the budget of the French government. If that number were true, France finances ought to be in better shape.
Clearstream (1, not 2) is the one case where we DO have evidence, thanks to lengthy and numerous lawsuits and plenty of publicly available documents, including some taken from the safes of the companies involved.
As a French citizen, I used to be somewhat adamant that there was no way my government was ever capable of doing Bad Things, a few hundred books later and exposure to the people in these groups (including working for an Elf-like company, and family in management in Total), I think differently.
Where is the defense of freedom of speech beloved by #ImCharlie folks?
Africa's GDP is around USD 2.4 trillion so seeing a fifth of that "disappear" seems like a conservative lower bound, actually (admittedly countries like South Africa skew the measure).
Do you honestly think that France is taking 3x this per annum and hiding it in offshore accounts?
Certainly France (and the US) meddled with successions in Africa (and even when they didn't have France's blessing, most elite soldiers in the immediate post-colonial period had served in the French Foreign Legion....) but for all the coups, former French colonies can and did leave the CFA Franc, one rejoined a couple of decades later and a couple of countries that weren't ever French colonies also decided to join.
I'm not familiar with the administrative details behind the CFA Franc, but it sounds quite likely the author is inexpertly trying to describe a pretty standard set of central banking arrangements (governments required to borrow reserves at the base interest rate to fund deficit spending, fiscal rules for a currency area, foreign currency reserves held with ECB to support commitment to Euro parity etc). A bit like the French in the Euro really...
There are good arguments for the CFA Franc not being wholly beneficial for its member states, but this isn't one of them.
Of course it is bogus. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...
I must say I am quite surprised to see a poorly written propaganda hoax article make the frontpage of HN. It is linked to the general decline in quality of HN? Is it a voting ring? Or is it because the headline pulls all the right triggers in the minds of bay area tech people?
I see a lot of accounts created in the last couple hours posting in this thread, so it might well be a voting ring situation.
As far as I can tell, it is mostly that a lot of users thought the article was interesting. Presumably it wasn't obviously a hoax to them.
In the end, flags defeated upvotes on this story.
I mean the goddamn copyedit should have flagged everyone on this to begin with. Just looking at it I'm 90% sure I just bought a sham-wow. The article is linkbait copyediting 101.
The Chirac video is taken out of context, from a television interview where he says the current state of France as a first world country, and a G8 country comes directly from its former past as a colonial power.
Hmm, looks like I can dig something up:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Afro...
> In relation with that is the translation of declaration of Mr Chirac is consciously shortened to serve the objectives of Mr. Koutonin. Chirac said ""Some of the wealth we have in our coffers, I do not say all of it, come from the exploitation of Africa. Therefore, it is only normal that we give back that money. It is not only normal, it is more sensible if we want to avoid the emergence of all kinds of social difficulties in the continent" Indicating the context of this declaration was a must that Mr Koutonin did not seem to appreciate
Not a single quote in the article is actually linked back to its source, just to wikipedia pages or websites and not even to a context in the article. His quote from Leopold Sedar Senghor comes up with 9 results in a google search, all linking back to this article. Even translated into French, the quote comes up with translations of this article.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is failing to even provide sub-par evidence.
Billions, nay near-trillions of dollars do not just magically float around the globe with no one noticing or accounting for them.
Sorry, but in a year none of this has been cited or sourced, just reposts. It's bullshit, it just got dredged up because everyone's been googling about France and Charlie Hebdo.
The author claims "Right for France to pre-deploy troops and intervene military in the country to defend its interests". This is not true as it's a defence agreement against external aggression, not internal civil war. For example they did not intervene for any side during the 2002-2004 civil war in the Ivory Coast.
The usage of Franc CFA is actually beneficial to those using the currency as it's value is pegged to the Euro, hence helping to control inflation.
I do not dispute the facts that Africans countries ought to be more autonomous (after all that's what independence is), but this stems more from a failure from Africans politicians than anyone else.
That's no true. France supported Alassane Ouatarra, the current president who lost the election, but was backed by France which troops fired on people on the street and also bombarded with helicopters the presidential palace to force the elected president Laurent Gbagbo to give power to Alassance Ouattara supported by France.
Links are all over the net to prove that.
The fact and history behind the CFA is much more dark, than presented.
I agree with you, Africans should fight the French to become more autonomous.
During the civil war[1] 2002-2007 The country was divided in two with the French military separating both side, the French were authorized to act by UN resolution 1528 (very important!)
The elections were held in October 2010, the counting took months and the Electoral commission declared Alassane Ouatarra the winner in December 2010. Laurent Gbagbo refused to stand down, claiming he won. Thus the 2nd civil war began[2]. The stand off continued until April 2011 when the rebel took control of the country including Abidjan and with the help of the French removed Gbagbo.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Ivorian_Civil_War [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Ivorian_Civil_War
We need to care more about facts and deeds not UN wind bags.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%9311_Ivorian_crisis
And while Ouattara's troops weren't angels, neither were Gbagbo's, which is why he's at the International Criminal Court now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurent_Gbagbo#Arrest_and_tran...
The merits of pegging local currencies in such a way are very doubtful. Across the whole eurozone, today, this issue is hotly contested by activists stating that this rigidity penalizes poorer countries, because their lower-quality wares cannot use currency devaluation as a competitive weapon anymore. Countries using the Franc CFA might be experiencing the same problem... Also, Argentina started its bankrupting spiral when its currency was artificially pegged to the US Dollar without really having the commercial and political power to sustain such link in the long run.
A monetary policy is not just about "keeping inflation low" -- in fact, inflation and currency devaluation in many cases are necessary corrections.
What did you mean by that? Wikipedia is prety succint on this:
"Following France's withdrawal, Guinea quickly aligned itself with the Soviet Union and adopted socialist policies. This alliance was short lived, however, as Guinea moved towards a Chinese model of socialism."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea#Independence_and_Post-C...
My comment on the substance of the article is that one way to reality-check French colonial policies in Africa is to see whether African countries that had a different history during the period of Western colonialism on the continent fared differently in recent decades. Ethiopia was an independent country except for a brief period of being conquered by Italy in the 1930s, becoming liberated again during World War II. Liberia was formally independent, although bound to the United States by economic ties as it was founded as a repatriation site for freed slaves from America. Various countries in Africa were British or Belgian or Portuguese or even (briefly) German colonies before gaining independence. Looking at what former colonies of a particular colonizing country have in common might shed a little light on what the varying colonial policies and post-colonial policies have done in Africa.
The same arrangement prevails between the defenders democracy and smaller countries that can't defend themselves against Big Brothers.
Why do you think Uncle Sam chose to invade Iraq when the House of Saud is the real evil in the ME?
The Saudis are safe because they will "do the right thing" when the chips are down -- see for example their recent refusal to cut oil production: there is a drunk Russian bear to quiet down, prices have to stay low to make him feel pain, so the Saudi Kingdom will make the "right" choice even if it costs them some cash. That's what a reliable partner does, and as long as partners remain reliable (and strategically irreplaceable), there is no reason to take them out.
Btw, if by "a drunk Russian bear" you 're referring to Putin, the guy does not dring, or at least, he does not get drunk, unlike most Russian men of his age. That's one reason Russian women like him.
Whatever the Russian military is making of itself, it's nowhere near as bad as what the "Coalition of the Willing" has been up to in <insert_any_corner_of_the_globe>
Although trying to study the place from third party sources is like watching Rashomon, this is pretty much how it works: - "friendly" dictator is installed and maintained so long as he cooperates. - aid packages are sent over (in cash, by plane) and loans made with friendly zero interest - money flies straight back via Geneva to finance French parties (e.g. RPR and Chirac, but also Mitterrand whose network was a subset of Pasqua's, ironically; who knows who is in charge these days) - country is maintained in poverty by any means practical (rigged election equipment with magical 90%+ wins, flying in 1,000 soldiers into Congo from Chad, shipping weapons by the crate...) so as to lower the cost of keeping it under control. This includes financing both sides of a war (as in Angola), and the "black governors" as some call them deliberately installing the rule of corruption from top to bottom (see Mobutu for the best example). The loans and missing aid definitely help keep the finances problematic, especially when they cause future resource production to be promised away for years as collateral.
It's important to note that Francafrique has been internationalised; FX Verschave, who despite being almost a communist has been very good at keeping track of the whole thing thinks the French networks have become subsets of the US ones. Cuba, Russia were also big players on the chessboard. As for the targets the saying is the louder they complain about the West, the closer they are. Omar Bongo was hand-chosen by De Gaulle (cf Foccart's memoirs) and trained and educated in France. He was the most reliable and famous, so close to the French government he arbitrated disputes between ministers.
You basically hear two sides of the story: - "communists are trying to take over the place and we must stop them and forget human rights for a while whilst we do so" (CIA, Rhodesians, South Africans back in the days) - "the Western capitalist powers will do anything to conquer their colonies and keep them in control, but we're the democratic choice" (Madagascar, Ghana, Zimbabwe and the aforementioned left wing countries). Some of the claims are pretty bold, for example aforementioned Verschave claims the left wing Mitterrand made Le Pen's political career happen (from 0.4 to 10% of the vote) in exchange for maintaining a nice vivier of far-right youth that could be relied on for African "holidays" and the occasional false flag car burning in Algerian-French banlieues.
I don't think either side is right of course but you can glimpse crumbs of truth from each side, and occasionally pockets of data emerge as the various powers take the fight to the press and public temporarily, or some Don Quixote decides to try her hand at windmills like Eva Joly against Elf (cf "Poisoned Wells" which is a nice taster to the place). I look forward to reading the declassified intelligence documents in 70 years or whatever it is. Mercenary accounts can be pretty entertaining too - I'll close with Simon Mann's quote about the French DGSE and military intelligence, "whatever you do, we can do dirtier".
It's also helpful in inter-agency rivalries, as whoever has the most resources, particularly black resources, can be the most efficient. Believe it or not there are several factions in France, aforementioned DGSE is the "official" actor outside the borders, but the DST has their own agents as well (yes, outside the territory) and then you have the military intelligence apparatus which competes against the other two and is in theory supposed to run the "mercenaries".
Any relevant piece of knowledge is already available in French. I understand the author's dislike of everything french, but this is going too far.
Probably, why 80% of the 10 countries with the lowest literacy rates in the WORLD among adults are in francophone Africa.
Namely: Benin (40%), Burkina Faso (26%), Chad (34%), Côte d’Ivoire (49%), Guinea (29%), Mali (23%), Niger (29%), and Senegal (42%).
Conversely we could look at African countries that haven't had to suffer meddling from a colonial parent, and they don't seem to be much better off. Liberia has been independent for a long time. The Democratic Republic of Congo doesn't suffer from Belgian military interventions. Neither is a paradise.
The French really were terrible at colonial administration. They had a way of letting emotions guide their decision-making and no compunctions whatsoever about asserting how morally superior they were to the locals. This led to truly horrific massacres on both sides, that continued until very recently, where most of the rest of the post-colonial world had largely moved on.
You see the remnants of that colonial legacy in the French attitude towards African and Islamic immigrants. As bad as classism gets in the US, it only rarely provokes violence. French civil unrest is often terrifying, as the Charlie Hebdo massacre has shown. That was actually tame compared to a lot of what happened in Algeria.
There are deep, raw, and gaping wounds that will probably never be healed. The old generation will just die off and the younger generation are, due to French apathy, falling under the spell of Islamism.