Sierra Leone is in another grip of international exploitation as neocolonial corporate organizations including African Minerals, London Mining, Sierra Rutile, to name but a few, all scramble over the country’s natural resources only to benefit Western nations and their petty bourgeois fractions.
African Minerals is said to be one of the richest mining companies operating across the world. In Sierra Leone, the government has signed a 99 year contract with African Minerals giving it the green light to exploit and extract iron ore and other precious minerals and to exploit cheap labor from the local land owners at Bumbuna and Feregbehya in the North of the country.
Dissatisfaction over working conditions of the exploited local workers and refusal for them to form a labor union led to a shock action on April 17, 2012. Police responded and shot dead 17 people including a poor woman in cold blood.
Another corporate company called Sierra Rutile is based in the South. Workers there are always dissatisfied with their working conditions. Foreign workers are given weekly allowances of $300. Meanwhile, the hard working local worker is only paid a minimum of 300,000 Leones, which is less than $100 per month.
This is the reality of so-called “investors” in Africa. They are parasites who exploit the labor of African workers and extract African resources at the expense of the development of Africa and her people.
Apart from the essential technological and industrial part, Africa as a region has adequate human resources and technical know-how for her basic development needs. The materials necessary for industrialization exist in Africa as well, but they are exported by these parasitic entities to North America and Europe and increasingly China. Africa cannot and shall never benefit from the ever-increasing influx of parasitic foreign agencies
The true and meaningful development of Africa must come at the expense of these parasites and at the hand of African workers who have seized control of Africa’s resources and future for themselves.
They and only they can evolve a realistic and sincere process of human development in the region. The use of people as resource with little or no consideration of their well-being is totally unacceptable. African neocolonial governments who aren’t accountable to their people but to those greedy, wicked, selfish corporate organizations whose motives are just exploitation must go.
