The Cost of Debt
“Third World debt, structural adjustment, privatization, and trade liberalization are intentional strategies of a neoliberal agenda to enshrine poverty.”–ERIC TOUSSAINT
The debt of low- and middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa increased to a record $702 billion in 2020, according to a new World Bank report released on October 11, 2021. This is the region’s highest debt burden in a decade.
Writers such as Eric Toussaint, among many others, have made critical contributions to an understanding that “Western foreign policy toward Africa does not merely produce poverty and inequality as an accidental byproduct, but rather, that Third World debt, structural adjustment, privatization, and trade liberalization are intentional strategies of a neoliberal agenda to enshrine poverty.”
Having surveyed the underlying fundamentals that have led Africa into debt, it is needful to gain an understanding of the true cost of debt to Africa.
This chapter sidesteps the financial figures, to provide a figuration of the true cost of debt, in the deprecation of African nationalism.
It would appear that even the ‘minimizing political independence which many African nations gained during the decade of the 60s, could be…