STOPFIIA organising group arranged a conference that was held at the School of Oriental and African Studies on Thursday 26/02/2015 in LONDON.
Organizers see foreign intervention in Africa as all the actions taken by foreign powers in Africa which are harmful to Africa and Africans and which are intended to secure the interests of those foreign powers.
This does not only take a military form. It is also economic and as result, African countries have been suffering from foreign control of their key economic resources and Western economic prescriptions.
These economic policies have been in the form of IMF and World Bank programmes, otherwise known as “Structural Adjustment Programmes” or “Suffering African People” for the last 40 years. Yet, there is not one African success story of such economic intervention under the guise of such IMF and World Bank dictates.
Intervention in Africa also occurs on the cultural and intellectual level by which foreign ideas, theories, perspectives and paradigms are often consciously and unconsciously imposed on the African continent. This is cultural imperialism from which Africans have yet to free their minds.
Stop Foreign Intervention in Africa, are activists who are opposed to foreign intervention in Africa
Ideas and suggestions of participants to the mentioned conference include:
1) Make a campaign to make companies (like Barclays Bank) involved in operations that are exploiting the DRCongo’s resources and exacerbating the loss of African lives and sexual violence against African women, pay reparations to the Congolese people; provide funding for the treatment and rehabilitation of victims. Similarly, Shell and other culpable corporations can be made to pay reparations to Nigerians for its environmental destruction of the Niger Delta. Etc.
2) Make a campaign for African unity, to override the tribalism, barriers and ethnic divisions among Africans so we can encourage adoption of a PANAFRICAN IDENTITY among all Africans.
3) Unite around the issue of fighting imperialism, as imperialism is the real issue. The fight is against the imperialist capitalist international order. It is the capitalist world that creates the widening gap between the super-rich and the rest of the world. We fight from a socialist pan africanist perspective.
4) Our exploitation is being facilitated by self-serving elite. Without a clear ideology we go nowhere and socialism is the consensus ideological basis to operate from.
5) Focus on campaigns that will meet the basic needs of Africans and African resource management for the benefit of the people. For instance 2/3rd of Africa is rural and yet only 10% of Africa’s investment is into agriculture. Can make a campaign for African governments to change this. What is Africa to be? Is its model of progress/development to be agriculturally based (and rural), industrialised (and urban), … etc?
6) Must not lose ordinary people with difficult language. Ensure to focus on easy, tangible solutions or actions. Campaign to boycott purchase of drugs from pharmaceutical companies, and promote African indigenous herbal medicine.
7) Target action against Britain and British companies, since this is where we (participants and organizers of the conference) are based and Britain’s intervention in African is particularly detrimental to our continent. Make an awareness campaign to educate people that intervention is detrimental (many of the public believe intervention is beneficial to Africa).
8) Make information campaigns to educate on: What does it mean to be intervened? Campaign to expose the role of the elite that are corrupt, facilitate the intervention by foreign interests, and are unable / unwilling to protect their own citizens (as in case of Nigerian military against Boko Haram). A petition is a good means of informing and raising awareness and discussion of the issues. The anti-war campaign has to be connected with.
Pictures from the conference:
