JEFFERY SACHS: WE ARE WHAT'S WRONG WITH AFRICA

What is wrong with the DRC? In this clip (from the UN Food Systems Pre-Summit in 2021), US economist Jeffery Sachs breaks it down, challenging Western nations to look in the mirror. In a powerful rebuttal of the popular framing of narratives around the economic and political struggles of Africa, Sachs calls for accountability from the West. He notes that the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo today is directly tied to centuries of Western imperialism, exploitation and political interference.

The public policy analyst gives a historical account of the DRC’s decades-long exploitation to illustrate Western dishonesty. He points to Belgium's brutal occupation of the Congo, which killed more than 10-million people, and the Belgian/British/US-led assassination of the Central African nation’s first democratically elected leader, Patrice Lumumba (1925-61).

Sachs further notes how neo-colonialism operates today in the DRC, where Western companies unethically extract resources while the population remains impoverished and is denied its fundamental rights, recognised under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

Imperialist powers may have stopped enslaving and colonising Africans, but they still plunder the continent’s resources, assassinate its incorruptible leaders and fuel wars that stiffle growth.  Today’s renewed cycle of war in the Congo is yet another chapter in the long history of neo-colonialism and imperialism.

Questions of internal governance miss the point. The real question should be: what is wrong with the West?