by Paolo Becchi

Source: Paolo Becchi
To understand something about what is happening in Africa and the mass emigration from that continent, we must first detoxify ourselves from what the newspapers write every day or what the mainstream publishing houses publish, and maybe start by reading a book recently published by Amazon and Youcanprint (both as an ebook and in paperback).
The author, Ilaria Bifarini, she is a young scholar, who presents herself as a "redeemed Bocconian", already known for a volume, Neoliberalism and mass manipulation (2017), which has sold thousands of copies online. His new book, titled The settlers of austerity. Africa, neoliberalism mass emigration (2018) continues the same critical theoretical path towards the neoliberal doctrine, tackling the topic from a counter-current perspective, very relevant today, of mass migrations. The fundamental thesis is soon stated: let's get out of our heads the convenient narrative that traces current African underdevelopment to the colonial past. This thesis is often supported today to justify uncontrolled reception. But it's false.
The disintegration of colonial empires starting from the 1950s led to the formation of independent national states, who however did not have the opportunity to develop their economies independently because they were prevented from doing so: colonialism was thus replaced by something even worse, a form of postcolonialism, focused on economic control, which prevented local economies from growing and developing.
IMF DEVELOPMENT
Despite having achieved independence, in fact, "multinationals and financial powers soon domesticated the representatives of the political class and local elites... they thus created a crumbling national bourgeoisie that administers the country in representation and defense of foreign interests" (p. 85). The economic system and political life of these states are externally directed. Despite independence, they have never achieved substantial political and economic sovereignty. A concrete example? The franc of the French African colonies, now pegged to the euro, always remains under the control of the French authorities, which determine the monetary policies of the two most important African central banks. If the fixed exchange rate has the advantage of eliminating the risks for multinational investments, this happens to the detriment of local real economies. It is the CFA franc that today constitutes an "insurmountable obstacle to the growth and development of the former colonies, which should be removed" (p. 192). A bit like the euro for us, one might add.
The misery of Africa, right, it was not caused only by this coin, but by the neoliberal policies imposed since the 1980s by the IMF and the World Bank. These policies were tested for the first time in Africa, after having imposed a development model that forced African countries to get into more and more debt and enter that debt spiral that we too have experienced in more recent years. «African countries have been hit by the unscrupulous dynamics of the international free market without prior protection of the industrial and agricultural sectors, forced on the one hand to purchase manufacturing goods and machinery at increasingly expensive prices, on the other to sell their raw materials ever more cheaply. To conquer foreign markets they favored the development of export crops to the detriment of self-sufficiency, producing exclusively for the foreign market and not for local consumption. Paradoxically, hunger in Africa is not caused by a lack of resources, but rather from their export: production is exported instead of consumed" (p. 76). And everything that could be earned through exports was used to pay off the foreign debt, fueling a vicious cycle that has caused growing misery and poverty.
DEMOGRAPHIC QUESTION
Add to this a singular demographic phenomenon. Usually each population passes from an initial situation of high mortality and high fertility to a condition of low mortality and low fertility. In sub-Saharan Africa, mortality has decreased, but the fertility rate continues to be the highest in the world. In the 1960s the African population was approximately 300 millions, today is 1,2 billion, In the 2050, if no changes occur, it will be approximately 2,5 billion. It is quite clear that the Black Continent would need economic and social policies oriented towards the qualification of the workforce and an adequate birth control policy. Instead, the local youth population is encouraged to abandon their countries and continue to have more children by moving to Europe. They are not refugees (if not to a minimal extent) who flee from wars, but largely economic migrants in search of those working conditions that they cannot find on the African continent due to the nefarious neoliberal economic policies that have increased inequalities and jeopardized any internal development. They come to Europe, not the poorest, but those even willing to get into debt by accepting loans and credits offered by NGOs (some ideas in this regard on p. 39-40), in the illusion of being able to find here what they don't find in their country. But Europe today finds itself in great difficulty precisely because of the same economic and monetary policies that have so far condemned Africa to permanent stagnation. The great migrations, in conclusion, today they damage Africa as much as Europe and the only ones who gain from it are the globalist elites, big businessmen, financial speculators like Soros, who after having squeezed Africa like a lemon are now dedicating themselves, to deal the final blow to Europe too, to the big business of NGOs.