Why Africa resents the West

President Cyril Ramaphosa said yesterday that resentment towards the West still lingers over the treatment of African countries during the Covid pandemic.

Speaking at the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact in Paris, Ramaphosa described how African nations “felt like we were beggars when we needed access to vaccines”. The former head of the African Union said that Western nations “had bought all the vaccines in the world and were hogging them”.

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“We resented that and it got worse: when we said we wanted to manufacture our own vaccines and when we went to the World Trade Organisation, there was a lot of resistance, enormous resistance.

“We kept saying: what is more important? Life or profits by your big pharmaceutical companies? We felt like life in the northernhemisphere is much more important than life in the global south.”

He also took aim at pledges by rich countries to developing nations to help them adapt to climate change.

A promise to provide $100 billion (about R1.8 trillion) a year made at a Conference of the Parties climate summit in 2009 is yet to be fulfilled, he said.

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SA’s foreign policy under Ramaphosa is under scrutiny in the West after his recent visit to Moscow to meet President Vladimir Putin and following allegations – denied by Pretoria – that SA provided arms covertly to Russia.

Ramaphosa led a seven-country African peace delegation to Moscow and Kyiv this month that pushed for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has driven up the price of food and fertilizer imports for African consumers.