Corruption and man-made Climate Change are interlinked; complementary – with corruption being the mother that has given birth to, and has been feeding, the baby-monster that has grown into the Teenage-Monster called “Climate Change.”

For most Sierra Leoneans/Africans, “corruption” is largely seen as policemen demanding bribes on the roadside; a nurse selling medicines in a government hospital she is supposed to give free to patients; or a teacher taking money from pupils and giving them unmerited 90% grades. That is baby corruption, or, petty corruption. 

The real corruption, or Grand Corruption, is that shameful act that senior government officials do in, for example, the finance ministry, or National Revenue Authority, or Sierra Leone Road Transport Authority, etc. They say they are building roads that they tell Parliament is valued at $10million, but, $8 million of that sum goes into their private bank accounts, and poor roads that would not last for five years would be constructed, causing deadly accidents. They STEAL billions of Leones or millions of US dollars. A man who earns $800 monthly in his government department would build a $500,000 mansion in two years.  

Most Sierra Leoneans perceive “corruption” as that deleterious thing happening   only in Sierra Leone, in Africa, and they appear to think that people in the United States, Europe and China are extremely honest. That false belief on the higher integrity of the ‘white man’ and the ‘thieving nature of the black man’ is ironic. The reality is that the most corrupt people on planet earth have always been people in Europe, the United States, and the Americas. Forget about the intrinsic corruption of European conquerors’ genocide on about 80% of the indigenous populations of the Americas as they conquered the ‘New World’ starting in the 16th century.  I won’t even bring up the corruption of the over three hundred years of the Atlantic Slave Trade which resulted in over 10 million Africans dying in gruesome circumstances as they were being kidnapped and shipped to the Americas. They were enslaved, dehumanised in the Americas and forced to give free labour which enabled the white man to accumulate vast wealth which eased him into the Industrial Revolution and the most meteoric economic, scientific, and technological surge in human history. 

Let’s turn attention to the post-World War II economic systems established by the United States and the victorious powers which was corruptly-rigged against poor countries in the developing world.

“Corruption” is not just financial crimes. To better understand the ramifications of corruption, consider when an IT professional tells you that your “computer files have been corrupted,” or, a teacher is accused of having “corrupted the morals of his pupils.”

In global warming and man-made Climate Change, the main culprits in the West have corrupted the global systems, destroying man and nature.

My assertion that the white man has always been more corrupt than the black man is not to lessen the culpability of the corruption by Sierra Leone’s (and Africa’s) about 1% political and bureaucratic elite.  The corrupt elite in Europe and the Americas largely use the proceeds of their corruption to live monarchial lifestyles, develop more businesses and industries; produce better and better goods, services, and ideas, and grow economies within their countries.

Over the past 100 years, the elite in the West have not only nurtured the greatest wealth ever in human history, but, have made sure that, relatively, wealth distribution is egalitarian.  Juxtapose that with what has been happening in African countries like Sierra Leone where the governing elite steal public money, but invest almost nothing significant in Sierra Leone (Africa). They severely diminish the quality of the vital educational sector, turn hospitals into morgues, impoverish the 98% majority, and siphon the stolen public money into banks in Europe and America.

Corruption, bribery, theft and tax evasion, and other illicit financial flows cost developing countries $1.26 trillion per year. That’s roughly the combined size of the economies of Switzerland, South Africa and Belgium, and enough money to lift the 1.4 billion people who get by on less than $1.25 a day above the poverty threshold ….” (SOURCE: How bad is the global corruption problem? | World Economic Forum (weforum.org)

When Western countries and institutions in the West stigmatize countries in the developing world for being nauseously corrupt, they are hypocritical.  Corruption in Africa is aided and abetted by the West.  In the February 14, 2019 edition of World Financial Review, in the article titled “Corruption and Economic Mismanagement in Developing Countries,” Kalim Siddiqui exposes Western hypocrisy. Kalim observes that corruption…has become more serious over the last twenty-five years…(Illegally) appropriated money would be transferred abroad, also known as money laundering, which means much less is left for reinvestment into local economies… (The) governments of (developing) countries are often asking the IMF and the World Bank for [additional] loans. Such foreign loans have to be repaid in foreign currencies, meaning these countries have to increase their exports (of largely raw commodities) which means any effort to increase the export of such commodities will simply mean increased supplies. However, if demand remains stagnant, then such efforts lead to a glut in the international market, falling export prices and falling export earnings due to oversupply. 

It has been a neat trick called “trade” that stinks like a one-month old bloated corpse left exposed by a riverside with flies and vultures hovering over it.  The West fix the prices for, say, palm oil or cocoa.  Institutions like the World Bank urge poverty-stricken countries like Sierra Leone to grow more palm oil or cocoa to ‘develop’ their economies.  They give the same advice to countries like Ghana, Brazil and Indonesia.  Soon, too much supply of cocoa and palm oil flood the international market.  Their prices drop.  You grow more palm oil and cocoa, but, you earn less money.  The Western banks then come in with international debt, at high interest rates.  You keeping on paying the interest for decades.  They lend you more money to pay the interests.

In Susan George’s 1980s-published epochal book on the macabre nature of international debt titled “A Fate Worse Than Debt,” she calls this Western chicanery as “Low Intensity Conflict” – a war on the developing countries that masquerades as “trade”, but, with the same consequences of physical war – death, malnutrition, dehydration, suffering.  Whilst poor countries like Sierra Leone keep on getting poorer and poorer, the richest countries of the world largely in the Northern Hemisphere keep on getting richer and richer, consuming more of the earth’s resources, and pumping more noxious gases into the atmosphere causing global warming, leading to man-made Climate Change. 

Campbell Erikson, writing in the Harvard Political Review of June 18, 2020, on the topic “The Climate-Corruption Connection” educates us that “….as global inequality swells and the pangs of globalisation make their way around the world…people are looking towards…grand corruption as the root cause of poverty, economic stagnation, human rights abuses…corruption has proven to be an international systemic issue…” (SOURCE: harvardpolitics.com).

In an article by Amanda Sperber, titled “Global finance systems enable Africa’s trillion-dollar corruption” and published by Quartz Africa (qz.com), October 31, 2018,   we are guided thus: “Daniela Lepiz… (is) in Copenhagen…at the International Anti-Corruption Conference…(Talking in a panel titled)… “What Will it Take to Win the Fight Against Corruption in Africa” …. But, Lepiz sees a bigger picture: ‘It’s true corruption is a problem in Africa… (But the) …systems and the mechanisms allowing corruption to happen are not based in Africa’… Africa lost an estimated one trillion dollar in the last decade to money siphoned out of the continent, stashed into (private) bank accounts, laundered through shell companies….”  

Now that we have agreed to change the language of “corruption” and “climate change”, 'let’s go imaginative’ and try to ‘see’ what is really happening in our world today.  That FBC/Cambridge-educated permanent secretary in a government department in Sierra Leone; that cultured Harvard-educated international NGO worker you met at the COP-26 conference… This is what they do.  They torture babies.  They take knives and take out the eyes of babies.  They go to hospitals and steal all the medicines so that pregnant women and lactating mothers suffer slowly, excruciatingly… and die.   That’s the mild part.  As Extinction Rebellion’s Jerome Hallam said before COP-26 in 2021 in the United Kingdom, this corruption/climate change monster is planning, and already executing, “The Annihilation Project,” the “mass murder of billions of humanity.” 

The question is: are you, the 98% majority in Sierra Leone, in Africa, of people on planet earth, going to sit down and commit mass suicide, or, wait for mass murder before you are galvanised into action? The local and international systems must be reset. Rise!!

By Oswald Hanciles, The Guru 

Freetown, Sierra Leone