Eromosele Abiodun
Former Chief Strategist to the President of the United States, Donald Trump, Mr. Steve Bannon, has called on African governments to be circumspect of China’s investment in Africa, warning that the goal of the Chinese is to colonise the region.
In an exclusive interview with ARISE News, THISDAY Newspaper’s sister broadcast company, at the News Xchange Conference holding in Edinburgh Scotland, he described Chinese involvement in Africa as predatory capitalism, stressing that the goal of the Chinese is to make foreclosure on most of the projects being financed so as to have greater control of African governments.
According to him, “I think it is 100 per cent colonialism. I think when you look at China, particularly the Chinese league, the CCP, it is a highly centred, hyper nationalistic society and at certain level it is quite racist. I think what they are doing in sub-Saharan Africa is predatory capitalism. They understand that many of the loans, the projects they are funding are never going to be able to pay back on the cash flow that comes out of it. They intend to foreclose on it and gain much more active control on some of these countries. That is why I think you see many leaders in Africa today are saying, ‘Hey we see what the Chinese are doing here we are uncomfortable with the Chinese bringing their engineers and all the people that actually run these projects. We have to get Europe and the United States down here.’
“I think the United States with Europe has to have much more engagement with Sub-Saharan Africa just like the United States has to have much more engagement with Central America to help these people solve these problems out for themselves. When you interview any of these migrants who go through this brutal journey up through North Africa and then to Europe, none of them is saying I want to leave my homeland because I want to.
“They all say it is because there is economic opportunity in Africa, the working class and the social welfare system in Europe certainly cannot take the amount of people that want to come. Therefore, this has to be sorted out in Africa and I think some sort of combination with Arab nations, Europe and United States need to much more engage because the predatory capitalism of the Chinese Community Party is only going to cause terrible problems in Africa in the years to come.”
Bannon who described President Trump’s bid to stop illegal migration as humanitarian said his effort will push the cartels involved in human trafficking out of business and end the misery that the migrants go through during the tortuous journey from sub-Saharan Africa through North Africa to Europe.
“His zero tolerance policy is trying to be humanitarian because he realises that once we move away from that it is a magnet for all these folks to thinking that they are going to be able to get in and get economic asylum, which you can’t. It is not political asylum and there are very tight rules even though we often let in a lot of people. The migrants from Central America know this and if you read a lot of the interviews in Washington Post and the New York Times as they are coming up, they said, ‘hey we understand we cannot get political asylum, what we are going to try to do is made a mad dash across some of the undefended part of Southern border, hope Border Patrol picks us up, game the system and hope to be released into the United States and stay for a couple of years.’
“What we are doing is enticing the cartels; remember some of the cartels have just got out of the drug business into the human trafficking business. The same this is happening is sub-Saharan Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is the cartels that are coming from there to North Africa that are making billions of dollars on this human misery. Forget the rapes and the other conditions that are imposed upon these people, these are massive money making operations and I think what President Trump is saying is hey economic migration is not a concept to come to the United States,” he said.
