General

EU-Tanzania clash: follow the money?

29.11.2018 – Leopoldo Salmaso
Until a couple of weeks ago, there had never been so much talk of Tanzania in the Western media.

Many people wonder if behind the scenes there is something more relevant than African homofobia. In fact, they invite you to follow the canonical path, that of money: follow the money!

It would be too easy to appease those insistent requests by re-selecting (i.e., recounting) various episodes which, at the time, the Western media left completely under track, all with a single, clear and precise common denominator: the energetic action of President John P. Magufuli (nicknamed ‘bulldozer’) to take control of the economic-financial flows of Tanzania, both domestic and international.
I will limit myself to a laconic list:
– 12 hours after taking office: the President inspects the offices of the Ministry of Finance, takes note of unjustified absences, and fires them (Mwananchi).
– two days after taking office: inspection in the port of Dar es Salaam, 2431 containers ‘disappeared’, the top executives are dismissed (Reuters);
– in the following months: many other sources of waste for the government budget are abolished or redefined (GoTanzania.org); continuous and meticulous controls over tax evasion, both domestic and international, including the striking example of the mining industry (The Citizen / Pressenza).
– The list could continue for pages, until the very recent intervention of the government, with the army, to buy and store cashew nuts in response to the lockout of private companies (BBC) …
Satisfied? Maybe not enough, but better than before?
Ouch, ouch, this is the counter-proof that you are content to investigate the tip of the iceberg or, as an African would say, the nose of the hippo. You are wasting time and energy following secondary paths, the economic-financial ones, leaving yourself hypnotized by the mainstream media, which are paid precisely to do the daily brainwashing to both Africans and us westerners. With the aggravating circumstance that, while Africans recognize themselves as ignorant, we pathetic Westerners tragicomically claim to be ‘informed’, or rather ‘shrewd’ and therefore ‘difficult to cheat’. So the masters of the world, with their hypnotizing media, take us all by the nose (us, not the hippos), attributing everything to the corrupt-corruptor pair, that is, to some rotten apple, thus reinforcing the illusion that the rest of the basket, i.e. the current world system, is fundamentally healthy, efficient and effective. Perfect strategy to maintain the status quo, that is to say to keep the power, the real one, firmly in the hands of a few families all over the world (and with good peace of mind of the Trumps/Merkels on duty at any time).
What am I saying? I am saying that the economic-financial component is a secondary aspect of the problem. The enormous and clearly prevailing submerged mass of the iceberg (or hippopotamus) is neither economic nor financial in nature. It is of a MONETARY nature. The scams, the robberies that the western economic-financial system perpetrates against the poor countries (including marginal European ones like Italy and Spain -not to mention Greece!-) are peanuts in comparison with the mega-scam, the mega-robbery that the international banking system carries out every day on a planetary scale. The international banking system is headed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) of Basel (Switzerland), which control the central banks of the various states (including the FED, the ECB, the Bank of Tanzania, etc.) and the World Bank. All these bodies have a public facade but are entirely controlled by a few euro-US families. At the lower level are the ordinary banks, both public and private, in all states except those few called ‘rogue‘ because they refuse to submit to the global cartel incorporated in the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network.
Even the German Minister of Finance is now openly saying that the SWIFT system is too subjugated to US interests, and we Europeans should make our own.
The five BRICS member states (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) declare that freeing themselves from the SWIFT is one major constituent reasons for their union, and for years they have been moving from declarations to facts, on a growing Rossinian momentum.
To conclude: the worst robberies that the most rapacious corporate carry on every day against Tanzania and poor countries on the ECONOMIC-FINANCIAL level are a breeze compared to the deadly bloodshed that those same countries suffer on the MONETARY level (read: rigged currency exchange regime and, more upstream, mathematically non-repayable debts).
All the multinationals and all the worst adventurers in the world have never managed to subtract 1000% of its GDP from Tanzania in 20 years. Instead, the IMF-SWIFT has done so, and shamelessly continues to do so.
The president of Tanzania is on the rampage, in a more or less disjointed way, against the nose of the hippo, and from what pulpit could the sermon come if his Western colleagues and examiners feel calm, seeing only waver their castles built on the tip of the iceberg while the underwater ice is sucked by their own IMF-SWIFT system?