Writing on “What is Africa owed”, New York Times journalist, Lynsey Chutel, referenced a group of eminent Africans, including the respected Ali Mazrui, who viewed reparations not merely in terms of monetary compensation, but in other efforts of restitution.
“Reparations from Western countries meant reducing their support for African tyrants, supporting democracy on the continent, giving African states a louder voice in international organisations, and cancelling their debt,” she wrote.
Indeed, Africa is riddled with unending debt, with Ghana, for instance, stated in official records to have spent 30 per cent of its national budget in 2024 to service debts instead of delivering tangible infrastructure and other developmental needs of the people.
This reality is what informed Professor Mazrui, Moshood Abiola and other eminent personalities in the 1990s to demand that reparations to Africa must not be restricted to monetary handouts.
At the moment, many activists and economists have valued reparations due Africa in trillions, with Kwesi Pratt Jnr., who is a member of the Coordinating Committee of the Pan-African Progressive Front, estimating in his book on reparations that Africa could be due a conservative figure of $2.28 trillion for the 12.5 million Africans forcibly taken during the transatlantic slave trade spanning the 15th to 19th centuries.
If the cost of labour for every individual forcibly taken into slavery was estimated at $5 per day, each of them would be worth $18,250 in 10 years, with the entire 12.5 million slaves accruing $2.28 trillion in 10 years.
This is a modest estimation, he said, because it does not take into account issues such as inflation and accruing interest.
Chutel, referencing a Ghanaian academic, Daniel Tetteh Osabu-Kle, in a 2000 article published in the Journal of Black Studies, put the figure at $100 trillion, assigning a value of $75,000 per person lost, based on a model of the historic development and population growth of Asia over the same period.
She wrote: “Approximately 12.5 million people were enslaved and taken from Africa, according to a widely accepted figure from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, but some estimates argue that as many as 20 million people were enslaved”.
Worst still, the expansive plunder by the West knew no bounds.
Renowned economist Utsa Patnaik states that Britain extracted $45 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938.
Marchal, a Belgian scholar, also estimates that in Congo under King Leopold II, 10 million people died between 1885 and 1908, while Belgium’s profit from this period amounted to $1.1 billion in today’s value.
While Africa is yet to receive its due for suffering slavery, colonisation and other injustices, the West has made some efforts towards other people.
For example, Germany has paid out $89 billion in reparations for the Holocaust (since 1952), while the United States has paid $1.6 billion to Japanese Americans interned during World War II.
Meanwhile, France compelled 14 African countries to hold – in CFA franc – 50 per cent of their reserves totalling $500 billion in Paris.
Although some efforts have been made towards reparations to Africa, the volume of them has been woefully inadequate when compared to what the continent deserves.
For example, Germany agreed to pay €1.1 billion to Namibia for the genocidal atrocities on the Herero and Nama people through their descendants in 2021 in existing aid programmes to be delivered across 30 years, while the UK gave £20 million to Kenya for victims of the Mau uprising.
But these sums are insignificant for Africa to the extent that £20 million for Kenya, for example, translates to just £3,500 per survivor.
In a May 2025 article published by the United Nations, Cristina Duarte, a Cabo Verdean former Minister of Finance, Planning and Public Administration who now serves as Special Advisor on Africa to the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, wrote that Africa’s call for reparations is “not just for reflection, but for clarity, courage, and a strategic reframing of the reparations discourse”.
She described the African Union theme for 2025, framed as: “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations”, as “a powerful and necessary theme”.
She then justified Africa’s demand for reparative justice by emphasising that the continent has become “a net creditor to the world, losing more than $500 billion every year through illicit financial flows, unfair trade practices, exploitative investment frameworks, and debt servicing, while it is home to some of the world’s poorest populations”.
For instance, she recounted that Ghana exported $9.58 billion in gold in 2024, yet it only retained 14 per cent of the value due to the nature of multinational agreements; that the DRC produces over 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt, yet only one per cent is refined in the country before being exported; that Zimbabwe was ranked as the third-largest producer of chromium in 2023, yet most was exported in raw form; that collectively, West Africa produces 70 per cent of the world’s cocoa beans but contributes less than one per cent of the global chocolate market, while in Somalia, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing by foreign fishing fleets costs the economy $300 million a year.
With important voices such as Ghana’s President, John Dramani Mahama, taking a front-seat role in championing the subject of reparations to Africa, the effort might take a better turn this time.
Now that the likes of Ghana President, John Dramani Mahama, are in the forefront of the push to claim the necessary reparations from the West, the effort might yield results sooner rather than later.
Indeed, President Mahama urged the African Union during the 13th AU High-Level Delegation Dialogue on Democracy, Governance and Human Rights held in Accra on Tuesday, July 29, 2025, to empower the relevant agencies under the body to prosecute its reparations agenda.
This is why the effort cannot fail.
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