President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has urged European nations to acknowledge the ills of the grim legacy of the trans-Atlantic slave trade by paying reparations to Africa.
President Akufo-Addo told world leaders that though no amount of money could ever truly compensate for the immeasurable horrors endured by Africans during the slave trade, paying reparations would symbolise a bold acknowledgement of the evil that was inflicted upon the African people.
Addressing the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 20th September 2023, he noted that there has been a longstanding global reluctance to confront the realities and repercussions of the slave trade.
He added that when slavery was abolished slave owners were compensated for the loss of the slaves, because the human beings were labelled as property, deemed to be commodities.
He explained that “for centuries, the world has been unwilling and unable to confront the realities of the consequences of the slave trade, but gradually this is changing, and it is time to bring the subject of reparations firmly to the fore.”
“Granted that current generations are not the ones that engaged in the slave trade, but that grand inhuman enterprise was state-sponsored and deliberate, and its benefits are clearly interwoven with the present-day economic architecture of the nations that designed and executed it,” he said.
President Akuffo Addo emphasised that no amount of money will ever make up for the horrors endured but it would make the point that evil was perpetrated and millions of productive Africans were snatched from the embrace of our continent. Surely, this is a matter that the world must confront, and can no longer ignore.
He further disclosed that the African Union has authorised Ghana to hold a global conference on the matter of reparations for Africa at its conference scheduled for November 2023 in Accra.
