The author links Africa’s push for reparations—led politically by Ghana’s President John Mahama as AU Champion—to a new scramble for minerals and processing, while arguing the continent still lacks factories and is burdened by conflict and debt.

The Accra-based Pan African Progressive Front (PPF), opened June 2025, convened a November 2025 conference at Nkrumah Memorial Park (200-plus delegates, 57 countries) that adopted the Accra Declaration and a special reparations text: an institute to document colonial damage, a reparations fund, and return of artifacts.

PPF head Humphrey Quaye frames African debt as recycled plunder and calls for cancelling “odious” debt, paying a reparatory debt, youth chapters on climate and tech, national reparations bodies, and solidarity with Sahel states breaking with French monetary and military ties.

Decades after attaining political independence, African countries have teamed up and fiercely advocating to reparations. Historical records show that Africa endured several years of slavery and economic exploitation. Today, Africa becomes the geographical region for an increasingly growing geopolitical race for influence, power and natural resources. The continent still lacks advanced manufacturing capacity and processing facilities, while facing challenges of ethnic conflicts and majority of leaders display lust for political power. Ultimately, the Western powers, with significant interests in Africa’s natural resources, are  returning to the continent, and this time renegotiating for  control of processing operations. Western governments are increasingly seeking such alternatives across the continent, with an estimated 30% of the global mineral wealth. The African governments are seemingly providing such strategic leverage, as it has closely been tied to the question of reparations.

These trends are unfolding, while the African leaders group, headed by the Ghana’s President John Dramani Mahama, is advocating for reparations at conferences inside Africa, and at international platforms including the United Nations. The political elites are rallying behind the move. The youth associations are organizing and requesting for reparations now! These are simultaneous efforts directed at building Pan-African Unity. It also shows Africa’s........

© Eurasia Review