By Artwell Nhemachena

THE problem of poverty in Africa is not due to lack of enough research nor mitigatory measures being taken.
The problem of poverty in African geo-politics is that it has been weaponised against the very people who are supposed to be beneficiaries of efforts to alleviate and abate the poverty.

The point is that, poverty in Africa is often denied historical context such that colonial poverty is often described wrongly as ‘African poverty’.
Poverty which resulted from enslave-ment and colonial dispossession and/or exploitation of Africans is often unfortu-nately described as African poverty – as if it is of African origin.
In this regard, poverty, including that which is caused by resilient colonial and imperial practices, has been, and is be-ing, naturalised as ‘African poverty’.
And, of course, African wealth, which has been, and is being, stolen and si-phoned to imperial centres, is also erro-neously described as ‘European riches/wealth’ and/or ‘American riches/wealth’.
The scenario is such that African wealth which has been stolen and is shipped to Europe and America is depicted as if it is of European or American origin simply because that African wealth has been re-located to Europe or America.
And European and American poverty, which has been relocated to Africa since the enslavement and colonial eras, is erroneously described as if it is of African origins – it is depicted as African poverty.
It is similar to unfortunate cases where the victim of witchcraft begins to describe the demons that are troubling him or her as his or her demons simply because they are now in his/her spiritual domain. They cease to be the witch’s de-mons even though it is the witch who has dispatched the demons – and this hap-pens when the victim of demonic afflic-tions begins to describe the demons and the afflictions as his or hers.
The logic is similar to one where a thief begins to describe what he/she has sto-len as his/hers simply because the prop-erty has been relocated from the victims of robbery to those who have robbed.
The point I need readers to consider is: At what point must Africans describe poverty as African given the history of enslavement and colonial dispossession and exploitation?
And, of course, dispossession and ex-ploitation have not abated because we are still witnessing the looting of Africa; the land grabs by transnational corporations and the exploitation of Africans, including in transnational corporations where they labour fruitlessly.

Africans need to remember that when Europeans came to colonise, that is to dispossess and exploit Africans, there was massive poverty in Europe where some had enclosed land, leaving their fellows landless and poor.
Those who had been impoverished in Europe then came to alleviate their own poverty back home by dispossessing and exploiting Africans.
Colonisation was a solution for Euro-pean poverty back in the imperial cen-tres.
The net effect here is that Europeans effectively passed on their poverty to Africans whom they dispossessed and exploited as a way to resolve the poverty back in the metropolitan centres.
In order to mask the fact that they passed on their poverty to Africans, Europeans created churches that then blamed African ancestors as causing poverty among their own descendants.
African ancestors are still condemned as ‘demons of poverty’ in some churches that are playing the ideologies of the col-onisers who have outsourced the poverty which they created through dispossess-ing and exploiting Africans to African ancestors.
Put differently, African ancestors have become punch-bags and sacrificial victims for the poverty which was created by colonialists on the continent of Africa.
It is essential for African scholars, re-searchers and thinkers to do a proper history of poverty on the continent of Africa so that future generations do not continue to blame their ancestors for poverty which was created by colonialists.
Africans continue to unwitting-ly blame their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and, more generally, their ancestors as demons of poverty when, in fact, poverty in Africa has colonial roots.
The reason pre-colonial Africans did not go around the world begging for aid is because they were not poor.
In pre-colonial Africa, Africans had their land, livestock, game and other nat-ural resources, including minerals which they mined and traded over long distanc-es. But with colonisation, all these were lost and Africans became poor.
Now one witnesses Africans relying increasingly on ‘humanitarian aid’ which comes, ironically, from those who col-onised, dispossessed, exploited and en-slaved the same Africans for centuries.
Africans do not need poverty allevia-tion and all the fancy projects and pro-grammes that are even supported by the UN organisations. What Africans need is recovery of their ownership and control over their resources.
The demons of poverty are not African, they reside beyond the continent.
Africans must not continue to condemn their ancestors as demons of poverty.
Of course, some Africans have even started to unwittingly condemn their lib-eration war fighters as demons of poverty on the continent.
They do not see the real origins of poverty that is troubling Africans.
Now they demonise their heroes as de-mons of poverty.
Africans must begin to think in terms of the coloniality of poverty so that the majority of the citizens become conscious of the colonial origins of poverty on the continent.
The fact that poverty is in Africa does not mean that it is ipso facto African.
By extension, the fact that poverty is in Zimbabwe does not, by that fact alone, mean that it is Zimbabwean poverty.
If a demon has been cast into one’s house, it does not become one’s own. It remains a demon for those who have cast it in, no matter their efforts in pretences to cast it out.
There is need for clear sightedness here if the problem of poverty is to be solved once and for all.
Poverty in Africa is a matter of colonial geopolitics of poverty — it is foreign-induced.