May 5—*The Schiller Institute and the Fédération des associations d’amitiés Chine-Afrique (FAACA) held a three-hour video conference May 4 on “China-Africa Cooperation in Poverty Reduction Strategy.” The FAACA is a multi-nation association, with an office in Dakar, Senegal. Speakers included Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder and leader of the Schiller Institute; Assane Mbengue, President of FAACA; His Excellency Ibrahima Sory Sylla, Senegalese Ambassador to China; Zhang Hangbao, First Secretary to His Excellency Xiao Han, Chinese Ambassador to Senegal; Zhang Yun, CEO of SOMETA SA (Senegal’s leading iron and steel company); Edmond Moukala N’Gouemo, UNESCO representative in Ghana, and others.

Some 50 people attended the entire conference, which included lively discussion, moderated by Sébastian Périmony, Schiller Institute-France. Below is Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s speech in English, the conference having been held entirely in French.*

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: Dear participants of this conference of the Federation of China-Africa Friendship Associations, my dear African friends, we are clearly at a crossroads of history and the outcome of how this will end is not yet decided. We have on the one side an escalation of the war in Ukraine, which is actually a proxy war of NATO against Russia. NATO will soon have to make a decision, because it is not going well for the Ukrainians, either to negotiate or escalate. There are many forces in the Transatlantic world who call for escalation, which has the danger of leading in the short term to a global nuclear war.

Then we have the genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza,and the pending attack by the Israel Defense Forces on Rafah, on people who are already dying of hunger, of starvation, of thirst, of need of everything. The entire Southwest Asia region is a powder keg, which if ignited, could also lead to global war.

Then we have the extension of NATO, or the effort of NATO to become Global NATO by extending itself into the Indo-Pacific around the South China Sea, the Taiwan crisis with China, which is being steered from the outside.

Now all these three crises are driven by the collapse of the Transatlantic financial system. Because what is behind all of this escalation is a desperate effort to prevent the emergence of a new economic system.

Let’s briefly look back at the end of the Cold War where we had the chance for a peace order for the 21st century. With the LaRouche Movement, the Schiller Institute actually promoted [peace] by proposing the Eurasian Land-Bridge as the beginning of the World Land-Bridge connecting all continents through infrastructure.

At that time there was the promise not to expand NATO one inch to the East, but this promise was broken right away. The neocons established the Wolfowitz Doctrine, which was the idea that the United States will be the leader of a unipolar world, and not allow any country or group of countries to bypass the United States economically, militarily or politically.

Instead they went to consolidate this unipolar world by pushing regime change, color revolution, intervention with wars. All of that, which for the last thirty years has led to a gigantic blowback because the countries of the Global South saw what was happening. They saw the effect of the sanctions against Iran, against Syria, against Yemen, against Nicaragua, Venezuela, and all the other countries, and they saw what it did to increase the poverty of the poor.

So, what were the consequences of the endless wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Syria, Libya? Millions of people died. They saw the weaponization of the dollar.

But then on the other side you have the rise of China which first lifted 850 millions of its own people out of poverty, and then, when in 2013 Xi Jinping announced the Belt and Road Initiative, the New Silk Road—which actually was an echo of our original Eurasian Landbridge proposal from 1991. The world started to change dramatically.

In the ten years since, or almost eleven years, the Belt and Road Initiative has given the countries of the Global South, for the first time, the chance to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. The emergence of the BRICS, the BRICS-Plus, for which now more than 40 countries have applied, is causing a tectonic change in history. Six hundred years of colonialism is ending, and you have right now a revival of the Spirit of Bandung.

At Bandung, Indian Prime Minister Nehru and Indonesian President Sukarno warned that even if colonialism was formally ending it was not ending in terms of its neocolonial form, namely the control and access to credit and trade. And this period is now coming to an end. Because with the cooperation with China and the tremendous civilizational effort China has provided to all of humanity, now the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America for the first time are absolutely in a position to no longer have to just export raw materials, but to add to the production chain in their own country with the aim to become middle level income countries very soon. So there is absolutely the tremendous chance that Africa will become the continent of the future as a result of this changes.

In 2050 Africa will have 2.5 billions people, at very young ages, which means we have to create 1 billion productive jobs in the near future.

Now, for our organization, for Lyndon LaRouche, Africa was at the center of our effort from the very beginning. The first plan for a comprehensive development plan, we presented it in Paris at a big conference. And my late husband Lyndon LaRouche said many times that the morality of the entire human species will be measured by how we treat Africa and their rightful demand for development. He first then produced another plan in 1980 which was a commentary and a criticism of the Lagos Plan of Action.

We conducted several big international conferences in Khartoum with the five countries of the Nile which, you know, whose development is still on the agenda. We were fighting for 30 years for the Transaqua project which is the idea to bring about 3 or 4 or 5% of the water of the Congo and bring it up through a system of canals and rivers to Lake Chad, by canals and rivers and that way giving electricity to 12 countries along the way, refilling Lake Chad, which will then be the source of irrigation of a large territory surrounding the Sahel zone.

Now, when the century agreement between China and the African Union was signed on the 27 January 2015 in Addis Ababa, there was opening a possibility for a continent-wide integrated, system of fast trains; and then at the Johannesburg Summit in 2023, when the BRICS countries convened there, and decided to become the BRICS-Plus, President Putin of Russia promised that he would head up [providing] the African continent with electricity from nuclear energy.

So there is an epochal change taking place, and reason for absolute optimism that the plan of the African Union for 2063 will be fully realized. It will mean that the vision of statesmen who fought for the development of Africa and several of whom paid with their life, is coming true, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, Kwame N’krumah in Ghana, the father of the Non-Aligned Movement, Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and foremost, Lyndon LaRouche who had made a measuring rod for the moral identity of humanity, how Africa will be treated.

Now the moral leadership role as already being taken over by the South African government, because it was they who brought the case of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza to the International Court of Justice. It was not the collective West. It was South Africa, and they did so in evoking the tradition of the fight against apartheid.

The Global South, the Global Majority, is actually the key today, in my view, to overcome the strategic crisis and the danger of nuclear war. Because the relationship between NATO and Russia, and NATO and China is already so much poisoned and slandered, that it definitely requires the addition of the Global Majority to come out with a very strong voice. And you must unite. Speak with one voice. Because as Prime Minister Nehru and President Sukarno said in Bandung in 1955, if it comes to nuclear war, the Global South, the developing sector, will die as well, even if they die a few days or weeks later.

So therefore the Global Majority has the absolute moral legitimacy to demand that the countries of the Global North cooperate, that they must stop confrontation, and they must work with the BRICS-Plus. The only way that the Global North can undo the guilt of colonialism is by cooperating with the industrial revolution of the Global South. And you have to take a very strong stand and be very firm. What South African President Ramaphosa in Paris said at the international financial summit a short while ago. He said the international community should provide the financing of the Inga Dam. “If you do that, then we believe that you are serious with your promises!” It will cost about $80 billions which will then produce 42 GW of electricity that will be a revolution for the energy supply of the entire continent and the entire economy of Africa. So take that stand and demand, because they owe it.

First, South Africa took the genocide case in Gaza to the International Criminal Court of Justice, now the students in the United States are protesting the genocide as well. And both South Africa and the students are upholding the honor of humanity. But we have to bridge the Global South and those people in the Global North who are fighting for humanity to keep its soul. Because without this bridge, I don’t think we can succeed.

Recently the Schiller Institute had a conference on an Oasis Plan for Southwest Asia. This is the idea that given the fact that much of Southwest Asia is desert, we need to produce lots of fresh water by building canals from the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea, to the Red Sea and then use nuclear energy to desalinate large amounts of ocean water, create actually new rivers this way, and have water for irrigation for agriculture, forests, new cities, and a real integrated infrastructure project.

Now that same concept can apply for all of Africa. Egypt is already building many projects, but you can use the Oasis concept for Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and regain much of the Sahel zone in the Sahara by desalination of ocean water. Take Sudan for example. They have the most fertile soil on the planet and with water they could have three to four harvests each year.

Now all of that is not enough: We also need a new international security and development architecture in the tradition of the Peace of Westphalia, which takes into account the security and development interest of every single country on the planet, and which pushes for the first time, the idea of the One Humanity first. And with this new paradigm I think we will have a very bright future. All my best for you.