When in hole, stop digging: The EIB won’t plunder Africa anymore
The European investment bank announced today that it will not finance any more mining projects in Africa and will instead reorient its funds toward “projects that really benefit people”, according to the new vice president of the bank. After years of financing dodgy mining deals, the EIB publicly claims it is done with the sector. The president of the bank apologized today for his role in awarding subsidies to huge western mining corporations infamous for their violations of human rights and the environment. “We made mistakes, for which I am sorry,” said Desislava Stoyanova, new communication officer of the Bank. She continues “We apologize for the pollution, we apologize for the displacement, we apologize for the corruption, we won’t do it again. The lure of money was too strong and we were too weak to resist, but we’ve done too much harm, it’s time to change”.
For years, studies have shown the mining sector rarely contributes to eradicating poverty, creating only a few precarious jobs and raising limited resources for host countries. On the contrary, it more often led to increasing tension and conflict in sensitive states, as well as social issues and environmental destruction. Wealthy multinationals were glad to benefit from advantageous loans from the EIB to invest outside the EU, where they were not bound by EU law. As the Bank had no binding standards and procedures to evaluate the projects it backed, the result were certain to be disastrous : massive water pollution, terrible working conditions and ridiculous rates of royalties.
“Going back to our mandate of development in Africa, we’ve realised that we had never thought about assessing our projects’ impact on people’s life conditions. But looking at it now, it seems pretty clever to make sure we don’t waste taxpayers money on highly destructive projects anymore,” confided the President of the Bank.
Full of good resolutions, the experts of the EIB are now debating small scale projects responding to the need of people, and seem to have totally forgotten about their old fondness for the short term export oriented model. Africans will appreciate it.