Addressing Reparations as an Inalienable Right of Africans and People of African Descent -By Kestér Kenn Klomegâh

Decades after attaining political independence, African countries have teamed 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 collective solidarity.

Guided by the Pan African Progressive Front (PPF), early September during a conference on Debt and Reparations, demanded through unbreakable spirit of Pan-Africanism and struggle, demanded for reparative justice which reflects the very essence of the existence of the Pan African Progressive Front. “The plain and simple truth that demands constant echoing is that the so-called debt crisis of Africa is not an accident, neither is it an African creation. It is the continuation of the same plunder of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism and imperialism by other refined and well camouflaged means and methods. For 400 years they took our know-how without due credit and our labour for free. For 100 years they took our lands, minerals and other resources for free. Now, they lend us our own stolen wealth at interest, and call us debtors. We cannot discuss debt without discussing resetting, repair and restitution. And we cannot discuss repair without demanding justice,” declared in an introductory speech by Humphery Quaye, head of the Pan African Progressive Front.

The Pan African Progressive Front (PPF) is non-Government organization – a united front of progressive political parties, trade unions, youth and women’s movements, peasant associations, socialist formations, and mass organizations from across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Black Diaspora. In the last 18 months, the PPF has moved from idea to institution. On June 30th, 2025, it opened the PPF International Headquarters in Accra, Ghana’s capital city. Accra becomes again the capital of Pan-African Movement. Records however show, in preparation for the historic task, it convened a landmark online conference bringing together over 60 influential Pan-African formations from 32 countries, in Africa, Brazil and the United States. The Conference underscored the importance of the Trade Union struggles, Women’s emancipation, and Youth engagement forward.

On 18th and 19th of November 2025, at the iconic Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park in Accra, the PPF convened the International Conference of Progressive Pan-African Forces to Commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the 5th Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945. Manchester 1945 gave Africa political independence and therefore, must give economic independence, which is intrinsically linked to reparative justice. That Conference, held under the motto: “From Historical Memory to Economic and Political Justice,” was opened by President John Dramani Mahama, the African Union Champion for Reparations, and brought together over 200 delegates from 57 countries.

That Conference produced not communiques, but concrete instruments: it adopted the Accra Declaration – a comprehensive program for Africa’s complete liberation: resource sovereignty, industrialization, agricultural revolution, and financial independence. It adopted the Special Accra Declaration on Reparations, which declared reparations an inalienable right of Africans and people of African descent.

And today, it moved from rhetoric to architecture. The Declaration proclaims:
a) The creation of the Joint Institute for the Assessment of Damage and Documentation of the Colonial Legacy – to build the scientific, legal and archival evidence base for our claims in international courts and at the UN;
b) The creation of the Pan-African Reparations Justice Fund – based on principles of transparency and accountability to manage and redistribute reparatory resources;
c) The demand for the return of stolen cultural artifacts, with a special exhibition of looted treasures held alongside the conference to remind the world that they still hold the soul in their museums.

The 1945 Congress was led by Nkrumah, Padmore, Du Bois, Kenyatta, and Banda. They were young men and women then. They declared Africa must be free. Today, in 2026, it is necessary to declare that Africa must be “free from debt, free from neocolonial control, and paid what is owed to Africa as a whole.” The Youth of Africa demanded: Cancel the odious debt. Pay the reparatory debt. Therefore, the youth has identified three tasks: (i) Formulate the Youth Chapter of the Accra Declaration – what does reparations mean for climate justice, for tech sovereignty, for the future; (ii) Organize in every campus, every community, every digital space; and (iii) Prepare to join the Continental Campaign for the establishment of National and Regional Reparations Bodies.

The current concern relating to debts and reparations are simply not sentimental and nostalgia, the PPF has offered a diagnosis and power against the powers that benefited from slavery, massive looting and exploitation. In an interview in September 2026, Humphery Quaye, head of the Pan African Progressive Front (PPF), explained that “all that happened, the architects who planned and executed this economic evil, the bloody and heartless murderous plunder have to speedily dealt with by the progressive forces. Today, the so-called multinational giants are the inheritors and heirs of the loot from the mass murder, rape, genocide and the worse! Not even the descendants of the slaves in those countries like the United States. They are still at the bottom of the social ladder with no access to the wealth created by the painful ordeals and labour of their forebears. To pander, to blaming Africans is simply letting off the real culprits of the most heinous crime in human history.”

Pan-African Progressive Front convened, in September, against the backdrop of a continent-wide reckoning with colonial debt and the unfinished business of reparative justice, has asked progressive forces, trade unions, women and youth to respond actively to the deepening of crisis of debt bondage across Africa, a crisis thrown into sharpest relief by the Alliance of Shael States’ rupture with French monetary and military control, and by Africa’s own passage through default, austerity, and IMF-monitored economic restructuring. Progressive forces have to build on the PPF’s ongoing continental reparations and debt-cancellation campaign, and stand as a deliberate step on the road toward a larger Sahel-region on colonial debt cancellation and reparations. The PPF has set its continental campaign and demands on Debt Cancellation and Global Debt Trap, and Reparations.