President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has repeated his calls for reparations for the Slave Trade masterminded by the West.
He insists it is time for the subject to be brought to the fore for discussion and a commensurate compensation paid to Africa.
President Akufo-Addo mentioned this in his address to the 78th UN Genera Assembly on Wednesday, September 20.
In his impassioned call, he said though the current generation of leaders in the West had no hand in the Slave Trade, it was state-sponsored and the benefits being enjoyed currently.
“Granted the current generation are not the ones that engaged in the Slave Trade, but that grant in human enterprise was state-sponsored and deliberate and its benefits are clearly interwoven with the present-day economic architecture of the nations that designed and executed it,” he told the Assembly.
“Reparations must be paid for the Slave Trade,” Ghana’s leader stressed.
He revealed that the African Union is taking the matter up and has already tasked Ghana to host a global conference on the issue in Accra in November.
For Ghana’s leader, “No amount of money will ever make up for the horrors but it will make the point that evil was perpetrated and that millions of productive Africans were snatched from the embrace of our continent and put to work in the Americas and the Caribbean without compensation from their labour.”
He added that the Slave Trade accounts for the inequalities in the sharing of the world’s resources with Africa at a disadvantage.
“Surely this is a matter that the world must confront and can no longer ignore.”