President Akufo-Addo has revisited the talks of Europe and America, paying reparations to Africa.

In a passionate address delivered at the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, 20 September 2023, he urged European nations to reckon with the grim legacy of the historic slave trade by paying reparations to Africa for the immeasurable damage it inflicted. 

In a fervent appeal, he lamented the longstanding global reluctance to confront the realities and repercussions of the slave trade, emphasising the crucial need to address this painful history.

“For centuries, the world has been unwilling and unable to confront the realities of the consequences of the slave trade, but gradually this is changing, and it is time to bring the subject of reparations firmly to the fore. Granted that current generations are not the ones that engaged in the slave trade, but that grand inhuman 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,” President Akufo-Addo said.

President Akufo-Addo told world leaders in New York that though no amount of money could ever truly compensate for the unfathomable horrors endured by Africans during the slave trade, paying reparations would symbolise a bold acknowledgment of the evil that was inflicted upon the African people. 

“Reparations must be paid for the slave trade. No amount of money will ever make up for the horrors, but it would make the point that evil was perpetrated, 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 for their labour.

“If there are any hesitations in some minds about the paying of reparations, it is worth considering the fact that, when slavery was abolished, the slave owners were compensated for the loss of the slaves, because the human beings were labelled as property, deemed to be commodities. Surely, this is a matter that the world must confront, and can no longer ignore. The AU has authorised Ghana to hold a global conference on the issue in November in Accra.”