22/07/2026
For decades Africa paid around 500 million dollars every single year to Europe, just to lease satellite capacity so Africans could make phone calls, watch television and connect to the internet, often within their own countries. Calls to and from Africa were the most expensive on earth, and the money flowed straight to Europe. In 1992, 45 African nations formed RASCOM to build the continent's own satellite and end the racket. They went to the World Bank, the IMF, the United States and Europe for financing. For fourteen years they got vague promises and nothing else, because the masters had no interest in funding Africa's escape from a 500 million dollar annual bill paid to them. Gaddafi ended the waiting. He put 300 million dollars of Libyan money on the table, the African Development Bank added 50 million, the West African Development Bank added 27 million, and on 26 December 2007 Africa launched its first communications satellite. The 500 million dollar yearly leash to Europe was cut.
Then he aimed higher. As chairman of the African Union in 2009, Gaddafi pushed for a gold-backed pan-African currency, a gold dinar, to free African trade from the US dollar and to give the countries trapped in France's CFA franc a way out at last. Libya was sitting on roughly 143 tonnes of gold to help anchor it. He had already contributed the majority of the funds needed to launch three institutions designed to replace the IMF's grip on the continent, an African Central Bank, an African Monetary Fund and an African Investment Bank. This was a plan to let Africa bank on itself.
In 2011, NATO bombed Libya, and Gaddafi was killed by rebels on the ground. Many Africans are convinced the currency was the real reason, pointing to Hillary Clinton's leaked emails that discussed his gold and his pan-African plans. In fairness, that direct motive has never been proven, and it rests on a single adviser's memo. But the sequence is impossible to ignore. A leader accumulates gold to free Afric
