Emmanuel Macron, standing at the Élysée Palace, asked a question that has haunted the corridors of power for centuries: “How can such a crime be redressed?” Europe and America not excluded.
Uttered at a ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the recognition of slavery as a crime against humanity, this is framed by the French president as an “immense question” that must not be evaded.
In the same breath, the French state continues to dance around the material realities of its history. By abstaining from United Nations resolutions on reparations and offering vague promises of “scientific projects” with Ghana, France remains trapped in an epistemological chasm. It acknowledges the moral stain of its past, but refuses to engage with the forensic reality of its present economic dominance.
However, the silence and indifference that Macron identifies as a “betrayal of what the republic is” are not merely moral failures. They are quantifiable economic defects — the structural outcome of an administrative cesspit.
The forensic reality of the census mesh
The historic genocide of the slave trade is not an abstract, “immense question” beyond the reach of economic diagnostics. On the contrary, it is a forensic reality that can be mapped with surgical precision.
To establish this truth, turn to South Africa.
When we speak of reparations, we are not speaking of symbolic financial payouts that are so easily re-absorbed by the vulture-like vortex of misgovernance and inequality. We are speaking of sovereign restitution.
The African Census Analysis Project (ACAP), which Tukufu Zuberi of the University of Pennsylvania and I pioneered and launched in 1998 alongside African scholars here in South Africa, was the genesis of this understanding.
We recognised then that Africans had abandoned the census data they had collated over years. This data, left rotting under broken tables and on decaying magnetic tapes, contained an unresolved African treasure. By retrieving this data, we began to set the path and platform to uncover the trajectory of human and capital flight that defines the modern African condition. An answer to the feigned perplexity of president Macron.
The data I’ve analysed* reconciles the spatiotemporal socio-economic consequences of African and European interactions. By moving from an “in-out” methodology of national accounts — where life interpretation starts in an amorphous middle and concludes in the middle of economic inputs and outputs — to an “out-in” method where human agents are the beginning and end of the loop, the analysis reveals the net effect of generational social intercourse with this amorphisation. The evidence is clear.
The 2010 pivot: statistical turning point
A major turning point in this mission was the 2010 Round of Population and Housing Censuses. Led by the author, then the statistician-general of South Africa and president of the African Symposium for Statistical Development (ASSD), this round of censuses was established as the critical pivot on which predecessor lapses could be corrected and successor progress could be anchored.
The 2010 round provided the “analytical weight” necessary to bridge the fragmented data environments of the 1980s and 1990s. While progress has remained wobbly in the decade since, a significant number of countries across Sadc, East and West Africa, and North Africa have successfully maintained the momentum. This momentum is essential. But we must be candid: the ongoing statistical delinquency in major economies like Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains a grave concern for the continent. These voids in the census mesh create gaps where extractive interests thrive, and they must be filled if we are to achieve true sovereign statistics.
The R14.3-trillion siphon
The epistemological chasm in modern economic discourse is a deliberate strategy to mask the mechanisms of extraction. Applying the novel out-in in South Africa, we have identified an aggregate of R14.3-trillion in accumulated developmental harm — a figure representing the loss of potential, the theft of human vitality and the imposition of debt. This is not too different to the “double debt” forced upon Haiti for its independence.
Macron’s mea culpa was likely not a spontaneous awakening. It follows the bold assertions of leaders like Ibrahim Traoré, who have claimed their nations’ minerals, signalling that capital — which has long known how to ignore pain — is finally being forced to respond to it. When sovereignty is asserted over the resource, the vulture vortex is disrupted.
The Lehohla Ledger* provides the empirical density to prove that the current age of abundance, especially where that abundance is located, is inconsistent with the legacy of modern-day slavery that alongside poverty cohabits the geographic space.
Artificial intelligence: Africa’s independence
There is a profound irony in the current technological discourse. Artificial intelligence, as it is marketed today, is often presented as a neutral, global tool. But within my framework, AI is reclaimed as “Africa’s independence”.
This is what makes AI so real. By using machine learning to process the high-density census mesh across the 1996, 2001, 2011, and 2022 censuses, we are using the “new instruments of power” that drive integrated reporting. This is the application of the five principles of Morena Mohlomi, the 18th-century Mosotho sage. More than just analysing numbers, we are creating a diagnostic tool for human liberation.
Africa’s independence is not a request, but a mathematical certainty, and it is built upon the solid, immutable truth of our own statistics. The era of abundance is here, and it belongs to those who have the courage to count the cost of the past and the vision to build the infrastructure of the future.
If France is truly interested in redressing its crimes, it does not need another committee. The Ledger is the accounting and accountability tool that confronts the in-out with the out-in method. It seeks to examine the census mesh of nations like France and the formerly colonised and enslaved. It needs to see the “ghost towns” that were once vibrant nodes of African economic activity, now drained into the administrative swamp. We may now pinpoint these siphons with precision. We are no longer asking for a seat at the table of the coloniser; we are using our own instruments of power defined by Morena Mohlomi to build the architecture of our future.
Resolving the identity, economy and geopolitics chasm
Karl Marx, in chapter 15 of Capital Volume 1, marvelled at the archaic and barbaric motives of capital as an inconsistent social formation. Today, those motives continue to manifest in the illicit financial flows that former president Thabo Mbeki has tirelessly worked to expose. The convergence of these historical impulses — the recovery of the “invisible people” in our data, the struggle against illicit transfers and the deployment of the Ledger’s 2,752 instruments — is a movement towards a new development path that resolves the tensions between identity, economy and geopolitics.
Macron claims that France is shaped by the crimes it has committed and that it must face these chapters with clarity. I agree. But clarity is a technical requirement, not a moral one.
Clarity, as Morena Mohlomi instructs us, requires the deployment of new instruments of power. It requires an audit of the colonial inheritance that goes beyond the “black code” and into the very structures of land, labour and capital that were dispossessed through what Mohlomi called integrated reporting.
A call to sovereign restitution
The time for symbolic apologies has passed. The era of “immense questions” that lead to no answers is coming to a close. Africa is now well-armed to claim what is ours. We have the data, we have the methodology of Encebo/Leruo (wealth creation), and we have the diagnostic capacity to hold history to account.
For France to truly redress its role in the slave trade, it must abandon the “in-out” orthodoxy that prioritises the metropole over the periphery. It must join the mission of sovereign restitution. This means supporting the recovery of the “invisible people” through the lens of ACAP, legitimising the census mesh as the standard for economic policy and accepting that the “double debt” is not just a Haitian problem — it is a global defect that must be liquidated.
Macron’s mea culpa affirms that the world is watching, and the victims of the past are now the masters of the data of the future. We are ready to answer the question, “How can such a crime be redressed?”
The answer is found in the recovery of the files of the invisible people. It is found in the assertion that African Intelligence, the true human AI, will drive the next phase of human development.
Africa’s independence is not a request, but a mathematical certainty, and it is built upon the solid, immutable truth of our own statistics. The era of abundance is here, and it belongs to those who have the courage to count the cost of the past and the vision to build the infrastructure of the future.
Phuthuma Nhleko made a call ― we are tired of being invisible in the past, present and in the future.
* My experience in statistical applications of 65 years has consolidated in what has become 2,752 instruments of the Lehohla Ledger. It is an intellectual trove driven by over 3,500 articles that I penned throughout my work life as a bureaucrat and as a member of the public.
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