AS THE United Nations climate summit once again failed to deliver any realistic finance to help developing countries deal with the impact of the worsening climate emergency, 144 countries face the worst debt crisis in history.

The fact that there are 193 UN recognised sovereign countries illustrates the depth of the debt crisis facing the beleaguered global South.

A report earlier this year by the campaign group Debt Relief International for Norwegian Church Aid (DRI) shows that repaying the debt is absorbing 41.5 per cent of budget revenues, 41.6 per cent of spending, and 8.4 per cent of gross domestic product on average across the 144 developing countries.

Health and education budgets have been slashed by debt-enslaved countries as nearly half of national budgets are used to pay creditors.

This paralysing debt enslavement halts any attempts by the world’s poorest nations to break away from the control of the self-appointed “masters of the universe” — the small but powerful cabal of Western countries led by the United States.

It also means the global South will never be able to escape from the extractive, exploitative and abusive relationship that it has been subjected to by Western powers.

I was once told that there is little point in merely finding ways to cope with an abusive relationship — one must find the means and the strength to leave it.

It is unacceptable for a continent as rich and abundant as Africa is to be in a position where it imports around 85 per cent of its food, with much of this food only affordable to tourists and the well-to-do on the continent.

Dagfinn Hoybraten, the secretary-general of Norwegian Church Aid, said at the time the report was released that high debt burdens are “a huge drain on a country’s economy and hits the poorer parts of the population first through cuts in welfare, education, or health expenditure to pay debts. A debt crisis is paralysing and undermines all other development efforts.”

As bad as the situation is now, the truth is that the outlook for the future is worse, as developing nations face additional pressures such as dealing with the impact of the climate emergency and whatever the next pandemic brings.

But the global North, unsurprisingly, continues to refuse to do the right thing. It refuses to pay for the damage it has caused to the planet — with the greatest impact falling most heavily on the world’s poorest nations.

The latest UN Conference of the Parties summit (Cop29) in the Azerbaijani capital Baku agreed to make available a paltry $300 billion (around £239bn) for developing countries that need the cash to cope with the transition from coal, oil and gas that causes the globe to overheat. But it is nowhere near the $1.3 trillion (just over a £1trn) that developing countries were demanding.

Responding to this, one climate activist from the global South is alleged to have described the amount being made available as “not even enough money to pay for the coffins we will need,” as people die off from the impacts of climate change.

It is the clearest indication possible that the world’s richest nations are interested only in getting richer and do not care about the impoverishment caused by them across huge swathes of the rest of the world.

Unfortunately they have also been able to incorporate some global South (mis)leaders to maintain these horrendous levels of poverty as a means of controlling working-class and peasant communities.

These so-called leaders have been willing to do the bidding of their masters in the North for the fattening of their personal offshore bank accounts.

To be fair, even many of these leaders appear to understand the basic equation that unless something is done, climate change will mean they will actually have no people or country left to “mislead.”

Those die-hard supporters of the West that remain must be made to understand that it is no longer in their interests to ignore the interests of their own people — millions of whom have no idea from one day to the next how they will put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads.

In places such as Kenya, more than 90 per cent of the economy is informal, with people having to find creative ways to make a living. This is far from unusual across the global South and means there is no degree of certainty for millions of people over how to survive.

As the massive debt burden continues to bite and the climate emergency adds to the woes of the global South, survival in this abusive relationship is simply not an option. Abusive relationships all too often end with the abused being killed.

We need to help organise the intervention into the abusive relationship so the nations being abused can stage a collective getaway.

For decades there have been calls for the debt to be cancelled. We must recharge these calls.

Not only should the debt be cancelled but the debate should be turned into one about how much money these rich nations actually owe the South for the exploitation and the damage they have caused.

The rich nations of the global North must not be allowed to continue to claim the impracticality of cancelling the debt. There is a precedent. 

After reversing a decision to keep the defeated Germans impoverished after World War II, the Western victors instead decided to turn West Germany into an economic powerhouse as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. 

This led to the cancellation of around 50 per cent of the debt owed by Germany.

They simply do not wish to do the same, at any significant level, for any of the nations of the global South — around 80 per cent of the global population — that they keep firmly under their iron heel through debt enslavement. 

The debate is the wrong way round. We should be talking about the money the rich exploiter countries owe the global South rather than the other way round.

There should be a commitment from the nations of the global South to agree to stop paying a debt that was forced on them and which, in any case, they can’t afford.

There can be no serious progress by the nations of the global South until debt enslavement is ended.

That requires the leaders in those countries to do what’s best for their own populations rather than the transnational corporations that mostly benefit from these high levels of debt and the exploitative relationship with the global South that it engrains.

But most of all it requires the building of the socialist movements across the global South that will force an end to this wretched debt enslavement.

We must not wait for a Harriet Tubman figure to arrive to lead us out of debt enslavement. We must organise collectively on an international basis to say enough is enough. We are out of here!