This year’s theme, "Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations," is timely and profoundly urgent. It speaks directly to the ongoing struggle to redress the enduring impacts of colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, apartheid, and systemic exploitation. These historical crimes were not merely acts of violence against individuals—they were assaults against entire peoples, economies, and civilisations.
For African workers, this call for reparative justice resonates deeply. The African labour movement has always stood at the forefront of the fight for dignity, equity, and economic justice. We are resolute and committed to waging the struggle for justice because we see, know and feel the consequences of historical injustice that are still with us—in underdeveloped labour markets, weakened institutions, exploitative trade arrangements, modern slavery, neo-colonial relations and economies structured around extraction rather than empowerment.
Reparations must not be reduced to mere symbolic gestures or abstract debates. They must encompass concrete commitments to transform the structures that continue to disadvantage African people and their descendants across the globe. This necessitates access to fair wages, quality education, universal social protection, decent work opportunities, and control over Africa’s resources. It also requires that international trade and financial systems cease undermining the sovereignty of African nations and instead become engines of shared prosperity. Dissolving artificial boundaries and transforming the entire continent into a common market through regional cooperation and integration are key areas for Africa’s future development.
On this year’s Africa Day, we join the African Union and call for concrete and transformative action to address structural inequalities and advance justice, dignity, and development for all African people and their descendants worldwide.
This includes:

• Reparative economic justice: Through fair trade regimes, living wages, debt cancellation, and universal social protections.

• Reinforced industrial policies - should create decent employment for Africa’s youth and women and empower local industries over extractive interests.

• Enhanced labour protection: We call on African governments and global institutions to end informalisation, uphold labour rights, and enable unions to organise and represent all categories of workers, including those in the informal and platform economies.

• Climate justice: Though Africa has contributed the least to climate change, it bears a disproportionate burden. Reparative justice must include financing for Africa’s mitigation, adaptation, and Just Transition strategies.

• Continental integration: Our development strategy must involve dissolving artificial colonial boundaries and building a widespread African market through regional cooperation and integration.

• Restitution of stolen heritage: Cultural artefacts and resources looted during colonialism must be returned to their rightful communities.

• Halt to hegemonic and patriarchal neo-colonial relations that undermine and exploit Africa’s security, peace, stability, wealth and sovereignty.

• Global solidarity with the diaspora: Africans in the Americas, Caribbean, Europe, and beyond must be actively included in this agenda—their struggles are inseparable from ours.

Reparations are about restoring dignity, closing economic disparities, and empowering African nations and workers to determine their destinies. As trade unions, we see reparations not as a historical footnote. As a transformative agency for justice and development, we are committed to ensuring that reparations become a tool for transforming systems, not maintaining them. Of course, we know that reparation is a struggle and not a tea party.

Therefore, we are committed to continuing this struggle through grit, unity, and solidarity to ensure dignity for our race and people. Let’s fight on because when we fight, we win!
Long Live Africa!
Amka Afrika!
Issued in Lome, Togo on 23rd May 2025
Akhator Joel Odigie
General Secretary
ITUC-Africa