This year’s African Union Theme “Assuring Sustainable Water Availability and Safe Sanitation Systems to Achieve the Goals of Agenda 2063” arrives at a moment that demands honesty, political courage, and urgent action from African leaders, multinational corporations, multilateral institutions, and the global economic system.

According to recent estimates by the African Development Bank (AfDB), Africa loses more than USD 580 billion annually through corruption, illicit financial flows, profit shifting, and capital leakages — equivalent to approximately USD 1.6 billion every single day. These are resources stolen from schools, hospitals, water systems, sanitation infrastructure, energy access, decent jobs, and the continent’s future. At the same time, the latest WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme findings continue to show that billions worldwide lack access to safely managed drinking water and sanitation services, with Africa bearing a disproportionate share of the burden. Millions of African households continue to rely on unsafe water sources and inadequate sanitation systems despite the continent’s immense natural wealth.

Every illicit financial flow is stolen water. Every tax haven is a stolen sanitation. Every corrupt deal is stolen electricity, healthcare, education, housing, and hope. Young Africans continue risking their lives across deserts and seas in search of opportunity and survival elsewhere because too many no longer believe the continent can provide a future for them. The burden of these failures falls most heavily on workers, women, youth, and vulnerable communities. Women continue to bear the invisible costs of collapsing public systems through unpaid care work, water collection, and sustaining households under worsening economic conditions.

ITUC-Africa, therefore, calls on African governments to confront kleptocracy, corruption, elite capture, and unjust taxation systems with seriousness and political courage. Public office cannot continue to serve as an instrument of private accumulation, tax evasion, and personal aggrandisement.

Further, African workers argue that a democracy that cannot guarantee clean water, sanitation, affordable energy, healthcare, decent work, and dignity for its people — while public wealth leaks through corruption and unfair taxation systems — risks becoming a democracy in form but exclusionary in practice. The growing inequality across Africa is morally indefensible, economically destructive, and politically dangerous. Democracy cannot survive where wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few while the majority are denied the basic conditions for a dignified life. The true dividends of democracy are clean water, safe sanitation, reliable electricity, decent work, affordable healthcare, quality education, social protection, housing, and human dignity.

ITUC-Africa, therefore, calls for bold and progressive tax justice measures across the continent. African governments must tax multinational corporations, extractive industries, speculative wealth, and the super-rich fairly. Africa cannot continue depending on unsustainable debt and aid while enormous wealth escapes through tax havens, illicit financial flows, and exploitative economic arrangements.

To multilateral institutions and the global development aid machinery, we also issue a direct challenge. Africa does not need a permanent aid architecture that reproduces dependency while weakening public systems and developmental sovereignty. For decades, externally imposed economic prescriptions have weakened state capacity, promoted reckless privatisation, reduced investment in public infrastructure, and undermined public services across the continent. The consequences are now visible in energy poverty, failing public systems, unemployment, debt crises, and widening social inequality.

ITUC-Africa further stresses that Africa’s future depends on reclaiming its energy sovereignty. It is unacceptable that a continent endowed with immense solar, hydro, geothermal, gas, and critical mineral resources remains home to some of the world’s highest levels of energy poverty. A Just Transition for Africa must guarantee universal access to affordable energy, public and community-centred energy systems, local industrialisation, decent green jobs, technology transfer, democratic control of strategic resources, and development pathways determined by African peoples themselves.

Water sovereignty, energy sovereignty, and economic sovereignty are inseparable from democratic sovereignty. Therefore, on this Africa Day, ITUC-Africa calls upon African governments, the African Union, trade unions, civil society organisations, youth movements, women’s organisations, and progressive social forces to unite around a transformative agenda that defeats kleptocracy, ends illicit financial flows, progressive taxation governance, strengthens public services, advances fair taxation, guarantees universal access to water and sanitation, promotes decent work, advances inclusive industrialisation, and ensures that Africa’s wealth benefits African people and defeats inequality.

Issued in Lomé, Togo, 25 May 2026, by Akhator Joel Odigie, General Secretary, ITUC-Africa