What are his views on Africa? In a recent interview he said "Mummy, mummy Johnny hit me back" what was the reference to?

What Sachs actually argues about Africa

Sachs's central conviction is that Africa's poverty is not caused by something inherently broken about Africa, but by a lack of the right financing and partnerships to unlock growth that is already latent in the continent. He has said that in Africa, "sustainable development means the escape from poverty," and he is emphatic that placing blame is not going to help Africa out of the poverty trap but focusing on solutions can.

He has told audiences: "I believe that the next decades are Africa's turn for super-charged economic growth." His model for how that happens draws directly on Asia. He argues Africa can achieve very rapid development in the next 40 years, in the same way China did between 1980 and 2020 and India has been doing since around 2000.

Where he says the system fails Africa

Sachs is sharply critical of the global financial system's treatment of African countries. He has argued publicly that Africa needs more debt, not less, telling Afreximbank's annual meetings: "The problem with African debt is not the scale, it is that it is short term and at high cost. Investments require a 20 to 30 year time horizon. Long term, reliable financing is the key."

He is also pointed about rating agencies, arguing they "do not understand development," and that what is missing is a design of strategy that takes account of the fact that Africa's growth prospects are "actually the highest in the world, something that rating agencies don't understand and don't even incorporate into their models."

On Africa's sovereignty and the historical record

Africa Sachs has spent decades working with governments across Africa, arguing that development is impossible without sovereignty, long-term planning, and freedom from external domination, and at Wits University in Johannesburg he delivered one of his clearest messages yet: that the age when Britain, France and the United States could violently derail Pan-African progress has ended.

On the quote you cited

The phrase "Mummy, mummy Johnny hit me back" is a well-known playground saying, used as a rhetorical device to describe a situation where someone who struck first complains about the retaliation. It is the logic of the aggressor who then plays the victim. Sachs uses this kind of pointed, accessible language in interviews to describe what he sees as Western hypocrisy, particularly when the United States or NATO countries provoke or initiate pressure on another nation and then cry foul when that nation pushes back. That framing fits squarely within his broader critique of Western foreign policy, which he has made repeatedly in his public interviews on Ukraine, China and Russia.

However, I cannot find any transcript, published interview or verified record in which Sachs uses that specific phrase. I would not want to attach a quote to him that I cannot confirm he actually said. If you have a link to the interview, that would let me look at it directly and give you a full account of what he argued in context.