‘The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside’ - Kwame Nkrumah
The need for Africa to develop its own system of government:
The best form of government is the one that is responsive to the needs of the people. The Chinese have evolved a system of government that is described by the west as authoritarian, tyrannical, autocratic, and repressive but this system has lifted 850 million Chinese out of poverty in the last few decades. By contrast, the numbers of people living in poverty in USA and parts of Europe are on the rise. In fact, if the Chinese contribution to global poverty reduction is removed, we would notice that there has not been significant reduction in poverty in the world over the past 40 years. The approval rating of the Communist Party of China is consistently somewhere between 70% to 90% according to polls including those conducted by pro-western pollsters. And this is tyranny? Do you have a democracy if your elections are rigged or controlled by a few people? Are you living in a democracy when your politicians are in the pockets of corporations who dictate the policies by which you are governed? When your government serves the interests of a few powerful people at the expense of the many, do you have a democracy?
Africa needs to develop a system of governance that is suited to, and adapted for her needs rather than operating a system that has been designed by outsiders for the purposes of under-developing her and leaving her in a condition of perpetual dependency.
The myth of independence and sovereignty:
African countries are neither free nor independent. What they achieved in the 1950s to the 1980s can best be described as flag independence, by which means colonialism morphed into neo-colonialism. In other words, colonialism did not end on Independence Day, but it was transformed into a system of indirect political and economic rule by the former colonial powers. White faces were soon replaced by black surrogates, and through them the neo-colonial powers would control the destiny of 1.3 billion Africans! To control 1.3 billion Africans, you control their leaders. You ensure the leaders are people who are compromised and who can be blackmailed if they refuse orders. Perhaps they are people upon whom you have dossiers on corruption, forgery, criminal history, or sex scandal.
African leaders who are not willing to betray their people have historically been undermined, deposed, overthrown, or assassinated usually through the connivance of African collaborators. Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara and Kwame Nkrumah are examples that readily come to mind. Those leaders who cooperate with their neo-colonial masters are richly rewarded: they are supported and enabled to rig elections, use excessive force to crush dissent against their misrule, steal as much money as they want and govern with as much impunity as they like so long as they do not interfere with the unfettered and cheap access that the neo-colonial powers have to the natural resources and human capital of their homelands. Neo-colonialism breeds corruption and it requires corruption to thrive.
To buttress my point that Africa is neither sovereign nor independent, consider the recent revelation by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. It is now abundantly clear that France, UK, USA and their NATO allies had determined in 2011 that no outcome other than the ouster of Libyan leader, Muamar Ghaddafi, would be acceptable to them. Along came six African leaders who boarded a plane to Libya for talks with Ghaddafi to try to resolve the crisis in his country. Museveni informs us that these African leaders were ordered by NATO to turn back. Let me repeat this. Six African leaders on a mission to resolve a crisis in an African country were ordered by foreigners to turn back. Please note that these African leaders were going to by flying over African territories, not European or American territories. Also, note that Ghaddafi did not invade or start a war against any NATO nation. Yet we are supposed to believe that NATO is a defensive alliance. So, what was Ghaddafi’s offence or sin? Ghaddafi wanted Africa to start trading in gold-backed dinar which would challenge petrodollar hegemony and weaken the neo-colonial grip of the west over African states. The pretexts for NATO intervention were human rights abuse and lack of democracy. In the case of Saddam Hussein, the pretext for overthrowing him was possession of weapons of mass destruction which they knew did not exist. His sin, it turned out, was also challenging petrodollar hegemony.
Africa is disrespected because it is weak:
Ultimately, the real sin of Muamar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein or the counties they governed was their weakness. Indeed, this is true about Africa and all formerly colonised nations. Europeans enslaved Africans and later colonised their lands because Africa was weak, not because they hated Africans. The transatlantic slavery system and colonialism (and now, neo-colonialism) are purely economic imperatives. Racism and white supremacy arose out of the need to resolve the psychological and moral conflict (i.e., cognitive dissonance) of believing that God created all humans equal and the desire to profit from the chattel enslavement of Africans. The only reason Putin has not received the Ghaddafi or Saddam treatment is because Russia is a nuclear armed country. Nuclear armed countries do not square off against each other because it would be MAD (mutually assured destruction) to do so. So, they use proxies for their conflicts. This is the proper context to understand the current war in Ukraine.
Africa has endured 500 years of humiliation because it is weak. In his book titled, The West And The Rest Of Us, Chinweizu said: “To regain dignity, we must make it impossible for any group to ever again trample upon us. We must confront their intention to do so with a power they can neither trample upon nor ignore.” To bring about the situation that Chinweizu describes, Africa must recognise who her enemies are and the tools by which they keep her down. Dismantling these tools will help her to overthrow such systems of control as I have been describing and thus thrust herself on the trajectory to power. This state of awakening and consciousness is what has empowered the Chinese to transform China from an agrarian economy to the world’s largest economy (GDP purchasing power parity) and military powerhouse within a few decades. China was tackling neo-colonialism whilst the rest of the global south was adopting one set of western neoliberal policies after another. The difference in 40 years between China and these countries is stark!
Sanctions and military intervention are tools for furthering neo-colonial interests in Niger:
ECOWAS is unwittingly lending itself as an instrument to advance the neo-colonial interests of France and USA in Niger. I say unwittingly because I want to give ECOWAS the benefit of the doubt. Does ECOWAS not recognise that every day that France and USA exert neo-colonial control over Niger brings impoverishment and suffering to the citizens of this beautiful country, and that this amounts to a coup against 25 million Nigeriens? The government in Niger has asked French troops to leave but France has refused to pull its troops out of the country in violation of the sovereignty of Niger. Why does ECOWAS not say anything about this violation? Whose interests is ECOWAS promoting?
I oppose ECOWAS intervention in Niger whether they be sanctions or military force because these interventions serve neo-colonial and foreign interests rather than the interests of Africa. Diplomacy is the way forward.
Consider the statement made by the European Union’s Special Representative for the Sahel, Emanuela del Re, during an interview she gave to Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, on 9th August 2023:
“The impact of the sanctions [in Niger] is becoming palpable,” she said. “The scarcity of medicine and food has reached alarming levels, while power outages are even more frequent than before. If we want the junta to weaken, we must persist with these sanctions.”
Who do these sanctions hurt - the military leaders or the poor people of Niger? It is easy to speak about how effective sanctions are when the victims are not Italian, French, or American citizens. African lives do not matter to neo-colonialists. To be clear, sanctions are a form of warfare and are arguably more destructive than physical wars. When a country is sanctioned, it is the poor citizens who suffer, and hardly the people in charge of the government. Are we going to subject our own brother and sisters to such abuse?
Africans have a habit of copying and pasting foreign ideas and values, often without giving much thought to their utility or relevance to their society. It seems to me that the recklessly thoughtless decision by ECOWAS to sanction Niger is one such example. The west does not care about Africans as evidenced by the comments of Emanuela del Re cited earlier. They care only about their interests which can be summarised thus: to ensure Africa remains the producer of raw materials and cheap human labour, and that she never achieves self-reliance. The tools for achieving these include sanctions, economic blockade, invasion, overthrowing a government which is perceived to be anti-west, and wars. In other words, sanctions and the use of military force accomplish western objectives in Africa. Coups are domestic issues, and we must get out of the mindset of telling sovereign countries (even if they are sovereign on paper only) how they must conduct their own affairs. This interventionist mindset is something that ECOWAS has copied from the west/NATO.
Finally . . . . .
A military intervention by ECOWAS in Niger could destabilise the entire west African sub-region. This will play directly into the hands of the neo-colonial powers whose stock in trade is destabilising and weakening nations that are rich in natural resources often by creating, training, arming, and funding terrorism under the guise of fighting terrorism or doing some charitable work. Countries with strong stable governments are much harder to exploit and steal from. Their foreign military bases are not here to protect us from terrorism. Fighting terrorism was the pretext for building them but their purposes are to control and exploit our resources, and contain the geopolitical and economic interests of their peer or near-peer competitors in Africa. By intervening in Niger, ECOWAS is furthering these objectives.
Niger is of too much strategic importance to the neo-colonial powers to be left alone. They would like to intervene directly but the optics of this would be even more damaging to their already battered reputation. So, they need someone else to do their dirty job. This is why they are pressuring ECOWAS to sanction and use military force. How will this end? No one knows for sure. What we know for certain is that the west is constrained by its political, economic and value systems to exploit and under-develop Africa and the global south, and that it will do everything in its power to keep Africa in the condition that allows it to exploit her ad infinitum. We have 500 years of data to support this. The all-important question is this: will ECOWAS allow itself to be used as a pawn for advancing neo-colonialism in West Africa?
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