THREE developments this week illustrate the sad fate of Black people in today’s world. The first relates to Uganda, denied a loan by the World Bank. Hear the bank: “Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act fundamentally contradicts the World Bank Group’s values. We believe our vision to eradicate poverty on a livable planet can only succeed if it includes everyone irrespective of race, gender, or sexuality. This law undermines those efforts.” Of course, President Yoweri Museveni fought back, declaring: “It is unfortunate that the World Bank and other actors want to coerce us into abandoning our faith, culture, principles and sovereignty, using money. They really underestimate all Africans.”
As Nigeria’s Super Falcons bowed out of the ongoing Women’s World Cup in Australia, an incident involving Lauren James of England and Nigeria’s Michelle Alozie spoke to the black dilemma. Deliberately and with criminal intent, James stamped on Alozie in a most sensitive part of her body, but only got a two-match ban, unlike Nigeria’s Deborah Abiodun who was slammed with a three-match ban over a misplaced tackle. You see, Alozie and Abiodun are from Africa. The third event took place here in Nigeria where, despite a groundswell of opposition to his warmongering moves, President Bola Tinubu led the ECOWAS Heads of State and Government to declare war on Niger, authorizing “the immediate deployment of a standby force to restore constitutional order in the country.”
Now, let’s look at the Uganda and Super Falcons cases. You see, regardless of their pretence, white people hate Black people with maniacal passion. The problem, as a character in Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners says, “is the colour black.” Black may be beautiful in your eyes, but the Caucasian race, basking in the magical realist tales about Africa, finds the colour repulsive. And it does not even matter if a white nation is occasionally led by a person of black heritage like Barrack Obama, the buffoon who went to Kenya preaching gay rights while ignoring the issues that mattered to the Kenyan people; black is still objectionable. White people, with few exceptions, detest black people. In America, the Democrats shout Black Lives Matter while leading the black abortion battles. The message is clear: Black lives matter but black pregnancies do not. If black lives mattered, the World Bank, now a World Bully, would not be talking of plunging Africa into a moral cesspit with loans, not even grants!
And now to the third issue. Tinubu wants the rest of the world to believe that the ECOWAS Standby Force (ESF) is a region-wide initiative , but anyone who has a sense of history would realise that this is simply a war between Nigeria and Niger on behalf of a murderously oppressive, racist and neocolonialist France. Driven nuts with Niger Delta oil money, military rulers wasted millions of dollars on so-called liberation movements and peace missions for which Nigeria was never rewarded in economic/political terms, and now Tinubu is doing same to legitimize his hold on power.
Tinubu is leading a charge against his own African brothers to reinforce the democracy of despair. Well, France, a force for evil in Africa which has, per Chinua Achebe, stolen too much for the owner not to notice in its former colonies, has never bothered itself about democracy in Africa. Refusing to go home after granting the colonies so-called independence in the 60s, France has maintained military bases in Africa, installing puppet governments, robbing the nations blind, and lending them their own money at cut-throat interest rates.
Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, speaking of Françafrique, the continuous subjugation of supposedly sovereign African states by France, notes that as long as the terms of the “gentlemen’s agreement” between the French presidency and the puppet presidents in these ex-colonies are complied with, “the African president can toss his political opponents to the sharp-toothed, flesh-hungry crocodiles frothing in his private pond, crown himself emperor, embezzle and deposit billions in Swiss accounts, all without fearing the slightest rebuke.” Hear this: “A French lawyer of Lebanese descent, who had served for decades as an errand boy for Françafrique’s marquee figures, decided suddenly in September 2011 to tell the Journal du dimanche how he used to carry from Abidjan, Libreville or Brazzaville briefcases stuffed with millions of francs he gave at the Elysée to Jacques Chirac.”
For ages, France murdered African naysayers, including Félix-Roland Moumié, a Cameroonian dissident poisoned in 1960. When Jean-Bédel Bokassa sacked President David Dacko of Central African Republic in 1966, it was with the full backing of the same France now talking of “democracy” in Niger. Done with Bokassa, France organized his ouster in order to continue looting the country’s uranium, which provides one-third of its supply to the 58 nuclear reactors with which it produces energy, the remaining two-thirds being supplied by Niger. In 2011, I wrote a back page for the Nigerian Tribune as rebels loyal to Alassane Ouattara and backed by French soldiers and tanks flushed out Laurent Gbagbo from the presidential residence in Abidjan, stripping him down to his underwear. Today, France’s ally, Ouattara, has suspended the constitution and is enjoying an illegal third term, but the group I hereby name FRANCOWAS has not invaded Cote d’Ivoire. Before I leave France’s case, I wish to remind readers of Opération Persil, a covert operation through which the French government sought to destabilize the government of Ahmed Sékou Touré following his rejection of the CFA franc and his successful campaign for Guinean independence. Using helicopters and airplanes, French agents dropped sacks full of fake Guinea Francs printed in France all over Guinea. I can go on and on.
In his Niger misadventure, Tinubu is mouthing the rhetoric that democracy is the best form of government as if that claim deserves no interrogation. Why is it, for instance, that non-democracies like Saudi Arabia and the UAE guarantee better lives for their citizens than many democracies? Besides, has Tinubu forgotten that following the EU’s spat with Russia, Nigeria has been called upon to supply gas to Europe via Niger and Morocco? How do you war against a country that is so vital to your economic interest, ignoring the fact that its destabilization would ultimately mean the destabilization of Nigeria given geographical contiguity and cultural nexus? Have the FRANCOWAS warmongers asked themselves why the Nigerian population has thrown its weight behind the mutineers?
Instead of doing Euro-America’s dirty jobs, Africa should look inwards and unite around common goals, beginning with the reformation of the crooked leadership recruitment processes across the continent and the rooting out of the democracy of despair.
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