Return of colonialism

Africa is unraveling but like in the past, the leaders and people are fiddling and enjoying themselves. Those in power are dealing with the minor leaving the major, causing deep dislocations, not knowing what they are doing and the consequences of their actions. The people are being destroyed, their psychology battered. The people are left in such a state they can’t tell what is happening to them and around them. 

Meanwhile, the entire place is burning, a fire lit by predatory forces bent on recolonizing not just our country but the entire Africa. Before now the move had been there but subtle. It came in the form of African leaders being dictated to in the rooms of power and in economic negotiating forums and from there graduated to all of them being invited for tutorials by one developed country or another. Even Arab countries were not left out of this demeaning engagement.

Recently the trend has assumed a monstrous dimension with a return of a rise in right wing orientation and politics. Developed Western countries are beginning to wonder why people in developing countries of which Africa is in the majority want to empty themselves into those developed settings. Initially, they didn’t ask and that was because it suited their idiosyncrasy and ideology of cheap labour. Now they have more than enough they are beginning to sing

 a different song: immigrants must return to the country of origin whether they are certified to stay or not. Globalization, the world without boundaries they told us not long ago, which holds the key to better life for all humanity, has turned out to be nonsense and of no use. Those who founded the concept are now running away from their invention. Funny world we live in.

This is not new, it has always been part of slavery and colonisation. Liberia and Sierra Leone were not countries that came into existence by organic qualifications and desire, they were countries produced by the wicked design of men and women, who held up very high the philosophy of one man superior and another inferior. When the whites had a need for free labour they found Africa an open space to come and play to  the dictates of their treacherous warped minds.

To be able to take away humans as objects of trade and forced labour they gave them stereotypes, “uncivilized”, “subhumans” and “people incapable of organization”. This paved the way for their forays. They got the backing of the church at the time this is to show the extent evil people can go to achieve a goal.

What compounded this misadventure was the state of the people themselves. The leadership of the people except for a few loved good life, they had unbridled taste especially for what they couldn’t produce. They wanted little meaningless materials like hats, clothes, cigarettes and whiskey drinks, for these they were ready to decimate not only their immediate communities and empires,they were always eager to fight each other, the key objective being to retain power and make money through the sale of their kitchen and kins. It worked like magic.

  Africans destroyed themselves and their society. The nasty stood at a corner smiling coming in only when it mattered most. When blacks in the diaspora had finished developing the new continents their captors turned them into objects of fun and ridicule.  Slavery was succeeded by force colonisation. On paper slavery and colonisation that came after it has ended but the big question on the lips of all true patriots is,” has those two abominations ended in reality?”

   The right and correct answer is no. The distortions in policy are alive and very potent. When they don’t produce leaders through veiled interventions, they use all instruments available to them to foist retrogressive policies on the incapable leaders they helped into office by way of subterfuge. In this regard, late former President Muhammadu Buhari and All Progressives Congress APC) came in mind. The World Bank and International Monetary Bank are alive, strong but  wicked, dishing out economic and political prescriptions that rob citizens of various countries of their dignity and keep their nations prostrate. It has reached to the level the whole world is beginning to think the Black Man is incapable of anything good, including the ability to govern himself very well.

The voyage into history is deliberate. It is intended to show that oftentimes the Black Race doesn’t learn from history. Otherwise, some of the things our leaders do,  they won’t do it or accept rubbish if thrown at us again. In recent weeks the President of United States Donald Trump has done enough to disgrace and discredit South Africa.

He invited the President Cyril Ramaphosa to Washington and tried to disgrace him publicly. Since then he has tried to make a full independent country appear far less. This is one pathway to colonialism. He tried it with Burkina Faso and the latest is Nigeria our country.

Currently, we are being investigated by another country. We brought that on our selves when some pandering to eternal influence want to fight religious supremacist struggles rather organisation, science, technology and development. This is akin to giving us hat, tobacco and whiskey and leave the rest to us. 

Penultimate week at the behest of eternal prompting,  President Tinubu, even without authorization mandated our Air Force to fly into Benin Republic, another independent country to meddle in what by every yardstick is an internal affair of the people of that country. Last week the Senate approved troop deployment.

They said the objective is to bring stability to a troubled neighbour. Sometimes they expand it to include “ensuring the survival of democracy”. Like before slavery and later colonialism took hold in Africa the leaders by their various acts ensured stability eluded the zone. Current leadership in Africa are doing the same.

  Terrible level of poor governance. Government run huge budgets yet nothing positive comes out of massive expenditures. The leaders on top make peaceful change a cardinal requirement in democracy impossible by what they have made out of the electoral system. Sham elections everywhere. They are beginning to add arrest, detention and killing of strong political opponents to the mockery of what the pass for democracy. This development should attract the focus but it is not. It is not attracting attention because the trend is the pastime of all the leaders in the continent. It is terrible to leave the root cause of violent changes to government to dwell on the symbols. This kind of approach doesn’t add up.

When President Bola Tinubu wanted to help France give breath to dying colonialism, northerners were one in resisting him on account they shared more than border with Niger Republic. The President beat a hasty retreat. Yorubas too share deep bonds with Benin Republic. Now we have gone in to show might. Did the government take into account what the reaction of the ordinary people who rejoiced at the news of a coup would be? Can we survive fighting on different fronts at the same time? It is important we know a fresh fight to partition Africa is on.