Ishaq

The thing about imperialism is that it is ubiquitous and impossible to avoid. Nigerians who think they can have intelligent discussions around politics, economics and business without acknowledging imperialism are just like a castrated man who wants to marry a wife and have kids, but doesn't want to acknowledge his condition. I'm sorry, but just because you're in denial, or the subject makes you uncomfortable, or you don't want to upset your white friends and investors by talking about it does not mean that this 800-foot elephant in the room is going to disappear. The imperial system you live under is why you eat imported rice and your bread is made with imported wheat, while your own agricultural land is used for industrial monoculture plantations growing export crops you can't eat like cocoa and cashew. Imperialism is why your kid goes to school wearing a neck tie, a wool sweater, a thick blazer and cotton socks while the temperature outside is 33⁰C. Imperialism is why you put on your TV news and the presenter is chewing her tongue desperately trying and failing to mimic the accent of a public school headteacher from Abingdon-on-Thames, whereas literally nobody in the history of her watching audience has ever sounded like that. Imperialism is why your central bank interest rate is always double digit, which means that consumer credit is literally nonexistent. No amount of roundtable sessions, seminars, and breakfast meetings with the bankers committee and PhD economists can change that basic eternal reality of your economy. Imperialism is why despite having double digit central bank lending rates, your currency somehow manages to always face inflationary pressure and regularly posts double digit percentage losses in a single day. You can do all the clever economic chart drawings and financial engineering you want, but they are completely useless in the face of imperialist decisions like Structural Adjustment Programs, which you experienced by other names from 1986 to 1988 and from 2023 to 2025. Imperialism is why you can have all your lovely ideas for leadership and governance, and a young population that is hungry for good leadership, but everytime you go into a "democratic election", you end up coming out with Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Tinubu. You can read all your "Why Nations Fail" and do all your "PVC sensitisation drives" and do all the "protect the votes" on election day, and at the end of all the wahala, the INEC chairman will announce that a crippled goat with craw-craw has won the election and if you don't like it you will go and meet Kekere-Ekun in court. Imperialism is why when you are having sex with your partner, you moan in English and make American noises even though you've never left Owerri before, and your sexual encounters always happen with a specific sequence that starts from oral and culminates in doggy - it's because all the porn you have ever watched in your life has been hosted and curated by American platforms, and you have over time taken on their sexual personality as your own. Imperialism is why you build with cement blocks plastered with concrete in your 34⁰C climate, even though concrete generates vast amounts of heat as it cures, and it can take years to fully cure, during which time it slowly cooks you in your own house - but rammed earth which your ancestors used is only just becoming a thing once again because white people have "discovered" it and put a brand on it that makes it desirable after they once labelled it as 'primitive'. I could go on and on. As long as you're determined to avoid confronting the ubiquitous and all-pervasive reality of imperialism in Nigeria, you're not really ready to confront whatever problem you are facing, from food to healthcare to education to public policy to poverty. If you're not acknowledging that underlying reality, you're just another Nigerian wasting their whole life performing the appearance of thinking, and creating useless content.

Keeping everyone (including Africans) completely ignorant about Africa and the central role it plays in the economic and natural world is a core feature of Europeanised education, not a bug. You're not supposed to know that the DRC is the most resource-rich country in the world, with an estimated $24 trillion sitting under its soil. You're not supposed to know that the rise of "western civilisation" from the 15th century on was entirely made possible by European contact with Africa, and that the resources and labour extracted from coastal West Africa from 1492 onwards are the entire reason why both American continents exist in their current form. You're not supposed to know that both WW1 and WW2 were essentially wars fought over the right to African colonial domination and expansion, and that even the uranium that was used in "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Shinkolobwe uranium mine in eastern DRC. You're not supposed to know that the reason the country of France exists in its current form is because tens of thousands of conscripted West African soldiers fought and won against the Nazis in Europe, and the French thereafter shipped them back to West Africa and massacred them at Camp Thiaroye in Senegal to avoid paying them their due wages. You're not supposed to know that there was nothing cold about the so-called Cold War, because the vast majority of the hot theaters it was physically fought in were on the continent of Africa. (Zimbabwe, DRC, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Eritrea, Zambia etc). You're not supposed to know that the ongoing Ukraine war and the war in the Sahel are in fact the same conflict being fought by the same 2 sides, and that the reason France is desperately pushing funding and arms to Ukraine even as it falls into internal crisis is that Ukraine is acting as its proxy army in West Africa, as it tries to regain its lost colonial territories there, especially Niger where the cheap yellowcake uranium for its famously cheap nuclear energy used to come from before the 2023 revolution. You're definitely not supposed to know that the entire global economy and system of trade as you know it is built on ruthless extraction from Africa and ensuring that Africa does not control anything it exports. You're not supposed to know that "Italian leather" doesn't come from Italy - it comes from Kano, Nigeria. You're not supposed to know that "Swiss chocolate" does not exist because cocoa does not grow anywhere in Switzerland or Europe - it comes from Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Nigeria. You're not supposed to know that Israel and the UAE control the global diamond and gold markets even though Israel has no diamond mine and the UAE has zero gold mines, because both resources are literally being stolen from the DRC and Sudan on an industrial basis. You're basically not supposed to understand that the entire geopolitical world as you know it, rests entirely on extraction from Africa, poverty of Africans, and your own ignorance about where everything you use comes from. Completely deliberate 500+ year-old feature, not accidental bug.

Well, well, well. Something, something, whenever you wake up, something, morning.

Here are some rhetorical questions. 1. Which entity is Africa's largest trading partner and only source of meaningful technology transfer, infrastructure investment and material upliftment via cheap consumer goods? 2. For which entity did the US govt recently dedicate a $1.6bn propaganda budget to fight its growing influence in the world? 3. Materially speaking as an African, which of these 2 entities has had a measurable positive impact on your quality of life? The one building your railways and giving you cheap technology, or the one spending billions to invade your mind and place poisoned information there? 4. Why are you suddenly seeing videos and narratives like "Chinese woman holds her nose when African woman boards bus" being promoted aggressively across US government-controlled platforms like this one? Whose interest do these things serve? Yours? Or theirs? Learn to be skeptical. Gullible people who take everything presented to them at face value will likely not survive this decade.