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The world has changed. This has happened many times before.
The difference is that it will no longer be a Caucasian-dominated affair, in which one white power replaces another. It marks the end of Western Caucasian ascendancy and dominance that began in the year 1492, which is the year in which the Western European elite classes finally found other peoples and territories that they could use to plunder so as to enrich themselves and their countries.
The new reality is that today’s international law, and all the institutions created to uphold it are now ready for their deathbed. So, what are the countries, regions and peoples least able to protect themselves without the minimum cover offered by such structures going to do about it? Africa, this means you.
We, the weaker peoples of the world owe the Palestinians a debt. The people of Gaza have paid a very high price to enable us to see one thing: it is now possible for a bigger power to publicly declare its intention to wipe out a whole population and then proceed to do so, demolishing whole towns with all their schools, universities, hospitals and homes, and then bombing the escapees in the refugee tents where they had fled, maiming and killing children, extinguishing whole family lines and finally starving the survivors by using food as bait to lure them into kill zones, and completely get away with it.
The leadership of any militarily weak, small population that happens to occupy a resource-rich area of land or sea should take very careful note of this. The entire planet, be it the rich powerful countries, the international bodies concerned with conflict resolution and human rights, the world’s large religions, or just ordinary citizens everywhere, have not been able to stop this now three-year carnage in the Gaza Strip. This is the new world order; it marks the complete end of the period of the highest aspirations for a new peaceful and stable world that began with the United Nations Declaration for Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, just two years after the UN itself was formed. There had always been challenges to it, the crime of South Africa’s Apartheid, the Indonesian occupation and plunder of East Timor, and America’s war in Vietnam being good examples. But Palestine was the evidence of the failure right from the beginning and has remained so up until the end.
This abandonment of International Human Rights Law and related protocols should be understood as part of a process of a wider breakdown. Already, we had seen the United States walk away from renewing long-standing and important treaties like the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the abandonment of the Russia-NATO agreements that ushered in the end of the Cold War (hence Ukraine today), and the breaking of long-standing trade arrangements with one-sided tariffs.
So, the continued American trashing of international bodies’ stabilizing initiatives is simply part of a wider pattern, and in this case, an additional step in an older journey. The US declaration of sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the UN expert assigned to document and report on the Human Rights aspects of the Gaza crisis, as well as the general callousness towards the people of Gaza, is what rendered the West powerless to mobilize the rest of the world against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Ukraine in the way that it was previously able to with earlier Western campaigns (such as the first anti-Iraq War). The Global South, in particular, has become tired and cynical about the hypocrisy of Western self-righteousness.
The West continues to decline. And not in a superficial or temporary manner; the decline is fundamental. Basically, capitalism is only being kept alive by war, and, therefore, by the investment returns of the war industry (which is why Albanese’s reporting so infuriated the West).
Beyond that, the financial instruments being held by private capital are basically unsellable at this point. First of all, the hitherto dominant owners and controllers of capital in the West have monopolized the market among themselves to the extent that they have no customers outside each other. And second, there’s a steady diminishing of industrial activity outside the genocide and war economy to back up the claimed value of the financial instruments. So, the real price of their financial instruments is creating a crisis of value, as those real prices cannot sustain the overall lifestyles expected by their populations.
This is now what has led the US government to make laws to try and induce the managers of pension funds to buy stocks offered by the private equity markets since pension funds are the only ones still holding large accounts of undisturbed cash.
The pension funds are now in a bind: if they accept to invest, they are buying junk; if they refuse, the private equity firms are going to eventually go bust as their instruments will be seen to be the junk they are because no one else is going to be buying them. This will bring down the American economy even further, meaning that the dollar, in which the pension funds hold most of their wealth, will still lose significant value.
Asia, in the meantime, rises. But in a particular way.
Of the top twenty economically sound and dominant countries in the world, between five and seven are in Asia. India and China alone hold 36 per cent of the world’s population and 20 per cent of the global GDP. But in terms of what matters to them, they have become prosperous through participating in the global economy without having to pay the price of policing it to keep the mechanisms in working order.
China has especially benefitted from this in terms of things such as international labour and intellectual property laws, and maritime trade route security.
What the powers all have in common is that they need resources. The shift in world relations is giving rise to greater demands for the raw materials needed to keep their growth moving, as well as the labour to extract it.
If you have those resources, and you are too weak to hold on to them or negotiate a fair price for them, then those powers are just going to come and take them. The West, because of its decline, the East because of its rise.
A third resource-hunting threat comes from that cluster of mainly small but cash-rich countries in what should properly be called West Asia but is commonly known as the Middle East and includes Turkey, which used to rule over most of them.
Meanwhile, Africa (and the poor nations of the Pacific) struggles to get out of a tight corner. We control little and dominate nowhere. Our ownership of our economies is largely formal, and our population is actually quite thinly spread over the world’s second-largest landmass. Where large-scale industry exists, it generally is not in either the public or the private hands of native Africans.
Hope lies in the ever-expanding BRICS economic coalition, although it is still organizationally in its early days. The aspiration – as has always been the case – is that goods will be exchanged in the best practice of respect and mutual benefit. But some BRICS members are far more substantive than others, economically speaking. And history tells us this has never happened when the strong want what the weak are holding (or sitting on).
A global law of the jungle is a far soberer expectation to have, and, therefore, to plan for accordingly.
Africa faces a growing crisis of resource-driven warlordism all along the Sahel line from the Atlantic to the Horn. Sudan, and the newly formed Alliance of Sahelian States (AES) have been hit particularly hard, with Nigeria not far behind. But the crises in the Greater Rift/Nile Valley Basin, taking in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mozambique and Uganda/South Sudan have also been a long-running sore.
So, Africa and Africans are going to have to organize to identify and defend their interests as a group, and to a level never before attempted, or at least not since the time of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) or perhaps even the Pharaohs.
How?
First, by stopping to look at this as a problem of individual countries. All those interested in our resources do not see “countries” as such; they just see Africans as being in the way, and plan according to their own best advantage. Hence France sponsoring “Islamist” militias in the Sahel, the United Arab Emirates supporting secular warlords in Sudan, American corporations supporting neighbours meddling in the DRC, and China’s “financial diplomacy” everywhere. Moreover, the countries we call “ours” (which the big powers do not really see) are in many cases part of the problem; they have tied us to ways of thinking, to debt, and to native suppression.
Second, by not depending on anyone else to feed us and being able to prevent anyone stopping us from feeding ourselves. These things have been said many times before, not least by Thomas Sankara and Dan Nabudere.
Third, we need to understand what we are worth, both in terms of active production and untapped resources. Africa needs to audit itself. This does not mean in terms of GDP only. A few very promising initiatives exist. There is the establishment of independent oil refineries, new energy initiatives in generation and distribution, nationalization of mineral resources and the like in Nigeria, Mozambique, Namibia, and the AES.
Fourth, a capacity for physical defence is needed. The Ukraine battlefield, in particular, has ushered in a new epoch of warfare. The one who has satellite levels of control, observation and targeting, robots, drones, Artificial Intelligence, and smart missiles, is the one with the better chance in combat.
This means a knowledge production revolution in Africa at both the technical and the conceptual level.
As things stand, Africa’s current leaders in the main seem to have farmed out everything – from our economic and social policy, mineral extraction, science research, investment financing, to commerce and logistics – to the Western donor community, academia and financial markets.
The way forward is to bring together and also set up focal points for the proper relevant, independent and integrated research into all these things. A lot of work does already go on, but it is either heroic individual enterprise, foreign-controlled, or carried out by under-resourced public institutions.
What we often do not realize is that Africa actually holds the advantage. This is the continent with the youngest and fastest-growing population. It remains among the wealthiest in terms of resources, with a population that is still sufficiently culturally aware and can be to be potentially organised into a broad cohesive whole.
The last 200 years have brought intellectual and spiritual divisions and diversions, and therefore no real progress. The rising generation will move beyond that. It is much less difficult; after the migrant deaths in the Sahara, the Libyan slave markets, the Arabian working conditions for black people, and the continued racism of the Western world, younger Africans have all the information they need to properly evaluate what the world really thinks of them, and plan accordingly.
What is needed is greater and systematic access to knowledge and skills, as well as an improved mindset.
The future is in the youth; invest in them and they will take care of it.
