If there is anything that USA President Donald Trump’s second coming and some of the actions he has so far taken have helped to highlight it is that we Africans count for nothing in world affairs. The only times we succeed in drawing the attention of the rest of the world to ourselves is when we need help or sympathy on a gargantuan proportions, way too big for ourselves to handle and too big for any single nation out there to be able to bring us relief.
If it is not on these counts, we are completely irrelevant in the geopolitical calculations in world affairs. When any serious minded leader such as Trump of America wants to plan how to make their nations great at somebody else’s expense or discomfort, nobody bothers about Africa. Our strategic minerals are already firmly in their hands. As I said a few weeks ago the minerals of Congo D.R. which have helped the tech giant Apple to become the most valued company in the world is in the hands of the USA based company and similar companies elsewhere in the world.
While Cote D’Ivoire, Nigeria, Ghana and some other of the world’s largest cocoa producers collectively earn about 2 billion dollars a year from this golden crop and its seeds, a certain Ukrainian producer of chocolate ( I think his name is Petro Poreshenko) earns about 20 billion dollars from that precious seeds.
While Nigeria and many other African countries are among the league of world crude oil producers, China, the USA and European countries refine and use the products to power their industries and earn large sums of money to prosper their economies. They have become so developed that they are the ones we depend on for aid to cope with our enduring poverty. Such that now that Trump has said he will drastically reduce charity to us and other needy nations of the world, we are grumbling and complaining and pleading with him to cultivate a more charitable heart when the man thinks that it is such a disposition that will help China to overthrow his country as number one in the world.
Before Trump was eventually sworn in for his second term, the whole world was in anxiety about how his declared trade wars would affect each or a group of them. I wept when Aljazeera broadcast one solitary news report about how one garment factory in Senegal stood the danger of suffering a collateral damage because it was built by China when its goal is to help Senegal meet her quota of an African preferential trade agreement with America.
Trade wars are wars of manly nations against one another. There are no manly nations in Africa worth taking on in this war. African nations are largely women nations. They depend on their husbands somewhere in the USA and Europe and Asia for sustenance. What a sorry states these nations of ours are.
In actual fact, the trade war against us took place somewhere some years down the line in Berlin in 1884 when our terrains, not our countries, were partitioned out to rampaging and greedy European powers. That was when the manly wars of nations were fought against us and won. Bribery and corruption and poor management of resources have helped over the years to do us in.
In 1989 when I attended a journalism course in the defunct Yugoslavia, one Yugoslav woman with whom I was very friendly lamented to me in the course of our conversation one day that while other Europeans were sharing out rich parcels of African lands and all her people, she does not understand why Yugoslavia was not at the sharing table. I went back to my hostel and shed tears for the fate and mockery and disdain of the much ravaged continent. There was no trade agreement with any of the natives of the Dark Continent and since then we have remained a people to be raped and robbed by the big powers.
