While the bush taxis, charcoal and chickens remain, the bush is now criss-crossed by futuristic infrastructure. Overhead are overpasses, which see freight train and haul truck traffic, and conveyor belts. Each train and truck are laden with bauxite ore — the source of aluminum, the backbone of modern power infrastructure.     

The cargo, coming from mines that resemble massive dirt-red scars on Guinea’s tropical landscape, is headed for multiple terminals, built along once-pristine mangrove estuaries. There, it is loaded with cranes onto streams of incoming hundred-meter-long bulk carriers, which bring the materials to even larger vessels anchored out at sea. These giants, measuring up to 300 meters in length, bring the precious ore to ports in China, mostly in Shandong province, home to the country’s aluminum-refining industry.

Offering both lightweight and decent conductivity at the same time, aluminum is one of the most widely used industrial materials, and has fed China’s transformation into the global manufacturing hegemon. With China’s push for electrification, both domestically and globally, it is gaining even more importance as an essential component in products such as transmission lines, solar panels and electric vehicles.

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Between 2015 and 2025, Guinea’s bauxite exports increased nine-fold from 20 million tonnes a year to 182 million tonnes, making Guinea the world’s biggest producer of the ore. With approximately 82% of the production bound for China, this surge is largely the product of Chinese capital, which facilitated the construction of the necessary port, road and rail infrastructure.

The production surge shows no signs of slowing down. As recently as last week, a consortium of Chinese companies tabled plans worth $3 billion to construct yet another railway and deepwater port, aiming to unlock another major bauxite deposit. 

Until the recent mining boom, driven largely by Chinese investment, Guinea was one of the poorest countries in the world. This transformation is representative of a wider pattern seen across the resource-rich Global South. Since the late Nineties, when China first experienced trade surplus and became a net capital exporter, it has gradually built up a near-total dominance of global mineral supply chains and offered itself as a reliable strategic partner. 

As of 2025, China accounted for about 60% of the global production of aluminum, and exercised similar dominance in the production and processing of other critical metals. Approximately half of the global supply of steel and refined copper is produced in China. Its supremacy is even stronger in a category of metals known as rare earths — about 20 elements with special magnetic and optical properties critical for the production of high-end technologies. There, China controls 60% of the global mining output and around 90% of the refining capacity. 

With the escalation of the new Cold War, China has shown increased willingness to leverage its near-total control of these supply chains. Perhaps the most humiliating confrontation with reality for the US was the April 2025 “Liberation Day”. Following Trump’s imposition of an additional 34% tariff on Chinese imports, China imposed reciprocal tariffs alongside severe export restrictions on seven dual-use rare earths – prompting a brief escalation followed by full-blown TACO, whereby Trump suspended all the newly imposed tariffs. 

But the weaponization of rare earths has continued. Last month, Reuters reported that some Chinese suppliers refuse to ship rare earths to the US for fear of repercussions from Beijing.    

The Trump administration appears to have acknowledged this as a problem. “We outsourced the manufacturing so we could focus on designing these goods. And then one day we woke up and we realized we had outsourced our economic security and our very future,” said Marco Rubio in his opening remarks at the Critical Minerals Ministerial held in Washington in February. It was easy to detect regret of the four decades of neoliberal dogma that have held sway over American economic policy-making, dictating minimal state intervention and free trade. “We were at the mercy of whoever controlled supply chains for these minerals, so my hope is that we are gathered here today as the first but important step to rectifying this mistake,” he said to a room filled with delegates from 55 partner states, with whose cooperation the administration hopes to counter China’s strategic dominance. 

But these efforts appear to have run aground. This is, for what it seems, not necessarily a function of policy-making incompetence but more reflective of deeper structural forces that allow China to engage in capital-intensive and risky projects offering only long-term payoffs. 

Freed from the whims of the four-year electoral cycle, the system allows for long-term economic and social planning. In the case of China, policies are implemented with decades-long strategies in mind.     

With unrestrained state intervention and high levels of state ownership, policymakers allocate resources to the priority sectors. In the Eighties, these were steel, cement and coal. In the 2020s, these sectors are dominated by high-tech renewable energy, electric vehicles, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. 

As China transformed into the global industrial powerhouse, its trade surplus grew significantly, spiking from $8 billion in 1994 to a historical high of $822 billion in 2025. With this massive surplus of international currency, China has obtained substantial capacity to export its capital across the globe. 

This came in the form of concerted efforts to develop infrastructure and build access to strategic resources, mostly in Asia, Latin America and Africa – activities that in 2013 took on the moniker of the “Belt and Road Initiative”.

Guinea was an obvious target for Chinese capital. Home not only to the world’s largest bauxite reserves but also to Simandou, the largest untapped deposit of high-grade iron ore, it has always been of high speculative interest for mining investors. 

The first Francophone African country to gain independence, Guinea is still deeply marked by the legacy of its totalitarian, inaugural leader, Sékou Touré, who ruled the country from 1958 until his death in 1984 – creating an oppressive and invasive state apparatus that quickly metastasized into a tool of extraction. 

Plagued by political violence and instability, deeply embedded corruption and non-existent infrastructure, the country was long considered unbankable. Rio Tinto, for example, kept its rights to the Simandou deposit, which it acquired in 1997, at arm’s length for almost two decades.

Things only started moving when the country fell into China’s line of sight. In its first major investment in the country in decades, a subsidiary of the state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation completed a 240 MW hydropower plant in 2016, more than doubling the country’s electricity generation overnight. This was followed by the construction of another 450 MW facility in 2021, which again doubled Guinea’s power supply. The total investment from the two projects came to $1.6 billion.

At the same time, rich bauxite deposits in the hinterlands were being connected to the coast — where a string of new ports were under construction — by a network of railways, conveyor belts and dirt roads, equating to roughly $5 billion in investment. 

It was likewise Chinese capital that finally got the Simandou project rolling into motion. Underpinned by an investment of roughly $20 billion, the project involved several port terminals and a 670-kilometer long railway — arguably the biggest mining infrastructure investment in African history — with an estimated three-quarters of the capital coming from Chinese sources.

It was here that the dark side of Chinese engagement took shape. In September 2021, Guinea’s incumbent president, Alpha Condé, who had extended his rule into a third term with an unpopular constitutional change, was overthrown in a coup staged by the head of his presidential guard. An imposing figure at 6’5” tall, Mamadi Doumbouya — married to a former French gendarme — ultimately soured on the democratic handover he had initially promised, instead eliminating virtually all political opposition through a campaign of kidnappings, disappearances and bloody clampdowns on protests.

As the Chinese government’s 2025 Guinea Country Guide to Outward Investment and Cooperation indicates, Beijing is well aware of the regime’s brutality. But China refrains from judgment, concentrating on what these actions imply for the regime’s durability and thus investment security. “Although there have been occasional mass incidents or small-scale riots in various places, the military government has been able to handle them effectively,” it notes, adding that “the military government demonstrates a strong ability to maintain control”.  

When Doumbouya eventually dared to face the electorate in late 2025, he was able to present a track record of concrete development — a convincing counterweight to the rise in political violence and the suppression of freedoms. Since he took power, Guinea’s GDP per capita has grown by more than 50% With Chinese help, the Simandou works were completed just a month before polling stations opened.

Billboards bearing Doumbouya’s likeness — clad in sunglasses and magisterial white robes — next to the slogan “Simandou 2040, Guinea’s economic transformation” became omnipresent in the streets, while Doumbouya’s ministers toured the country promising a windfall of cash and staging dance competitions to pro-Doumbouya pop music.

What the US is able to offer pales in comparison. The collective West has just a single bauxite asset in Guinea. Producing about nine million tons of bauxite a year, Alcoa’s mine relies on infrastructure built largely in the mid-20th century.

Owing to its noncompliance with good governance standards — which include controlling corruption, upholding human rights and democratic elections — Guinea was historically excluded from the American infrastructure-development initiatives such as the Millennium Challenge Corporation. 

A privately-funded American initiative, centering on an iron ore deposit that neighbors Simandou, has yet to see the light of day. This inertia is perhaps reflective of financial markets’ unwillingness to take long-term bets in high-risk states. And elsewhere on the continent, examples of US mining and infrastructure success stories are virtually nonexistent. Much of the discourse around the American mining investment on the continent has centered around the Lobito Corridor in Angola, which, in 2025, secured a $553 million loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation, created under the first Trump administration to counter the Belt and Road Initiative.

The fund was used to enhance the capacity of a railway connecting an Atlantic port in Angola to the Central African Copper Belt, split between the DRC and Zambia, and secured several additional billions in commitments to implement associated projects. But awkwardly, even Lobito bears the mark of Chinese capital. The former colonial railway, almost entirely destroyed during the Angolan Civil War, was originally, between 2006 and 2014, rehabilitated with the help of a $2 billion Chinese loan — part of a bigger $30 billion loan package that China spent on rebuilding Angola’s infrastructure. 

Trump’s other supposed success story, the US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement — signed in December 2025 and granting the US preferential access to Congolese minerals in exchange for settling the conflict with the Rwanda-backed rebels in the east — likewise turned out to be not much more than a PR exercise to signal Trump’s deal-making genius. 

More than a year on since the US promised to bring peace to the region, the conflict continues to rage, and American capital inflows remain to be seen.                   

This impotence has come alongside the wider recession of Western influence in the Global South. With China churning out unprecedented volumes of capital, tied to the development of hard infrastructure, the West has ultimately come up short and is incapable of offering anything remotely competitive.

For decades, the only way for developing countries to access aid was through agreeing, even if in a token way, to comply with Western norms of good governance and liberal values. This era seems to be over. Uninterested in seeing its face reflected across the globe, China is content to let partner states abide by their own norms.

The spike in Chinese investment has, therefore, given dictators and rogue regimes, previously largely reliant on the West as a sole source of meaningful finance, freedom of choice and leverage, and as the case of Guinea shows, legitimized their rule.

It is, however, questionable whether these countries were ever viable targets of liberal democratic evangelism, and the fact remains that China brought cash and development to regions with no historical experience of substantial capital inflows. Perhaps the ultimate, uncomfortable truth is that China has produced an extractive-authoritarian equilibrium that actually works, offering a modicum of stability, infrastructure and growth.

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In Guinea, Doumbouya’s militaristic regime, continuing a total war against political opponents, is set to preside over a growth rate of 8.7% this year, according to IMF, making the Guinean economy the fastest growing in Africa only after Ethiopia. IMF estimates that government revenues from Simandou alone could amount to 3.4% of GDP between 2030 and 2039, compared to just 2.2% of GDP for all mining government revenues in 2022.  

Ever more fearful of a mutiny among his armed forces, divided along ethnic lines and subject to long-standing frustrations, Doumbouya has nevertheless apparently done a decent job in entrenching his rule. With little transparency over how the proceeds of the mining windfall are being spent, the security apparatus has ballooned. Since 2021, Groupement des Forces Spéciale, Doumbouya’s de-facto praetorian guard, has grown from 500 to at least 2,500 well-paid men. Downtown Conakry, where the presidential palace is located, is now guarded by modern surveillance systems and armored vehicles and gunmen stationed at every crossroads, pointing machine guns at passing traffic. The Hotel Kaloum, a Chinese-built five star hotel not far from the palace, hosts a high-tech surveillance suite on its top floor. Doumbouya’s personal survival is not guaranteed, but the repressive state apparatus will be a formidable asset for whoever might come next.

While it is hard to argue with fast economic growth being ultimately a good thing in a cash-strapped nation like Guinea, its fruits, at least for now, are being distributed very inequitably. The mining industry is extremely capital-intensive, thus creating very few jobs. In the absence of comprehensive redistribution mechanisms, the mining boom has benefited primarily a handful of lucky contractors and those close to power. It has also come along with community displacement, rise in violence and full-blown environmental destruction — pristine forests have been erased, estuaries polluted and wildlife endangered.

This warrants some nostalgia about once non-negotiable conditionalities in the allocation of developmental help and investment, and demands a response from the West. But the current economic model seems incapable of providing one that is adequate. Proselytizers of free trade and a small state have gone noticeably quiet. In the Trump administration’s attempts to play China at its own game, however, it is merely doing a version of it that is both incompetent and ineffective. As the fruits of China’s decades-long strategic planning continue to materialize, the collective West may find itself forced to rethink the very foundations of the existing neoliberal economic order of small government, free trade and unrestrained financial markets, built upon the dollar as the global reserve currency. As Branko Milanovic thoughtfully pointed out some years back, Trump, incapable of understanding the complexity of the institutions underpinning the system over which he presides, might turn out to be America’s very own Gorbachev. 

Back then, after all, the United Kingdom was a fairly prosperous, settled nation, and would soon be on the winning side of the Cold War. As for Nigeria? A dictatorship with some crude oil. Now, of course, everything has changed. As Elizabeth’s son welcomes Bola Tinubu today, it’s Nigeria, not Britain, that holds the best cards. Indeed the UK’s long-term prospects feel rather uncertain — precisely why courting Nigeria, and countries like it, is so important to its future.

For much of the post-Cold War period, Britain and its Western allies could sort the world into two broad zones: stable and unstable. In the stable countries, money was safe, governments were predictable and the future discernible enough for long-term bets. In the unstable places, governance was erratic, investment risky, and violence never far off. This mental mapping had real consequences, shaping where capital, attention and diplomatic respect all flowed.

Nigeria long sat on the wrong side of that divide. With Marxist-Leninism just about still a going concern, the anti-communist Babangida was an important friend to have, likely explaining the 1989 state visit. At the same time, though, Nigeria’s economy was taken far less seriously. Through the Eighties and Nineties, after all, the country lurched through coups, aborted transitions and IMF austerity schemes, while its politicians acquired a reputation for predation and volatility. As late as 2016, David Cameron was filmed describing Nigeria as a “fantastically corrupt” country.

Over recent years, of course, our neat ideas of stability and corruption have started to collapse. A major war has raged on European soil for four years now, with the Baltics and Poland fearing for their very sovereignty. The Gulf, long an oasis of affluent calm, suddenly looks much less secure. America, hitherto the chief guarantor of Western stability, is now a country whose Capitol can be stormed by an angry mob, and whose president can levy tariffs or launch foreign adventures overnight. As for Britain, one-in-three Britons now believe civil war could occur here in the next decade.

This does not mean that Britain or America are “just like” Nigeria. But it does mean that disorder, or at least the serious prospect of it, is no longer something that simply happens over there. That in turn changes the relative position of countries like Nigeria. Their problems hardly vanish, but they no longer look like uniquely disqualifying flaws in an otherwise ordered world. Now, Britain’s Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle says that “the UK and Nigeria share a belief in the power of enterprise, innovation and education” — with a new strategic partnership between the two countries promising a flourishing of finance and fintech jobs.

To be clear, Nigeria still remains a difficult, exasperating country, whose promise has long been squandered by its own elites. Tinubu himself is hardly the personification of clean government, with allegations of corruption trailing him throughout his career. In this, Nigeria’s president shares much with the country’s broad political class. For instance, a court in London is currently hearing bribery charges against Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former petroleum minister, who supposedly spent £2 million at Harrods gotten from industry figures keen on government contracts.

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Meanwhile, though wealthier now than they were in 1989, most Nigerians remain poor, even as the state struggles to deal with a plethora of jihadist terrorists and criminal gangs. Kidnapping for ransom is so rife that it’s become a multimillion dollar industry of its own. The country’s size and natural resources have often made outsiders assume its eventual success is somehow inevitable. It never was — and isn’t now.

Yet it’s also true that Tinubu’s government, in power since 2023, has done something previous Nigerian administrations long avoided: embarking on reforms that acknowledged the country’s economic model was bust. Oil rents, import dependence, the sheer hustle of its citizens — none of these make an advanced economy. The broad direction of Tinubu’s changes, including lifting fuel subsidies and generally liberalizing the economy, have won praise from the IMF and World Bank. This matters not because their approval is all that matters, but because many Nigerians agree that the old system was unsustainable. The year before they were removed, the fuel subsidies consumed a quarter of Nigeria’s budget.

What many Nigerians rightly complain about is the brutal way in which Tinubu’s reforms were implemented. For instance, the sudden removal of fuel subsidies has drastically raised costs, with some basic staples now costing two or three times what they used to. That’s a big deal in a country where poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food. In other words, then, measures that look rational on an IMF spreadsheet can feel like punishment to regular citizens, especially if they’re already distrustful of their rulers. With 8-in-10 Nigerians expressing little to no trust in Tinubu’s government, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

Yet if Tinubu’s reforms succeed, Nigeria’s strategic position offers reasons to cheer. Aside from the country’s transition to democracy, the country’s GDP has also jumped eightfold since 1989, while its population has tripled to around 230 million, roughly 60% of whom are under 25. This makes Nigeria one of the youngest nations in the world, in sharp contrast to the aging societies of Britain and the wider West. That youthfulness offers both opportunities and risks in a land where some estimates put youth unemployment at around 50%. Fail to create enough jobs and the government is in trouble.

Nonetheless, Nigeria’s youthfulness remains a strategic fact. And besides, it has other strengths Britain can only dream of. Alongside the crude oil reserves it’s long been famous for — especially helpful given events in the Middle East — Nigeria also enjoys significant deposits of lithium, beryllium, zinc and other metals critical to technology supply chains. Britain needs access to critical minerals to power its renewable, high-tech and defense industries, even as it actively seeks to “full-proof” its supply chain over the years ahead.

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Britain has more basic reasons to cultivate economic ties with Africa’s most populous nation too. Since 2008, its GDP per capita growth has fallen to a sluggish 0.46% per year, hardly enough to cover the galloping rise in living costs. The country’s long-run economic story is hardly cheering either. In that context, a fast-growing market of over 200 million people looks less like a realpolitik ally — and more like an opportunity. Britain and Nigeria already do about £8 billion of trade a year, and British ministers have spent the last two years pushing new agreements in legal services, finance, education and energy. And why not? This is precisely the kind of fast-growing, English-speaking market Britain cannot afford to dismiss.

The feeling is mutual. For decades, and despite being such a vast oil producer, Nigeria imported much of the refined petroleum it consumed: its own state-run refineries barely functioned. Now, though, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria and Africa’s richest man, has built one of the world’s largest oil refineries in Lagos, spearheading investments in steel as part of a broader industrialization push. These are the most serious recent attempts to drag Nigeria up the value chain, and Britain can prod things along with targeted investment.

All the while, Nigerian immigration to the UK, reckoned to be around 300,000 over the last five years, means that the country’s cultural influence has blossomed too. Afrobeats stars now fill arenas and top music charts the world over, while the Nigerian diaspora is helping shape British society from KSI to Bukayo Saka — to Kemi Badenoch.

Altogether, then, it’s clear that Britain needs meaningful relationships in the rising global south, relationships based on more than postcolonial guilt, paternalism or nostalgia. In our increasingly dangerous geopolitical age, friendship is not ornamental. Rather, it shapes supply chains, diplomatic leverage and investment decisions. Britain can no longer simply announce its importance everywhere. It has to work out where history, language, and diaspora networks give it a real foothold, then build out from there.

Nigeria is one of those places. And while some on the fringes of British politics — both the radical Right and Left — are uncomfortable with that fact, Nigerians themselves seem far more relaxed. As a 2020 Ipsos survey of young Nigerians found, Britain’s people, government and institutions are the most trusted among foreign nations. Tinubu’s office has described Nigeria and Britain as sharing a “special bond”, while many wealthy Nigerians send their children to British universities, maintain homes here, and consider London a serious place to do business. Nigerians who live or spend most of their time in Nigeria itself have little time for the performative anti-colonial waxing some British-Nigerians indulge in here.

That, in turn, should prompt a change in British sensibility. A mature relationship with Nigeria cannot be conducted as though London still dispenses order while Nigeria merely receives it. The old imperial habit — part condescension, part nostalgia — is now not only unattractive but also impractical. If Nigerians are prepared to engage Britain as an equal, Britain will have to learn to reciprocate.

Whitehall is already learning these lessons in its dealings with countries like India, where capital, demography and strategic leverage increasingly matter more than inherited assumptions of rank. That is likely to become one of the century’s governing patterns: former imperial subjects, or once dismissed peripheries, gaining influence as Western states lose their monopoly on confidence. The sensible response is neither sentimentality nor resentment, but realism.

A moment later, a pick-up truck, carrying four masked, heavily armed members of the National Guard, lurches down the street before grinding to a halt by a nearby construction site. Here, workers from sub-Saharan Africa are gathered. The soldiers dismount, snatching one of the workers at random. He submits without resistance, and is hoisted onto the empty truck bed as the vehicle speeds away.

Half an hour later, the same vehicle looms into view. The truck now carries a full cargo of migrants. Simultaneously, police are raiding workplaces around the city. At night, they venture into people’s homes, breaking down doors. Those apprehended are detained and later dumped at the borders of Mali and Senegal.

Until recently, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania — a sparsely-populated desert nation sitting on the border between the Arab and African world — was an attractive destination for migrant workers from West Africa. Offering relatively high salaries, it also had a patchily-enforced immigration regime. But in March this year, that regime came to an end. Deportation raids suddenly started in Nouakchott, the country’s sun-baked capital, before gradually spreading across the country.

Home to both Arab and black African ethnic groups, Mauritania — the last country to abolish slavery — has long been afflicted by racial tensions. These tensions were compounded in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when political upheaval across North Africa led to a surge of Sub-Saharan migrants through the country. Mauritania becoming a major transit point for migrants heading north, many of whom settled there among the politically dominant Beidane Arabs.

“We are a nation of 4.5 million, but in my opinion, we have at least eight million migrants here. They bring crime and drug trafficking and bad morals,” said Ahmed, a telecommunications executive, while driving his Toyota Hilux through the concrete sprawl of the capital Nouakchott. “Now, finally, the government is doing something about it.”

But the Mauritanian government has not publicly explained why it has started deporting migrants en masse. A €210 million migration partnership deal with the EU, signed in 2024 — the EU being concerned about arrivals to Spain’s Canary Islands from the country — may have been a factor. For its part, the EU has never explained how the funds were meant to be used. Ten months into the deportations program, it is to know precisely how many people have been expelled. But judging by the effect on industry, rather than non-existent official statistics, the deportations have been in the tens of thousands. The campaign has caused immense damage. The country’s African migrant communities have dwindled in number, with many deported under brutal and violent conditions. Meanwhile, factories, farms, and construction sites lie empty, deprived of the migrant labor upon which they depend.

All this means that the desert nation has become an unlikely testing ground for the kinds of mass-removal policies that, in Western states, are threatening to elbow their way through the Overton window. Mauritania’s experience suggests that these policies are less about political will than about what a state must become to enforce them. It also demonstrates that such an operation demands enormous state capacity and resources, lest it descend into chaos and lawlessness.

One evening, police raided a compound in Nouaudhibou that was home to Ibrahim, a 25-year-old from Côte d’Ivoire. He was arrested alongside six others. Despite having the necessary documents to remain in Mauritania, Ibrahim was told dismissively to get into a pick-up truck. He was then brought to a detention center and held for five days together with 200 other men. During this period of detention he was given no food.

Suleyman, a 27-year-old Guinean, spent eight months in prison after being violently robbed. The police accused him of initiating the incident. The moment he stepped outside the prison walls, he was arrested over an expired visa. Several days later, he was dumped at Mauritania’s border with Senegal.

The process for determining whether migrants were legally in Mauritania was largely arbitrary. Youssouf, a Guinean factory worker who is in his early twenties and from the Fulani ethnic group, was arrested when police broke down the door to his room early one morning. Youssouf had been asleep beside a black Mauritanian — also Fulani — with whom he shared the accommodation. Both lacked identification, but Youssouf’s roommate was let go after demonstrating proficiency in Hassaniya, the local dialect of Arabic. Youssouf, speaking in Fulani, claimed to be from a village in the Mauritanian south. Unconvinced by his accent, police grilled him with questions about his ancestry. Because Youssouf was unable to verify his story, he was identified as an illegal alien and deported.

On the ground, the campaign has metastasized into a giant rent-seeking exercise — a function of a perverse incentive structure and systemic incompetence. Traore, an Ivorian construction worker in his mid-20s, was arrested three times in less than a week. Each time he regained his freedom after paying bribes of not more than £22. “It’s just about whether you have something to give them,” said Musa, a 24-year-old Gambian construction worker who was deported after police raided his room while he slept.

Seemingly indifferent to their assigned mission, police focused almost entirely on self-enrichment. Before being brought to a detention facility, Youssouf, the Guinean Fulani factory worker, had his pockets searched and the small amount of money he carried on him — the equivalent of £2 — confiscated. Elizabeth, an elderly Nigerian woman, recalled police breaking down her door while she slept naked, handcuffing her before she could dress. Upon finding that she held a valid residency permit, they stole her television, calmly carrying the loot towards a pick-up truck parked nearby.

Such behavior has caused a degree of confusion among Mauritania’s migrant population. “These Mauritanians, they have no IQ,” said Ruth, a street vendor from Sierra Leone when describing her interactions with Mauritanian police. Even though Ruth has valid documents, the police continue to pester her for money.

The inevitable economic disruption wrought by Mauritania’s deportation campaign seems to have had little influence over authorities’ decision-making. As raids intensified in Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, construction sites stood empty and factories came to a halt: many workers were deported, while others feared coming to work for fear of arrest. “There are no workers now, no people who can go to the sea to fish, because they are picking up people who have no documents,” said the owner of one of Nouadhibou’s largest fish-processing factories.

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In the south, along the Senegalese border, the campaign took on a more self-defeating form. For no obvious reason, the government took it upon itself to roll out the deportation campaign in Rosso, a region whose farms — Mauritania’s agricultural backbone — rely almost entirely on foreign labor. Migrant workers were then forced to retreat deeper and deeper into the bush, far beyond the reach of military pick-ups. “They were harassing me a lot. Every day I had to run,” said Ibrahim, a laborer from Guinea-Bissau in his early twenties, while cooking over an open fire in a remote migrant camp where he lives with other workers from Mali and the Gambia. Forced to live off the land, bushmeat — including monitor lizards and other reptiles — is often seen roasting in camps along the River Senegal.

In these riverine bush areas, the farcical nature of the campaign becomes clear. It has achieved little in terms of its presumed goals beyond inflicting extensive human suffering and demonstrating the state’s capacity for cruelty. Those unlucky to be caught in Rosso and deported to Senegal can easily return within a day. “If they catch you, deport you, you go Senegal. Then tomorrow another way you return,” said Samba, a thirty-something Gambian rapper who works in agriculture on a seasonal basis. Migrants, familiar with the terrain and routes through the riverside marshes, would typically pay for fishing canoes to return them to Mauritania for as little as £4.

For others, returning to Mauritania is just a question of having the money to bribe their way through the countless checkpoints along roads between the borders and major economic centers. Those without cash are just waiting for the operation to cool down before they can return and rebuild their lost livelihoods.

Still, mass-removal policies have gained political traction in the West. In response to the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant, President Trump called for the denaturalization of migrants who undermine domestic tranquility and the deportation of those incompatible with Western values, alongside an outright ban on immigration from third-world countries. “If they can’t love our country, we don’t want them,” he later said.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration tsar, went a step further. “Trump’s plan to stop the invasion of small towns in America: remigration!” he tweeted — remigration referring to the use of state-enforced expulsions to reverse existing migration-driven demographic trends. Miller’s comments came days after the State Department tweeted that “mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization and undermines the stability of key American allies.”

More recently, the fatal shooting of a civilian by an ICE agent in Minneapolis — and the uproar that has followed — shows how calls for mass removals can translate into chaotic and volatile forms of state violence when put into practice.

In the UK, too, calls for mass deportations and remigration are becoming more commonplace, with Reform UK and the Conservatives squabbling over who gets to claim credit for mainstreaming mass removals as a policy option. Surprisingly, these proposals fail to confront the realities of what their implementation would involve. When asked whether the first Reform UK government could realistically deport 500,000 people, Zia Yusuf limited his response to, “Totally, yeah.”

Discussions of possible obstacles rarely extend beyond potential legal hurdles. A 2025 paper by Restore Britain — an advocacy group led by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe — advertised, in its own words, as “the most comprehensive deportation policy ever produced in Britain”, fails to account for what mass deportations would look like on the ground. Its analysis of logistics is largely limited to how to exclude migrants from work and public services, alongside schemes to incentivize snitching. It provides no guidance on what is supposed to happen between the intention to deport an “illegal chancer” and the moment he enters a chartered flight. When Restore Britain’s Harrison Pitt, who co-authored the paper, was interviewed by GB News, the practicalities remained undiscussed.

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Yet the Mauritanian case suggests that the questions of practical implementation — and state capacity — are, in fact, the most critical elements of any mass removal operation. Such operations rest on six basic requirements: identifying “targets”, apprehending them, detaining them, transporting them, expelling them, and preventing their return. In these respects, Mauritania has benefited from an extensive intelligence-gathering apparatus, despotic governance, the absence of rule of law, and little respect for human rights, thus exercising a certain competitive advantage over Western states. Mauritanian police were able to proceed with an efficiency-maximizing approach, prioritizing high numbers of arrests over any broader considerations.

While it might seem that Mauritania’s failure to prevent human suffering and excessive collateral damage is particular to its incompetent governance and inability to effectively enforce policy, it points to broader contradictions in mass deportations as a practical strategy. Contrary to what much of the current discourse would suggest, the viability of mass removals rests on far more prosaic questions about what the state can actually do, and at what cost.

Mauritania was able to turn the concept into action only because it is seemingly willing to exercise despotism and brutalize those it now deems unwelcome. It remains unclear whether there is another way to implement the policy. Any government wishing to implement a less arbitrary and brutal approach — providing at least a façade of legality — would need to develop a large, permanent apparatus of surveillance, detention and enforcement capable of tracking and controlling millions of people. This would inevitably come in combination with an expansion of state power and administrative coercion that chronically limited public budgets would struggle to sustain, even amid a scenario of sustained public support.

A completely different, yet equally important, consideration is how mass removals would change the moral fiber of our societies. While proponents of mass deportations might stress that migrants could be encouraged to leave voluntarily, through incentives rather than coercion, it remains questionable whether significant numbers could be persuaded to leave in exchange for a financial reward alone. Such a decision would mean sacrificing the prospect of a life-long existence in the West, and as of yet there are no convincing examples of successful cash-for-voluntary returns schemes adopted on a mass basis. If the ambition is not merely to marginally increase returns but to reverse demographic trends decades in the making, voluntary self-deportation schemes seem unlikely to deliver the numbers required.

Thus, any attempt to make such a campaign effective might necessitate radical changes in everyday life: neighbors denouncing one another, landlords and employers acting as auxiliary immigration officers, and routine identity checks becoming a normal feature of streets, shops, and workplaces. While public opinion on mass deportations continues to shift, it is one thing to endorse these ideas in the abstract, but quite another to live with the methods required to enforce them at scale. As the Mauritanian example suggests, the gap between these two positions is where the real political and moral costs lie.

***

Nearly 60 years ago, Time magazine, then an important publication, posed a discomfiting question on its cover: “Is God Dead?” Yet today, a spiritual hunger grips America, with roughly two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans still believing in God or a universal spirit, according to Pew. Overall, young people are drawing closer to a higher power, and new research reports that most Gen-Z teens are more interested in learning more about Jesus, often using the internet to find new commitments.  

There is even some sign of revival in decidedly secular Europe, with 45% more people being baptized in historically anti-clerical France compared to last year. And, notes The Spectator, there’s a “boom biblique”: a rapid rise in sales of the Bible. More broadly, religious bookstores report a 20% percent increase in purchases since 2024. In Britain, of course, there is the “quiet revival,” with the church-attending share of the population rising to nearly 6 million in 2025, up from 3.7 million in 2018, with much of the energy seen among young men.

In modern sociology, conventional wisdom holds that religious people are generally less curious, less ambitious, and less intelligent than their nonbelieving peers. But this view is out of tune with current realities. On the contrary, a deep dive into the data shows that, over the last 15 years, religiously engaged people have become more likely to be well-educated, while atheists are less so. In the United States, religious groups outperform atheists and agnostics.

Overall, religious enthusiasm is most concentrated among middle-income professionals. An analysis of the 2022-2023 Cooperative Election Study, surveying nearly 85,000 Americans, found a positive correlation between education and weekly religious attendance. The rate of attendance rises from 23% among high school graduates to 30% for those with graduate degrees. This trend is supported by the sociologist Philip Schwadel’s research, which found that each additional year of education increases an American’s likelihood of attending religious services by 15%.

At the same time, the nature of worshipers has changed, and taken on increasingly conservative character. This has much to do with the rise of Gen Z, notes religious commentator Aaron Renn. Today’s young believers have arrived at faith amid a decidedly hostile environment for religion. They have, moreover, embraced political positions on race, immigration, and transgenderism that are vastly different from those held by older liberal Catholics as well as mainline Protestants.

Indeed, progressive ideology has proved catastrophic for houses of worship that embrace it. In 2019, more Protestant churches closed than opened in the United States, as mainstream Protestant denominations lost 5 million members in the past decade. Once dominant mainline Protestant churches now count barely 9% of Americans in their flocks, down from a peak of 50%. Progressive-dominated sects like the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, and the United Church of Christ are experiencing what one analyst described as “a bloodbath,” with membership down at least 30% since the Nineties.

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In Canada,  the once-dominant Anglicans have lost roughly three-quarters of their worshipers and could go extinct by 2040, according to some church leaders. Even in its ancestral home, the Church of England, fashionably liberal and dismissive of many of the concerns of its congregants about such problems as Islamic militancy or grooming gangs, has been in secular decline and may be surpassed by Islam within a decade. Liberal Catholicism is similarly graying and out of touch.

The progressive hierarchs of all denominations, in short, face the challenge of an increasingly conservative customer base, both in the West and even more so in Africa, the crucible of the Catholic future. Traditionalist faiths, such as Greek Orthodoxy, seem to be doing better. A survey of Orthodox churches around the country found that parishes saw a 78% increase in converts in 2022, compared with pre-pandemic levels in 2019. The average age of attendees is 42, with 62% between 18 and 45. That’s significantly younger than other major traditions.

Among Jews, reform and even conservative synagogues are struggling while those of Orthodox Judaism, particularly the thriving Chabad movement, have gained both members and influence, enjoying the greatest growth in engagement since Oct. 7. Some reform Jews (including yours truly) have been shocked by the turn toward anti-Zionism among leading reform rabbis. Given the overwhelming support among Jews for Israel, these Leftist-oriented clergy can only alienate most congregants and can only survive as useful idiots for those who wish to destroy the Jewish state.

If there’s an epicenter for the new religious revival, it’s Africa, which is the one continent with a growing population and enormous, largely untapped economic potential. Historically, Christian missions were central to establishing formal education on the continent, forging a lasting link between faith and upward mobility. Today, Pentecostalism is a major driver of this trend, offering a version of Christianity that promotes values such as individualism and a strong work ethic, providing followers with the spiritual and social tools to pursue economic advancement and a better future.

Widely ignored by Western interests, Africa is far from a hopeless basket case. It is home to 11 of the world’s 20 fastest growing economies. In the span of a single century, Africa has undergone a religious revolution in tandem with its economic growth. While Islam has expanded its footprint in Africa, doubling its share since 1900, the preponderant growth is among Christians. The Chrisitan faith has won the adherence of nearly 57% of all Africans since 1900, compared to 29% for Islam.

Clearly Africa’s demographic exceptionalism will drive the future of religion. The population of sub-Saharan Africa grew by an extraordinary 31% between 2010 and 2020 alone, reaching 1.1 billion people. UN projections indicate that this population will increase by two-thirds by 2050, a period during which Europe and North America are forecast to remain largely static. By the end of the century, seven of the world’s 15 most populous nations are projected to be in Africa, a stark contrast to 1950, when only one African country made that list.

Ultimately, then, Christianity’s future lies in Africa. As of 2020, there were 697.4 million Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. This growth now accounts for most of the numerical increase in Christians globally. A century ago, two-thirds of the world’s Christians lived in Europe. Today, that figure is roughly a quarter. By 2050, projections indicate that 4 out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa. The region’s share of the global Christian population is expected to rise to 38% by 2050, up from a quarter in 2010; while Europe’s share is projected to plummet to just 16%. Africa’s Christians are also young, with a median age of 20, compared to a global Christian median of 30.

In Africa, Christianity also tends toward social conservatism and takes traditionalist stances both inside mainstream groups like the Anglicans or the Catholic Church, or in fast-growing  evangelical, charismatic, and Pentecostal denominations.

This tie between religious faith and growth, so visible in Africa, could also shape the West. Education, long dominated by Left-leaning secularists and radicals, will be a crucial inflection point. In the South Bronx or Houston’s heavily immigrant Sharpstown, religious educators are having success with young people from very poor backgrounds where secular education is failing. Inner-city boys who attend religious schools, notes Tulane University sociologist Ilana Horwitz, do far better and are twice as likely to graduate from college than those in public schools. Critical here, she notes, are the attributes of religious engagement, such as respect for elders and learning. Even guilt has its efficacy, helping to restrain the worst impulses that often lead adolescents into dark spaces.

Nationwide, enrollment in private Christian schools has risen in recent years. In New York, as city schools are emptying, Catholic-oriented charters have doubled their enrollments. The K-12 enrollment at the Association of Christian Schools International, described as “one of the country’s largest networks of evangelical schools,” increased 12% between the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years, even as more families migrate out of the public-school systems. The rise of voucher programs, including in such large states as Texas and Florida, has largely benefited religiously oriented schools.

It is becoming increasingly clear that religious faith provides critical social benefits. For instance, just 10% of religiously observant people today say they have no close friends; the share almost doubles for those who have no faith. Participation in church generally also correlates, according to a 2022 study in the American Journal of Epidemiology, with better health outcomes. Equally well-established are the links between religious participation and longer lives, greater financial generosity, and more stable families. 

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Christian talk show host Justin Brierley predicts “the fall of the New Atheism.” Richard Dawkins’s vision of a universe driven by “blind, pitiless indifference” is being challenged by a generation of conservative intellectuals like Jordan Peterson, JD Vance, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who embrace religion’s resurgence as counterweight to the current declines in marriage, family, community, and civil society.      

Even some in the tech elite are having second thoughts. Most scientists tend toward secularism, but there seems to be a trend among scientists to embrace faith. Most notably, the expanding Society of Catholic Scientists counts more than 2,100 members and has 28 regional chapters.  

Even in the technological heartland of secular America, Silicon Valley, there are religious stirrings. The world’s most important innovator, Elon Musk, has recently become more public in his embrace of Christianity, which he described  as “ a religion of curiosity” and “greater enlightenment.” Other executives and investors like Pat Gelsinger, former head of Intel, Gary Tan, CEO of Y Incubator, and Peter Theil have likewise embraced the faith.

In Silicon Valley — where, as one observer notes, religion is “borderline illegal” — the congregation of the Catholic Our Lady of Peace church has burgeoned to more than 3000 families. And, according to Fr. Brian Dinkel, who hears an estimated 50,000 confessions a year, “People who may be doing well also want something more. Our people work at Google and Apple, but there’s a real search for the truth beyond tech.”    

Ultimately, the religious may prevail due to their higher birthrates. The places where Americans have children tend to be in the South, the Plains, and parts of the Intermountain West. These are also centers of conservative Christianity. The presence of children is all the more important in an  era where the population bomb has morphed into the population deficit.  

 It seems likely that more Americans, seeing the benefits of faith and community, will continue to take on a more religious cast of mind in the future. News of the death of God, it turns out, was greatly exaggerated.

While the Horn of Africa endures some of the worst conditions, huge swathes of the continent experience chaos and deprivation in some degree. To understand the structural reasons for this, we must look at Africa’s cities. Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing an urban transition of a kind unique in history. Though it is currently the world’s least urbanized region, with slightly less than half of its 1.4 billion people living in cities, that proportion is climbing rapidly, driven by phenomenal birth rates and migration from rural areas. In other parts of the world, starting with Britain in the 19th century, movement to cities was accompanied by the growth of manufacturing industries, providing jobs and helping to supply modern infrastructure. In Africa, however, this economic transformation has not yet taken place. Along with its increasingly dry and unpredictable climates, the greatest strain on Africa’s future comes from the simple fact that there is not enough formal employment for its rapidly growing numbers of young, urban people.

As Robert Rotberg has written, sub-Saharan Africa is “experiencing the most rapid population increases anywhere, ever”, such that “half of all the babies born on the planet between now and 2050” will be delivered in the region. African women begin having babies, on average, in their early 20s, meaning that generations compound faster than elsewhere. Thanks to improved medicine, more of those infants, and mothers, now survive.

The population statistics are far from reliable, but those collected by the World Bank at least give a sense of scale. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have 4.3 children each. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Chad, they have more than six each. Whereas, in 1975, Africa had half as many people as Europe, by the middle of this century it will have three times more, and the median African will still be in their mid-20s. This growth will be concentrated in urban Africa. The continent has 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing cities, and in the coming decades many of its urban centers will double or triple in size.

Many African cities display what appear to be impressive feats of development. Returning to the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a case in point. Flush with Chinese and Emirati cash, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is razing much of the city’s historic core and replacing it with grand parks and museums, plazas, hotels and offices. The horizon blooms with skyscrapers and condominiums. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian state has for over two decades been seeking to foster an industrial revolution, directing investment towards factories, railways, housing, and an enormous hydroelectric plant in the form of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. For much of that time, economic growth has averaged an impressive 9% annually.

And yet, behind the glamorous projects and flattering statistics, prosperity remains scarce. Despite Ethiopia’s frighteningly low wages — Ethiopian textile workers earn half as much as those in Bangladesh — the country is struggling to follow East Asian countries along the manufacturing route to development. There is much more automation now, and complex supply chains allow firms to use African workers for discrete tasks, such as assembling components made elsewhere, which don’t add up to proper industries. This leaves few paths towards mass employment or higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.

The struggle to industrialize has grave consequences for political stability. Ethiopia has Africa’s second largest population (though estimates vary significantly), and drought-stricken rural areas are regularly on the verge of famine. Like many African countries, Ethiopia also has deep ethnic divisions, with the army struggling against violent uprisings in three different regions. Young men without hope of employment provide the recruiting pools for local militias, and for the bandit parties that kidnap travelers and employees of foreign businesses.

As for the shiny precincts of Addis Ababa, these cater to a relatively small middle class that works for the state or has managed to plug into the global service sector. Thousands of less fortunate residents have been forcibly evicted by Abiy’s schemes. Much of the property development in the city is highly speculative, and many projects are never finished. Urban development has been a source of conflict in the past. The previous government’s plans to expand Addis Ababa at the expense of farmers in the surrounding region were abandoned amid protests and violence.

Little wonder that so many Ethiopians, and Africans more generally, do not remain in the cities where they first arrive, but want to emigrate further afield. Thanks to modern media and communication, they know that people elsewhere have better lives and far higher wages, that there are routes for reaching those places, and that some emigrants actually make it. With Europe’s current asylum system, ambitious and determined young men especially have a good chance of being awarded work and residence rights, if they can just get there. But Europe is only the destination for a small percentage of Africa’s emigrants, most of whom move within the continent itself. For Ethiopians, another major migration route flows eastwards across the Red Sea, towards Saudi Arabia. It is a brutal journey along roads littered with decomposing corpses, and those who are not gunned down by Saudi border guards often face appalling exploitation within the Gulf kingdom itself. Millions of Ethiopians try their luck anyway.

Many of Africa’s swelling cities show similar patterns to Addis Ababa. Globalization has fractured these spaces, allowing small pockets to leap ahead and join the advanced industries of the 21st century, while leaving the rest with Chinese-made phones and consumer goods but few opportunities for training or employment. A large part of the continent’s wealth, such as it is, has come from primary resources like fossil fuels and metals, often extracted by foreign companies, creating small numbers of rich individuals rather than a large body of skilled wage earners. Well over half of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, lacking reliable access to clean water, sanitation, and other basic services. A still higher proportion earn their living in the informal economy, working as street vendors and casual laborers, smugglers and traders, their businesses and occupations unknown to the government.

Nowhere will the dramas of the African city play out on a larger scale than in Lagos, the Nigerian metropolis on the Atlantic coast. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country by far, and that population is growing rapidly, due to overtake the United States by 2050. Lagos is destined to become one of the world’s largest urban centers. It may eventually merge with coastal cities in four other countries, together forming, as Howard French puts it, “the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people”.

Nigeria has one of Africa’s leading economies, boasting the continent’s largest oil and gas reserves, as well as strengths in manufacturing, tech, finance and other services. Yet 90 million Nigerians are thought to live in extreme poverty. Likewise, Lagos is home to an impressive middle class of educated professionals and businesspeople, but the city cannot keep up with the sheer speed of its own growth. More than 1,000 new inhabitants arrive each day.

According to the Polish-Nigerian political scientist Remi Adekoya, the situation in cities like Lagos is worsened by the bad governance of Nigeria’s narrow political elite. There is, he told me, “huge frustration” and “a feeling of helplessness” among middle-class Nigerians, who are unable to leverage their resources to improve the country since they have “zero influence over the political system”.

One might think that a frustrated middle class combined with large numbers of underemployed young people would make Nigerian cities ripe for political unrest. But Adekoya says there are powerful factors working against such a possibility. One is simply repression. “They know that their governments are ruthless, and will not hesitate to send out soldiers on the streets to shoot at them,” he says. Another is religion, which plays an important role in the lives of most Africans, and can lead them to interpret inequality in terms of divine favor. Finally, there is the fear that political convulsions will lead to Nigeria — like Ethiopia and many other African nations composed of different groups ­­— “descending into ethnic-based civil war”.

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Instead, political disillusionment has encouraged what Adekoya calls “a form of escapism”, whereby middle-class people focus their energies on the private sphere. Many have opted for a more literal escape too. A large diaspora of talented Nigerians is making its mark overseas, in countries like Britain, where it has been notably successful in politics, business, the arts, and many other fields. Between 2017-2023, about 100,000 Nigerians departed to study in the UK. 75,000 nurses left Nigeria over the same period. Polls regularly report that 60-70% of young Nigerians are eager to relocate to other countries.

This is not just a problem for Nigeria, of course. Somewhere in the region of 70,000-100,000 trained professionals leave Africa each year. In Britain, we tend to discuss the morality of immigration rather myopically in terms of the value of openness, the merits of diversity and the benefits to our economy, rarely considering the cost to poorer countries of losing their most educated and ambitious young citizens. Yet there is surely a cost when a third of African scientists live outside the continent, when there are more Zimbabwean midwives in Britain than in Zimbabwe, and more Ethiopian physicians in Chicago than in Addis Ababa. The World Health Organization predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will face a deficit of 5.3 million health workers by 2050.

But as European governments struggle with rising anti-immigration sentiment, they are now most concerned with reducing the numbers that are coming to the continent illegally or to claim asylum. According to the current consensus, endorsed by Britain’s Labour government as well, this is best achieved by investing in Africa to address the conditions that spur migration, and to bribe African governments to act as an advance border control. In theory, this diplomatic approach can tie in with other European agendas in Africa, such as gaining access to natural resources, combating radical Islam and checking Chinese and Russian influence.

The British government last year pledged £84 million to address factors driving migration in North and East Africa, through a combination of skills programs and humanitarian aid. But the real champion of this African strategy is Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has consistently pushed something called the Mattei Plan for Africa. A series of meetings with African leaders has resulted in a scheme for €5.5 billion of investment in energy, education, health and agriculture across more than a dozen African countries. Italy wants help stemming migration in the Mediterranean, while looking to benefit from African oil and gas.

This summer, the Mattei Plan was officially folded into EU policy, as Meloni staged a joint summit with European commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Rome. They announced funding for a railway in the Lobito Corridor, an area rich in strategic minerals that links Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. They also committed to debt relief and an undersea cable linking Europe with East Africa.

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But Europe’s stance is not quite as it appears. The key goals guiding the EU’s investment in Africa are “sustainable growth” and an “inclusive, green and digital” economic transformation. These are the same policy clichés preferred by most of the Western NGOs supporting development in the continent. The problem, as numerous African politicians and activists have pointed out, is that no other region has successfully developed its economy by green or sustainable means; they have all relied on the intensive use of fossil fuels to foster industrialization. There is as yet no proven path to development through renewables, let alone through digital technology, and the evidence in Africa is hardly promising so far. Almost half of Africans lack reliable electricity, while three quarters of those in rural areas have no internet access.

The grim truth is that European leaders and development agencies do not want Africa to turn into an even bigger China sitting just across the Mediterranean; a powerful industrialized region with over two billion people, placing enormous demands on the world’s resources and producing vast quantities of carbon emissions. Like infrastructure investments which facilitate the extraction of natural resources, contributions to “sustainable growth” in Africa are a cynical form of generosity. They really amount to paying Africans to remain poor.

And yet, Meloni was surely right when she said at the recent summit in Rome, “Africa is the continent where our future is most at stake.” The Mediterranean and even the Sahara are no longer clear civilizational borders; millions of people in Europe now have family ties with Africa. Short of dramatically different immigration policies, or breakthroughs in automation that reduce demand for foreign labor, it is difficult to see how these connections will not continue to grow. Asylum systems will need to change if European governments are to address popular anger over porous borders and immigration. But Africa will soon have a larger working age population than India or China, and there will be plenty of economic interests clamoring to use that workforce on our own aging continent.

For Africa itself, the greatest challenge remains that of providing its burgeoning numbers of young people with livelihoods to meet their needs and ambitions — something which can only be accomplished within the continent’s new urban worlds. If it fails this challenge, then the pressure valve of emigration will not be enough to prevent growing political instability, an outcome that is already manifest in many African countries. Cities will be the engines of Africa’s transformation, or the ultimate symbols of its tragedy.

To back up this claim, liberals cite polls which invariably give countries under the US security umbrella disproportionate representation, and which seem to confirm that the rest of the world shares their view. But as anyone who has lived or travelled extensively outside of the West in recent years will tell you, the reality on the ground is much more complex. Trump’s base extends far beyond the United States.

Trump’s allies abroad take many forms, with motivations ranging from an ideological affinity for Right-wing anti-communism to a preference for a limited “America First” policy over the Democrats’ liberal internationalism. When liberals encounter these positions, they tend to label Trump’s foreign admirers as authoritarian. There may be some truth to this: Trump’s populist tough-guy persona is something that people in many parts of the world like, perhaps because it’s familiar. But such linear explanations are also self-serving, and neither entirely accurate nor honest.

The reality is that Trump’s overseas approval can be found in unlikely places. For instance, according to polls from the 2020 election, the country where Trump was most perceived to care about “ordinary people” was Nigeria. In that year, to the incredulity of American reporters, hundreds of Nigerians held a rally for the former president, clad in t-shirts showing his face and waving placards calling for his re-election. At the time, one 23-year-old artist told Reuters that Nigerians appreciated Trump’s “radical” approach to politics. Some liked him so much, in fact, that they weren’t that concerned with the Muslim ban. “If we have a person like Trump… Nigeria will be a better place to stay,” another supporter said. “There will be no need to go outside the country.”

Some attribute Trump’s popularity in Africa to the continent’s Christian minority, and the perception that Trump is the defender of Christians and their interests. He is, for example, a perennial favourite of African preachers and prophets — and none more so than Uebert Angel, a Pentecostal minister from Zimbabwe and an ambassador for the African Union’s Pan-African Parliament. In a recent broadcast, Angel — who has three million Instagram followers and over half a million YouTube subscribers —explored Trump’s “spiritual alignment”. “Donald means the ruler,” Angel explained. And “John, for J, means ‘the voice’”. Angel believes that prayers transmitted by his enormous following saved Trump from that fateful bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Nigerian televangelist Christian Oyakhilome, known as “Pastor Chris”, has also openly backed Trump. As the founder of the megachurch Christ Embassy, which has spread internationally, he alleges that Trump has been targeted for advocating for his flock. “They are angry at Trump for supporting Christians,” Oyakhilome has said. “So the real ones they hate are you who are Christians.”

Elsewhere, some in Africa explicitly support Trump’s dismissive approach to the continent, including his insistence on cutting aid. “For some strange reason, while I despise his divisive rhetoric and certainly don’t think he’s the best choice for President of the United States, I agree with Mr Trump’s position on Africa,” business strategy specialist John-Paul Iwuoha wrote in 2016. “Africa needs to wean itself off the tranquilising milk of foreign aid… and thanks to Mr Trump’s nationalistic ideals, Africa now has a rare opportunity to stand on its own and create a bright and prosperous future for itself.”

This aversion to aid is largely a response to its politicised and transactional nature. On one recent pan-Africanist podcast discussion about Trump and Kamala Harris’s hypothetical Africa policies, the hosts agreed that Harris would step up engagement and aid for Africa, while Trump would likely scale it back. But as they saw it, the Democrats’ supposed generosity with aid is an underhanded tool of manipulation — a means of buying the support of corrupt African leaders and ensuring continued allegiance to the US.

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Further afield, Trump seems to be just as popular in Vietnam, where scooter businesses bear his name and the wall of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant displays a picture of him on The Apprentice. Binh Lee, an entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City, has written that Vietnam’s “love affair” with Trump can be explained in part by his nationalism. In the West, nationalism is often associated with ethnic cleansing and genocide. But in Vietnam, as in much of the so-called Global South, nationalism served as the ideological basis for decolonisation. While many rightly emphasise the sharp distinction between these two contexts, some in Vietnam do not. As Lee explained: “With his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, Donald Trump… embodied the kind of ideal leader forever ingrained in our collective psyche: the hero who would appear at the darkest moment of his country and lead his people through the struggle to ultimate triumph.” Meanwhile, others link Trump’s appeal to Vietnam’s fast-growing economy, where new would-be entrepreneurs view the former president as the embodiment of capitalist success. Others still attribute Trump’s popularity to his anti-China sentiments, which some in Vietnam share.

In Indonesia, meanwhile, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, attitudes about Trump are also unexpectedly mixed. While some leaders lambasted him for his bellicose rhetoric, others were more circumspect. One prominent lawmaker dismissed Trump’s Indonesian critics, stressing that the president had only adopted anti-Muslim rhetoric to drum up support among the electorate, while another minister described Trump as a “non-ideological and non-confrontational” leader who would treat Indonesia as a “democratic equal”. In a similar vein, researcher Andrew Matong has noted that Trump’s presidency was conspicuously free of the American flag burnings across the Muslim world that were ubiquitous in the time of George W. Bush. Many of these countries’ citizens may find Trump’s language repugnant and dislike his policies, but for many, these pale in comparison to the wholesale destruction of countries overseen by “respectable” Republicans and Democrats.

Similarly, few foreign countries celebrated Trump’s 2016 victory more than Serbia, where Bill Clinton is still despised as the leader who spearheaded the bombing of then-Yugoslavia in 1999. Trump has appeared on billboards there, and you can buy socks emblazoned with his face on Belgrade’s central streets. More recently, the current Right-wing Serbian government has made little secret of its preference for another Trump presidency. Indeed, it has already signed an agreement with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a complex on the site of the old Yugoslav Army headquarters, which was bombed by Nato in 1999. The planned development will reportedly include a controversial memorial complex “dedicated to all the victims of Nato aggression”.

Yet perhaps the most surprising locus for Trump approval is China. Within hours of the assassination attempt, Chinese vendors had printed t-shirts depicting the image of a bloodied, defiant Trump with the slogans “fight, fight, fight” and “shooting makes me stronger”. One vendor on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao claimed he had received 2,000 orders within three hours of putting the t-shirts online.

No doubt many of Trump’s Chinese supporters find him appealing because he shares their distaste for platitudinous liberalism. On a more elite level, however, there is some muted hope that another Trump presidency might be “realistic and balanced”. This is an echo of the Seventies’ logic that “only Nixon could go to China” — the implication being that only an anti-communist hawk could oversee US-China rapprochement, because the same move by a centre-left Democrat would have been tarred as “soft on China”.

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In many instances, then, Trump’s foreign support is motivated by his businessman credentials: he is viewed as someone who prefers making deals to launching secular crusades in the name of democracy and human rights. At the negotiating table, we can surmise, such a distinction matters. While liberal internationalism is sustained by faith, deal-making implies a certain crass rationality.

Indeed, this line of thinking was even evident in a recent interview with Mohammed Al-Hindi, a top leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who was asked whether Biden or Trump would be better for Palestine. (The interview was carried out prior to Biden stepping down as the 2024 nominee.) While noting that “Trump, at the end of the day, just like Biden, would be looking after American interests”, Al-Hindi seemed to suggest that Trump might be slightly preferable. “We kind of miss Trump now, his debates and statements,” he explained. After observing that the current war in Gaza had affected Israel’s standing “in the eyes of the world and the region”, he concluded that “any future president will find those changes on the table and they cannot be disregarded — especially if he is a businessman like Trump”.

Thus, a more complicated picture of US foreign policy emerges from beyond the West. Democrats like to say that the world’s dictators will be happy if Trump comes to power, because he will put an end to Washington’s promotion of “democracy” abroad. But plenty of people who’ve endured such policies do not view their outcomes in the same self-mythologising terms. In fact, many see them as disastrous. The result is something less flattering for both sides of the US political divide: while some of Trump’s overseas defenders like him for what he is, many more like him for what he is not.

Disillusioned ANC supporters stayed home everywhere. The party lost its majority in Gauteng, the country’s economic heartland, and the populous and tumultuous KwaZulu Natal Province. An avenging five-month old radical party, Umkhonto we Sizwe, headed by disgraced and deposed former President Jacob Zuma, swept the polls in the Zulu heartland and emerged the third largest party nationally.

The liberal opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) held the Western Cape and a clutch of small ethnic and regional parties also made incremental progress. Another Zulu-based movement, Inkatha Freedom Front (IFP), increased its share and held its fastnesses north of the Tugela River. The big loser was the urban radical and nativist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) which bled copiously to the even more extreme and anarchic MKP. Socialist and redistributive voters trumped free market ones two-to-one.

The architect of the ANC’s decline is its own President, Cyril Ramaphosa, who was elected with the highest hopes in 2019 that he would be a reformer and an energiser after the eight years of plunder and decay of his predecessor, Jacob Zuma. He was neither, the country deteriorating by virtually every metric possible compared with the country’s halcyon days under former ANC presidents Nelson Mandela and, to a lesser extent, Thabo Mbeki. His weakness in failing to promptly extirpate the Zuma saboteurs from within his ranks years ago, and to lead a reformist national alliance, opened the gap for the extremists such as the EFF and MKP and disheartened even his most ardent supporters. He too has seen his gat.

Few will feel sorry for Ramaphosa. Perhaps fewer still for voters who seem wholly indifferent to either the competence or honesty of their public representatives and routinely vote for their own dispossession by marauding political elites. Such is the allure of tribalism and race.

All this has brought the country to a decisive moment. Initial hopes by the ANC that it could cobble together a majority from pliant smaller parties are dashed. Will the viviparous ANC, still kingmaker after 30 years despite everything, cast towards its offshoots like the EFF (sprung from the ANC Youth League) or the MKP (the former ANC Zulu diehards) to keep power? Or towards the DA and its liberal-reformist Multi Party Charter? If the former, it brings either 51% or 55% of the electorate and what analyst Dr Frans Cronje calls the Chernobyl Option, keeping power in the short term but sowing the seeds of its own destruction. If the latter, it brings 76% of the electorate and possible economic redemption.

A pre-poll survey by the authoritative Brenthurst Foundation found that South Africans rated weak leadership as a bigger threat than crime, more than three quarters were happy with a coalition Government, and 54% were in favour of a coalition which included liberal parties or ANC and liberal parties. This public expression should guide the ANC but probably will not, which is why it is in the position it is.

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South Africa's stagnant election

By Brian Pottinger

The ANC has declared itself winning to form a Government of national unity but, as always, the devil is in the detail.

The positive is that despite all past and looming threats, South African democracy is alive and functioning. There was little pre-election violence and a relatively stable, albeit sporadically dysfunctional, electoral process. There are numerous challenges but none that yet appears systemically threatening. The Judiciary intervened when called to defend the process and the media and independent observers were omnipresent and unfettered.

Vital indicators emerge from these elections. The first is the salience of identitarian or, in its South African context, tribal and ethnic mobilisation, its reality long denied or ignored by white liberals and the black elites. Black South Africans voted overwhelmingly for black parties; whites mostly voted for the DA and the Afrikaner dominated Freedom Front Plus (FF+); mixed-race people deserted the traditional parties to support “brown” and “first nation” parties, the most wildly popular headed by a convicted ex-bank robber who demands the return of the death sentence, and many Asian descended people, when not voting for the DA, voted for tiny local, religious, family and regional parties. With 54 registered parties contesting, there was an embarrassment of choice.

Zuma’s party did best in its Zulu heartland and Zulu-speaking regions in the eastern parts of the country. The ANC triumphed in the Xhosas-speaking Transkei region, its place of historic origin, and the northern parts. The DA benefitted from the huge counter-migration of whites back from the hinterland to the coast and abroad (74% of expatriates voted DA), fleeing the collapse of the northern metropolises. Ramaphosa’s indecisiveness and cowardice has thus decisively slain Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Rainbow Nation, if it ever existed. A catastrophically failed ANC leadership through decades has ensured that South Africa is demographically and politically reconfiguring itself back into the 19th century.

Underlying these election results has also been a significant generational aspect. More than two-fifths of the voters were between the age of 18-34. Initial surveys show significant numbers voted for either EFF or MK. To these young voters, the mystique of the ANC holds little allure: the prospects of jobs and a better life do, although, tragically, their political choices last week will certainly defeat their personal hopes. More, the advent of the young disconnected radical, no different from counterparts across the developed world, diminishes the power of the trade unions, historically one of the ANC’s key support pillars but now widely regarded by many unemployed young blacks as anachronistic as the ANC itself. The real face of the ANC thus emerges. It is old, raddled and utterly bereft of ideas.

These elections have consolidated another theme of recent politics in South Africa: localism at both the regional and metropolitan level, a trend which will be hastened by the next round of municipal elections. This process has been underway for some time. As the central State withers, private initiatives move to fill the gaps in education, security, health and most recently in utilities like electricity and water. At the core of this cantonal impulse at municipal level, graced by the name of co-governance, has been the DA and some smaller parties, modest gainers in the elections. The process may promise a sunshine option to the numerous wealthy quasi cantons stretched along the Indian and Atlantic shorelines, but it presages even greater disparities in income and lifestyle chances nationally.

So too at provincial level where two powerful secessionist streams are running, one in the Western Cape, where polls suggest between 46% and 70% of the people wish to break away, and the other in the ever-volatile KwaZulu Natal where a vociferous lobby, the Abantu Batho Congress (ABC), is calling for an autonomous Zulu Kingdom. The extent to which these movements flourish depends on whether the ANC goes into alliance with one of its offspring movements (spurring Western Cape independence) or whether it does not (driving KwaZulu Natal’s simmering revolt).

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KwaZulu Natal, a fiercely contested arena, faces a fraught and unpredictable future. The upstart Zulu-based MKP, patroned by the indestructible 82-year-old Jacob Zuma who is bizarrely still allowed to hold ANC membership, has made huge inroads, stripped the EFF of support (cruel, as the EFF galvanised the young who now vote against them), and annihilated the ANC in both its urban and rural strongholds, emerging with 45% of the provincial vote. The DA’s premier candidate, a presentable young, white gay man able to speak fluent isiZulu, had no chance against the flood.

Reasons for the MKP’s success is a volatile mix of blood, disillusionment and rage: Zulu chauvinism, attraction to the MKP’s policies of radical economic “transformation” (translation: expropriation of private wealth in favour of an avaricious and unproductive new black elite), a traditional Zulu respect for age, a sense Zuma has been wronged by Ramaphosa, but mostly because of an utter public weariness with the ANC’s violently factional and failed rule in the province. In the wake of the abortive insurrection of July 2021 in which the State went AWOL and left local communities to fend for themselves, a revolt inspired by some now sitting in the MKP, I wrote that this province would never forgive Cyril Ramaphosa for allowing it to happen. It did not, but incredibly, many now seek salvation from the very quarters that caused the tumult.

It is uncertain who will rule in KwaZulu Natal. An ANC-IFP-liberal alliance is still possible. If it fails we should expect an unappealing mélange of medieval kingdom (the recently anointed King Misizulu Zulu is severely miffed at the ANC for challenging his sole directorship of 2.8 million ha of communal land), a radicalised tribal party, and a shadow despot who was arguably the most corrupt President in South African history.

Zuma is prevented by law from holding public office for five years due to a recent conviction for contempt of court and this is likely to be the first violent bone of contention between the State and a party which in its short life, like its leader, trails a succession of criminal and civil litigation and has brought chaos everywhere it has gone. A second bone would be if MKP is denied power in the province by an alliance of opposition parties: the balance is knife-edge. Today, police and military reinforcements are deploying into a wary but uncertain calm. KwaZulu Natal, historically the most fought over patch of South Africa, home to my family for five generations, deserves better than this. The nation does.

Louw’s stint as mayor was short-lived, thanks to the fractious nature of municipal coalitions, but he remains active in politics. The son of a domestic worker and a warehouse worker, he belongs to a group known as the “coloureds”, whose mixed descent includes the Cape’s indigenous Khoisan people, Dutch settlers and Malay slaves brought to South Africa during the early colonial period. They share the language of the white Afrikaners who governed the country during apartheid, but under that regime endured severe discrimination similar to black South Africans. In my experience, few Westerners even know of the coloured people’s existence — and yet, they constitute about 8% of the country’s population, and more than 40% in the Western Cape.

When Louw joined the ANC in 2017, years of corruption and mismanagement had already tainted its image as the party of Mandela which ushered in democracy in 1994. But he believed the ANC was still the best vehicle for change. “There is more to do after 1994,” he tells me. “I wanted to implement what we were promised — not just freedom, which we have now, but economic freedom.” According to Louw, assistance has been too slow in reaching poverty-stricken rural areas. His own community of Dysselsdorp has recently benefited from a new housing project — but that was the first in 27 years. In particular, Louw wanted to fight on behalf of coloured people, many of whom feel neglected by the ANC. He even speaks of a “reverse apartheid”.

But in February this year, Louw left the ANC. The party, he says, has “become so toxic I don’t think that dream of economic freedom will be realised”. He found that political opportunities were distributed according to internal factions and personal relationships, while there was little interest in representing coloured people. Louw has now joined a small party called the Patriotic Alliance, which was established in 2013 and has been winning seats at municipal elections since 2016. The Patriotic Alliance has a strong emphasis on the interests of coloured people, though it says its populist stances on issues such as crime and illegal immigration resonate with ordinary South Africans more broadly. Louw, for instance, favours introducing the death penalty to counter South Africa’s severe problems with violent crime (the country recorded 27,500 murders last year), citing the precedent of El Salvador.

Louw’s story is emblematic of the ANC’s declining fortunes among young South Africans. Ahead of the national elections on Wednesday, which could well see the party losing its absolute majority for the first time, a survey of 18-to-24-year-olds showed a disturbing degree of disillusionment. Only 16% expressed optimism about the country’s future, the lowest score of the 16 African nations surveyed. Almost three quarters said South Africa is heading in the wrong direction, citing a bevy of grievances including government corruption, unemployment, the presence of undocumented migrants and problems with basic services such as water.

I have found a similar picture of frustration in my own conversations with members of the “born free” generation — those born after 1994, who have lived their entire lives under ANC rule. The electoral implications of these sentiments are still unclear, for they have contributed to pitifully low levels of voter registration and political engagement more broadly. But speaking to those who are engaged, the vision of national unity and gradual transformation which Mandela’s party stood for 30 years ago is now wearing dangerously thin. Among South Africa’s many different groups, there are few who do not feel in some way unjustly treated, and young people increasingly favour movements which speak to those injustices.

In Louw’s case, that movement is the Patriotic Alliance. But in South Africa at large, the most effective practitioners of youth politics are undoubtedly the radical-Left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). This party emerged in 2013 from the ANC’s own youth league, under the leadership of charismatic firebrand Julius Malema. Visiting South Africa in April, I found Malema’s portrait with its trademark red beret staring out from long rows of election posters at the roadsides. His movement’s irreverent stance towards Mandela’s legacy can be gleaned from its manifesto claim that “We are not part of the 1994 elite pact. We are a completely new generation, with new demands.”

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The EFF presents itself as the agent of an unfinished black liberation in a country where the white minority still controls a large proportion of the wealth. The “non-negotiable cardinal pillars” of its constitution include the expropriation and equal redistribution of land, nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy, free education, healthcare and housing, and a move “from reconciliation to justice” across the entire African continent. The party registers around 10-15% in national polls, meaning that if the ANC fails to win a majority, it could become part of a governing coalition.

Hundreds of miles to the north east of Oudtshoorn, in the province of Mpumalanga, I heard about the issues shaping the politics of young South Africans. Unita Mdhluli works as a receptionist inside the Kruger National Park, a popular tourist destination, where she hopes to one day become a field guide. She is 24, and with her confident demeanour, she seems to be living proof of the opportunities available in post-apartheid South Africa. But Mdhluli credits her education largely to the private school she attended during her primary years. Her state-run secondary school, by contrast, was chaotic. She had to share textbooks, switch between classes taught in Xitsonga and exams set in English, and “spent most of my days fighting other pupils for something as simple as a chair to sit on in class”.

As a share of national income, South Africa spends more on education than the EU average, but experiences like Mdhluli’s remain common. “We grow up with the saying, ‘use what you have to your advantage’,” she tells me, but many find themselves with little to use. South African students struggle to achieve basic skills such as literacy, with around half of them failing to complete secondary education. Lacking academic or trade qualifications, “most of the youth try to start a business, and since they don’t even have the knowledge to do that, they end up selling alcohol without licence or selling drugs”. Youth unemployment stands at a staggering 45%. Another option is leaving South Africa altogether. But while some emigrants find success and become “the icon of the community”, Mdhluli says, others fall into criminality and “have ended up coming back home in a coffin”.

Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising that young black South Africans are attracted to a movement promising radical change. Explaining the popularity of the EFF among her friends, Mdhluli tells me “its agenda is based on improving the lives of the youth of South Africa”. But she also observes that political engagement is concentrated among students in higher education. This, it seems, is the paradox of the EFF. While presenting itself as an authentically African movement fighting for the oppressed masses, some of its most committed supporters, like those of radical movements in the Western world, are educated young people who feel deprived of social mobility

These people observe that in South Africa’s poorer communities, the young are submerged in immediate material concerns and fail to engage with broader questions of governance. Louw calls this straatpolitiek — street politics — and characterises it as: “I just want my electricity to work, I just want to fix my burst pipe.” Despite its poor record with infrastructure in recent years, this localised field of vision probably works to the advantage of the ANC, since it has established relatively generous welfare entitlements during its decades in office. Almost half of South Africa’s 60 million citizens receive state grants, and the ANC is now promising to extend a monthly benefit dating from the Covid pandemic in the form of a basic income system. Similarly, state procurement contracts loom large in the politics of local communities, as small businesses and mafias demand a share of government spending.

This presents a stark contrast with the broad horizons that students encounter at universities. Here one finds South Africa’s peculiar circumstances merging with global trends in theory, activism and identity politics. In 2015, a major student protest movement erupted under the banner of “Fees Must Fall”; its main demands were for greater financial support, as tuition fees represent a genuinely intolerable burden for many South Africans. It achieved only limited concessions, but was more successful in changing the political culture of universities with its “decolonisation” agenda, challenging various forms of racial inequality and legacies of white rule. The protests even washed over to Britain, where students at Oriel College, Oxford, followed their counterparts in Cape Town by demanding the removal of a statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes. It was during these convulsions that the EFF secured its place as the movement of choice for young radicals, not least within the Student Representative Councils (where, at South African universities, candidates are elected as members of political parties).

When I contacted EFF representatives at leading universities, I found young activists who were articulate, strident and ideologically committed. They reminded me of the erstwhile supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, though their brand of socialism is a much purer shade of red. Hlamulo Khorommbi, student council president at the University of Cape Town, said confidently of EFF policies on land appropriation, industrialisation and state capacity: “These are things that young people want to see happen.” He told me that his generation views the record of the ANC as “a complete failure”, whereas under Malema’s party, “prospects for the youth will be limitless”. These cadres also feel a strong personal connection to the cause. As a student representative at Wits University, Michelle Mbhalati, put it: “The EFF’s ideology resonates deeply with me, especially as a young black woman.”

The rise of the EFF is, of course, part of a wider fragmentation of South African politics. As dissatisfaction with the ANC has grown, no other party has looked capable of achieving a similarly broad appeal: the main contender, the Democratic Alliance, has never achieved more than a quarter of the vote. Instead, a plethora of smaller parties has emerged. Former president Jacob Zuma has formed another breakaway party from the ANC, with a programme similarly radical to the EFF, and a similarly militant name (uMkhonto weSizwe, once the title of the armed wing of the anti-apartheid movement). It has a tribal flavour, with its strongest support in the populous Zulu heartlands of the north-east. The overall picture here is that South Africans are moving into smaller political silos, responding to movements that represent their particular identities and experiences. The EFF is, at least in part, the movement that fills this role for educated and politically engaged young South Africans. As a number of my interviewees pointed out, it is the only party whose leadership prominently features young people with academic qualifications.

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But feeling represented is one thing, active participation quite another. Student activists such as Khorommbi say that “the attitude of the youth is that of thinking they can exist outside of politics”, describing voter registration drives where “we go out to the streets to humbly ask people to exercise their constitutional right”. Even within universities, the popular engagement of the Fees Must Fall period has all but vanished. Activists suggest that fellow students have succumbed to another kind of despondency by focusing on their personal prospects.

In any case, the EFF and its dubious figurehead are bound to disappoint their young supporters. Malema’s hardcore socialism, which would plunge South Africa into still greater chaos, is designed to secure a devoted following, not provide a programme for government. His movement will either continue to stoke division at the margins of politics, or it will enter a governing coalition and reveal itself to be another cynical player within a corrupt system.

Ironically though, the EFF has revealed a continuing strain of idealism within the apparent disillusionment of youth politics. Young radicals are most scathing about the empty dreams of 1994, but it is they who have taken those dreams most seriously, insofar as they still believe in politics both as a source of collective purpose and a means of pursuing justice. The tragedy is that South Africa’s governing class has become so enmeshed in games of patronage and personal enrichment that such hopeful energies can only find expression in minor parties and lost causes.

Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, is a tundra of low-roofed buildings and patchy roads lined with threadbare bush. It is the billboards, though, that stick in the mind. A combination of the generic and the personal, they offer everything from tempered glass to soft drinks to the chance, with the help of a professional medium, to become wealthy, get your ex back or simply take “revenge”.

This impulse for revenge, that “kind of wild justice” as Francis Bacon wrote, is doing its debased work across the region, not least among Zambia’s neighbours: Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to the north, and Mozambique, to the east. So far, the war in eastern DRC has seen 5.8 million people displaced in a population of 7 million; 72% of people now live on less than $1.90 a day. In northern Mozambique, nearly one million people have been displaced by conflict since 2017, 80% of whom are women and children.

It’s not just a regional problem. While the world has rightly focused on Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza following October 7, Africa has descended to mass violence and, in some places, near anarchy. There were 104 conflicts across the continent in 2022, the deadliest year in Africa for more than three decades. And since the Sudan civil war broke out one year ago, 8.6 million people have been forcibly displaced, and more than 15,000 confirmed killed (though the actual figure is likely to be far higher).

African leaders have long understood the gravity of the problem. Last month, Hakainde Hichilema, the president of Zambia and current chair of Southern African Development Community (SADC), last month convened a summit to discuss the SADC’s peacekeeping deployments in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — known as SAMIDRC and Mozambique (SAMIM). SADC is a southern African regional bloc that primarily deals with economic and political cooperation, but has increasingly been forced to focus on security concerns. In recent years, violence has concentrated the minds of SADC nations, and African leaders generally: never have peacekeeping forces been more necessary, more problematic — or, according to those on the ground, more inadequate.

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The SADC has already made some efforts to help DRC. Last December, it deployed a joint force to eastern DRC to fight the M23 rebel army, but it ran into difficulties. M23 is allegedly backed by Rwanda, which denies any involvement, though the UN accuses it of “direct interventions” to support the rebels. The summit concluded by reiterating SADC’s “unwavering commitment to provide both diplomatic and military support to the Government and people of the DRC”.

Separately, the United Nations has been running MONUSCO, its own peacekeeping operation, in eastern DRC for more than 25 years. At its peak, the mission was vast, with around 13,500 people attached to it. But it was always dysfunctional. In 2010, I spent time with various MONUSCO peacekeeping forces deployed across the country, and it was obvious that they were unable to effectively deal with the various militia groups berserking across the east. I embedded with Guatemalan peacekeepers in the jungle near the city of Bunia in eastern DRC. These were tough men, drawn from the ranks of Guatemala’s Kaibiles Special Forces whose motto was, memorably: “If I advance, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I retreat, kill me”. They were desperate to fight the gangs of murderers and rapists in the thick bush just kilometres away — in this instance the sordid Lord’s Resistance Army. But in practice, it was hard for them to get permission to engage. The most energetic I ever saw them was when we watched the 2010 World Cup Final on base, and they exploded into mass ululation when Andrés Iniesta scored a 116th-minute winner for Spain.

No wonder MONUSCO was always unpopular locally. The Congolese government was talking about kicking it out when I was there, and in December 2023, the decision was finally taken when a UN Security Council vote dissolved the force. It will be totally withdrawn by the end of the year. SADC will take its place.

The feeling on the ground is unmistakable: Africans want to take the lead in solving African problems. They have lost faith in the West to intervene. But wars aren’t the only problem they’ll have to face alone. Though the Islamist threat has largely disappeared from the international press, it continues to strafe Africa. Al-Qaeda offshoot Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) is sluicing its way around Mali and Burkina Faso as well Benin. Meanwhile, al-Shaabab and the Islamic State West Africa province (Iswap) are busy murdering as usual. Last year saw 23,322 deaths from Islamist violence — a rise of 20% from 2022.

To make matters worse, there have now been seven successful coups in three years in the Sahel, which is experiencing a near-systematic disintegration of democracy. With that of course comes yet more violence: in 2023, fatalities in the region rose by 38% and civilian deaths by 18% from the previous year.

Change and leadership must come from within Africa. African peace-keeping forces are now the region’s greatest hope. But these forces must achieve far more than ending the slaughter — an evidently noble and much-needed aim, but only ever the first step. It is here that we usefully remember the second half of Bacon’s quote on revenge: “The more man’s nature runs to [it], the more ought law to weed it out.” The aim of peacekeeping is far wider: encouraging people to get around the table and reach political settlements. In the end, wars are never ended or resolved on the battlefield, but at the tables around it. Dialogue not drones is what brings peace. And Africa, more than almost anywhere else, needs political dialogue and the rule of law, not more conflict.

This is why SADC needs the West’s support. All this chaos is a blight for those who are unfortunate enough to suffer it, but it is also an opportunity for bad actors who wish to exploit it. Russia is now the leading arms supplier to sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 25% of all sales between 2018 and 2022. Its mercenary Wagner Group spent the last several years killing and vacuuming up local resources. Since the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, it has been ominously re-named “Africa Corps” — and is now fully under Kremlin control. Meanwhile, China is Africa’s second largest arms supplier; its drones have been used in DRC among other places. It is also an increasingly influential friend and investor: between 2000-2022, Beijing’s state financiers have lent $170 billion to African nations. Conversely, between 2008-2022, US trade with Africa has decreased by 48%.

The result has been yet more instability. As a source working on regional security recently told me: “Zambia is a peaceful nation committed to the principles of stability and democracy, but we are living in a time where it’s hard for us to make sure those values and that stability are reflected across the region.”

Africans will take care of their own problems. But the West can still help them to restore stability. It may not be able to compete with the investment policies of China, but it can help fund African peacekeeping missions. More broadly, it can encourage greater African representation on the world stage: the September 2023 decision to give the African Union a seat at G20 was correct — though long overdue.

Dusk in Lusaka is sleepy. But with DRC and Mozambique next door, the people of this relatively tranquil city know that mass violence is never far away. And it is not just the region that is at risk, but the international stability that is already unravelling to levels not seen since the run-up to the Second World War. Africa needs the West’s help — and like Gaza and Ukraine, this is a crisis that affects us all.

Nigerians have responded with a wave of “hardship protests”. Since February, demonstrations have rocked many large cities including Lagos, Ibadan and Kano. In Lagos, police responded with sympathy, handing out biscuits and water to the protesters to prevent them fainting from hunger. After ration sizes in Nigerian prisons were cut, protests broke out in the prison of the central city of Jos at the end of February.

Many have blamed the crisis on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was elected in controversial circumstances last year. The powerful emir of Kano, Aminu Ado Bayero, said in February that Nigerians faced “economic hardships, hunger and starvation” and called on President Tinubu to take action. Later that month, Tinubu agreed to release 102,000 tonnes of a strategic grain reserve at subsidised prices, but such is the hardship faced by most Nigerians that when this happened there was a stampede at the depot.

On the face of it, President Tinubu’s economic policies are to blame. In May 2023, he removed fuel subsidies, which the World Bank estimated could save the Nigerian government $5 billion a year. It was part of a wider strategy to increase foreign investment. Yet, in spite of the pain this catastrophic strategy has already caused, global investors warned last week that the Central Bank had to “tighten” monetary policy further to attract investment — even after a 4% increase in Nigeria’s interest rate, to 22.75%.

This tightening of the screws will only worsen the crisis. The call from investors runs counter to what financial leaders said last year: that scrapping fuel subsidies was already giving markets “everything they hoped for”. Even the Financial Times reported last week that, in retrospect, “many are questioning the wisdom of abruptly removing the subsidies without a shock-absorbing plan”.

But Tinubu can’t be blamed for everything. When he was elected, Nigeria was already facing an economic crisis. By late 2021, analysts were pointing to a looming debt crisis, with public debt having soared under the previous president Muhammadu Buhari. This followed a decade during which, as Bloomberg reported, long-term loans had more than doubled. In 2022, the last year of Buhari’s government, annual debt repayments stood at $7.5 billion, which exceeded the government’s total revenue by almost $1 billion.

However, it’s worth noting that in 2019, the picture was the reverse. That year, the African Development Bank issued its annual report, which said that “the state of the continent is good. Africa’s general economic performance continues to improve”. This followed a decade of sustained economic growth across Africa, with some claiming at the time that the eradication of poverty by 2030 was possible. As two Dutch economists concluded in 2018, there were “broadened opportunities for sustained economic growth in the longer term”.

What changed between 2019 and 2022? The obvious answer is the Covid pandemic response, which not only interrupted economic growth across Africa, but in the Nigerian case, saw a collapse in the oil price that resulted in a sharp drop in revenues. It also saw a huge increase in the debt burden. In April 2020, the IMF approved a $3.4 billion loan to Nigeria to fund its Covid response — almost half of the government’s annual revenues. The Central Bank of Nigeria drew on this to offer credit facilities to businesses in distress. Now, however, those loans are being called in, and some accuse the government of “conning” Nigerians.

Worse still, at the end of February, the Nigerian Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability network filed a lawsuit against President Tinubu for the government’s failure to account for the disbursements from this huge loan. In a tale that will be grimly familiar to readers in the UK and the US, the effective printing of money that accompanied the Covid response is alleged to have led to diversion or theft of the funds that have never been accounted for.

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This suggests that the real cause of Nigeria’s crisis is what scholars Ruben Andersson and David Keen aptly label “wreckonomics” in their provocative new book of the same name: a label that describes how the setting of a war economic model is used for profiteering by existing institutional interests. For these interest groups, the purpose of the war is not necessarily in winning it, but in extracting profit from the crisis situation — often by extending it for as long as possible.

Such analysis offers a different twist to the concept of the neoliberal “permacrisis”. While these rolling crises are usually spoken of in political terms, wreckonomics shows that it is part of an economic framework. In each crisis framed as a war — whether real wars such as in Ukraine, or the “war on Covid” — existing economic interests have the institutional frameworks to leap in and profit from them. This corporate money printing comes at the cost of state budgets, leading to future indebtedness, which is paid for by those who had no hand in the profits — and who must put up with crumbling state services.

The Nigerian crisis perfectly fits the wreckonomics mode. A “war on Covid” was declared worldwide. This created a massive external shock and led to the printing of money financed with credit from the IMF. Existing interests took advantage of this to profiteer from the debt in Nigeria, as also happened in Senegal, the UK and the US. And none of this had anything to do with the threat posed to the Nigerian population by Covid itself, since, with a median age below 20, this was always low risk compared to a disease like malaria that kills 600,000 people annually across Africa. Indeed, at present, the registered Covid deaths in Nigeria total 3,155.

The consequence was a vast increase in Nigerian government debt which, twinned with collapsing revenues in 2020-1 because of the oil price, reversed the rosy picture described by macroeconomists in 2019. Not only has all this led to the new era of austerity, but it was predicted right from the start by groups such as Oxfam. The charity reported in 2021 that, as of 15 March that year, 85% of IMF Covid loans were tied to future austerity in the countries concerned. These “externalised losses” have now been realised, by people in Nigeria — and indeed across Africa.

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As the devastation wrought by these policies becomes clear, Africa has started fighting back. Last week, a coalition of senior African academics accused the WHO of being “colonialist” in its plans for a new pandemic treaty that could allow it to plunge Africa back into lockdown. “This is a perpetuation of classical Western imperialism coming through the backdoor,” said one academic. The coalition is seeking to challenge whether African governments should automatically accept the new pandemic treaty, as well as IHR regulation changes being promoted for discussion and voting at the World Health Assembly in May.

The group’s health advisory director, Wellington Oyibo from the University of Lagos, challenged the grounds for the new treaty. “Lockdowns affected Africans badly because these are people who earn their living from subsistent income, and yet you lock them in for several months?” he was quoted as saying. “The people are still not over the socio-economic and educational consequences of lockdowns.”

Yet with the crisis growing, the official policy menu for Nigeria’s government is very restricted. President Tinubu is negotiating further World Bank budget support of up to $1.5 billion — but this will just further the wreckonomics model that has proved itself so useless over the past five years. Meanwhile, with the postponement of elections in Senegal, and the imprisonment there of the leading opposition candidate Ousmane Sonko, political crises are growing across the continent. In such cases, governments usually look for someone to blame. The WHO might be a good start.

For electricity has arrived in Bondo. Three turbines were installed in a micro-hydro scheme exploiting the fertile region’s rainfall. And the impact has been life-changing for the 1,800 homes so far connected to a mini-grid. Children can study after dark, so now have a better chance of passing the exams for secondary school rather than having to leave aged 11. Drugs and food can be stored in fridges, so villagers do not have to make the 12-mile trek to the hospital and can produce batches of food or drinks to sell at market. Cooking the evening meal is three times quicker — and far less destructive to the environment — without the need to collect firewood.

One group of women giggled when I asked if they had televisions and watched football in their homes. “Before, our husbands would say they were going off to watch football when they were really walking out with other women. Now they can no long claim they are going off for football,” Bertha told me. The senior chief told me they had never dreamed of having energy supplied to the villages, with a dozen maize mills, many small enterprises, schools, shops and churches also connected to the grid. “When you move around Bondo you see happy people — and that’s because of electricity.”

Yet the big surprise in Bondo is not simply the supply of energy to such an isolated community, in a country where only one in eight citizens has access to grid electricity and on a continent where almost half the 1.2 billion population still lack this life-changing supply. The real eye-opener is the stack of 32 computers inside the concrete pump shed. This innovative mini-grid — located more than two hours from Malawi’s second city of Blantyre along bumpy roads and tracks that can become impassable in a torrential downpour — is mining Bitcoin to fund its operation.

It is a smart idea. The computers used to create valuable new Bitcoin tokens and validate transactions consume around the same amount of energy as a medium-sized country such as Sweden would generate. Hence the stinging critique of how this cryptocurrency wastes the planet’s precious resources. This initiative flips that narrative by using Bitcoin mining to fund energy in parts of Africa that are too poor or remote to merit connection to grids, but which do have plentiful supplies of potential power sources. Mining soaks up the excess energy of these renewable plants. And this delivers not just electricity but a powerful jolt to to drive development in the local economy.

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The concept comes from a Kenyan firm, Gridless, set up in 2022, whose backers include Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. There are four other sites in Kenya and Zambia and plans for scores more across the continent. Its aim is to demonstrate how Africa could play a central role in countering the conventional belief that Bitcoin, now 15 years old, is used simply for risky speculation and dodgy transactions. Instead, it backs those who claim it will lead to more inclusive financial systems as it usurps the control of dysfunctional governments and manipulative central banks.

It will also release the community from reliance on foreign handouts to survive. The Bondo power plants were built by Mount Mulanje Conservation Trust, a local group trying to protect the mountain region’s unique bio-diversity, and were initially supported by finance from aid and development agencies — but now Bitcoin covers the running costs. This offers a commercial incentive that does not rely on altruism or subsidies to deliver power to remote regions, while exploiting energy waste at times of low use such as overnight.

Malawi, one of the world’s poorest nations, provides a powerful case study in the failures of aid. As former development minister Rory Stewart said in a lecture at Yale, Britain gave £4.5billion over half a century to this southern African country corroded by corruption and bad governance, yet it ended up “if anything, poorer than it was when we started”.

“Bitcoin can prevent Bondo becoming the sort of white elephant that you see across Africa, built by aid groups and then abandoned,” said Erik Hersman, chief executive of Gridless. He admits that he is “not a big fan” of the sector. “They come in with low-cost loans and grants to finance all these schemes that they say will pay their way in 30 years but the sums never add up. This is a new way to finance development.”

Malawi also demonstrates another reason why there is rising interest in Bitcoin in Africa: people are seeking a safer home for their cash than local currencies. Prices rose sharply after its currency was devalued two months ago by 44% against the US dollar — the second decrease in value of the kwacha in 18 months. Many African countries on the continent have suffered also from catastrophic inflation, while official currency conversion rates can be significantly lower than street rates.

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One Kenyan entrepreneur told me she turned to the cryptocurrency after seeing her savings constantly eroded even in a country with lower than average inflation for the continent. “I was trying to save to buy a house but kept finding my sums declining. I wanted more stability so tried Bitcoin, and then found it had other uses,” said Marcel Lorraine, founder of Bitcoin DADA. Her clients include a trader of alternative health products in a Nairobi street market, who found it much cheaper to use than changing currencies after being introduced to it by a Nigerian customer and is now hoping it will provide a stable platform for building her business to obtain a shop.

While Warren Buffet dismissed Bitcoin as “probably rat poison squared” and the economist Paul Krugman has compared it to a Ponzi scam fuelled by libertarian fantasies and “technobabble”, devotees see it as a liberating force due to the decentralised design created by its mysterious and pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, has even applied to launch a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund that may open up the market to the US wealth management industry.

Certainly Bitcoin, for all its fluctuations, can seem comparatively reliable if you live in Africa — or indeed many other parts of the planet, from Argentina to Lebanon. “This is what I have seen everywhere,” said Peter McCormack, who travels the world for a Bitcoin podcast. “Here is an alternative to gold and property for a middle class that has some money and patience, but is seeing expenses and costs rise while savings decline in value. And a strong middle class helps build a strong economy by driving consumer spending, reducing reliance on the state and driving innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Bitcoin has also become a helpful tool for activists and journalists in dictatorships, since it makes it far harder to track funds. In Togo, a West African state run by one despotic family since 1967, it is used to channel cash to opposition and civil society leaders despite the freezing of bank accounts. Bitcoin has been instrumental in delivering donations to Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation in Russia and the pro-democracy movements in Belarus and Myanmar.

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Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation and author of a book arguing that Bitcoin offers freedom from archaic monetary systems and political strife, believes the cryptocurrency is especially exciting for Africans, since they suffer “all kinds of financial repression”. He points out there are 45 currencies on the continent — with 15 still controlled by France — with high transaction fees on conversion deals that are largely processed by Western firms with heavily-fluctuating rates. “Bitcoin provides an escape and an alternative for Africans while its use is less limited than some people think,” he says. “Entrepreneurs there have figured out how people without the internet can use Bitcoin, which is frankly remarkable.”

This agility is typical of the technological innovation exploding across Africa, driven by a young, rapidly growing and increasingly well-educated population. “The beautiful thing about Bitcoin is that it is a bottom-up technology and its adoption has been genuine at all levels,” said one key figure at the second African Bitcoin Conference in Ghana at the end of last year.

Only time will tell if Satoshi’s invention will turn out to be a bubble with bad consequences or, as optimists believe, a driver of profound change in the world. The fraud conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, who ran one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, and admission of money-laundering by the boss of another major exchange has hurt the reputation of cryptocurrencies for many in the West. But Bitcoin certainly seems to offer something positive in societies scarred by autocracy, colonialism, military coups and woeful governance — as seen with those computers in a concrete shed in rural Malawi turning water into streams of cash to fund electricity.

More than any other resource, Africa is starved of the energy it needs for economic development. This isn’t for lack of natural endowment. Africa possesses vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. But extracting those resources and using them for domestic development requires money, infrastructure, expertise and institutional capacity — which Africa’s poorest nations, especially in the sub-Sahara, sadly lack. One solution is partnering with foreign energy companies — until recently, mostly European and American firms — but that means that much of the domestically produced gas and oil is then exported rather than used for local development.

Yet beyond practical difficulties, in recent years an ideological force has also come to stymie potential development: the global political creed of Net Zero.

While the phrase is already associated with straitened living standards in the West, in the developing world Net Zero threatens to lock countries into perpetual underdevelopment. So far, it has mainly taken the form of Western countries limiting overseas fossil fuel investments. As early as 2014, one study found that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the main US development finance institution, had started “to invest principally in solar, wind, and other low-emissions energy projects as part of the [Obama] administration’s effort to promote clean energy technology”.

Then, at the COP26 climate summit in 2021, the US and several European countries pledged to stop funding oil and gas projects in developing countries. The Biden administration has since gone even further, ordering a halt to investments in “carbon-intensive”, fossil fuel-based energy projects globally, and issuing new guidance for multilateral development banks such as the World Bank, “aimed at squeezing off fossil fuel financing except in certain circumstances”. The US also vowed to oppose all new coal- and oil-based projects, and to offer only “narrow support” for natural gas projects. Prior to that, the World Bank had already said it would no longer financially support oil and gas after 2019. Other international funding groups, such as the European Investment Bank, have started linking finance to climate adaptation and mitigation, curtailing or halting their funding of fossil fuel and even nuclear projects.

Meanwhile, across Africa, the Western climate-industrial complex, composed of NGOs and state development agencies, has started pouring vast amounts of money into wind and solar projects. And this combination of carrot and stick was a clear injunction to poor countries in Africa and around the world: if they want to develop, they have to do so in a “green” and “sustainable” manner. Advocates and policymakers started pushing the idea that this was totally feasible — that poor countries can generate all the energy they need from renewable sources, primarily wind and solar power. That, in other words, Africa can achieve Net Zero and industrialisation simultaneously. This claim is a delusional fantasy — and a dangerous one at that.

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As Vijaya Ramachandran and Seaver Wang of the Breakthrough Institute recently observed: “No matter what advocates and policymakers say, these cheap, renewables-only scenarios remain theoretical and unproven even for wealthy countries.” And it is obviously absurd to expect some of the world’s poorest countries to achieve in a short time what even the world’s most advanced countries have failed to do in a decade. Despite trillions spent on wind and solar, solar panels and wind turbines still deliver just over 3% of global energy, while fossil fuels still account for over 80% of the global energy mix — the same as three decades ago.

The fact is that fossil fuels remain the quickest and cheapest way to kickstart economic growth, as the Chinese miracle of the past three decades shows. Even though renewables (ideally in combination with nuclear energy, which is fully carbon-free) have a role to play in the development of Africa and other poor regions, many African countries have no choice but to rely on fossil fuels in the coming years (coal, oil and natural gas) if they want to raise living standards. It will, of course, initially mean higher emissions, though not significantly: were sub-Saharan Africa to triple its electricity consumption overnight using natural gas, it would add only 0.6% to global carbon emissions. But it will also mean fewer deaths from poverty, destitution and indoor pollution, which in turn will make African countries more resilient to the effects of climate change. Conversely, demands from rich-world advocates and policymakers for developing countries to abstain from using fossil fuels “are very likely to perpetuate the extreme poverty that many Africans face”, as Ramachandran and Wang write.

Forestalling development in the name of Western middle-class luxury beliefs, themselves a product of affluence built on fossil fuel consumption, is not only immoral. It’s also a form of ideological imperialism, as the continent’s leaders have made clear to those willing to listen. In 2021, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni wrote a scathing article in the Wall Street Journal titled “Solar and Wind Force Poverty on Africa”, arguing that “Africa can’t sacrifice its future prosperity for Western climate goals” and that “Africans have a right to use reliable, cheap energy, and doing so doesn’t prevent the development of the continent’s renewables”.

Last year, the Senegalese President and former President of the African Union, Macky Sall, went further, saying that “Africa must be able to exploit its large gas reserves for another 20 or 30 years to further its development and provide access to electricity to the 600 million people who are still deprived. It would be unfair to stop us.” Yemi Osinbajo, former Vice-President of Nigeria, made the same argument: “Limiting the development of fossil fuel projects and, in particular, natural gas projects would have a profoundly negative impact on Africa.”

This isn’t just rhetoric — the African rebellion against the demands of the West has already taken material form with several new energy projects, established with or without the West’s support. For instance, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline is intended to transport crude oil from Uganda’s oil fields to the Port of Tanga on Tanzania’s eastern coast, where it will then be sold onwards to world markets. The project’s opponents include the US-based Climate Accountability Institute, France’s Friends of the Earth, and the European Parliament, who say that it will breach global emissions targets. And many Western banks — including Standard Chartered Bank, HSBC, Barclays and major French lenders — have publicly said they won’t support it.

But the governments of Uganda and Tanzania say they intend to move forward with the project regardless, arguing that they can’t afford not to exploit their natural resources while the world still runs on fossil fuels. Across the continent, part of the reason for the pushbacks is that they know that, if necessary, they can turn to an alternative superpower for funding: the China National Offshore Oil Corporation is one of the main investors in the Uganda-Tanzania pipeline. Meanwhile, other African countries — Algeria, Nigeria, Mauritania, Senegal and others — are pursuing or considering new energy projects, mostly in the field of natural gas, a relatively clean fossil fuel which could provide “transitional energy”. Several countries are also exploring nuclear energy, despite multilateral development banks’ refusal to support nuclear power plants.

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The good news for Africa is that the tide has started to change in the West as well, even if for purely selfish reasons. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s decision to decouple from Russian gas have sent EU countries scouring the world for alternative supplies of gas — and Africa is the obvious choice. It has 13% of global gas reserves, only slightly less than the Middle East, and 7% of the world’s oil, as well as vast renewable energy potential. “Africa may be the answer to Europe’s immediate gas problem and its longer-term carbon one,” according to The Economist. And this is probably why, in March, the World Bank announced that it would be supporting the development of Mozambique’s massive natural gas resources, signalling an important shift in the institution’s policy.

Ultimately, we should be grateful to Africa for resisting the dangerous and inhuman ideology of Net Zero, arrogantly imposed by the West upon a world that no longer trusts them. The next step, however, is ensuring that Africa’s resources are employed first and foremost to promote the development of Africa itself, rather than to perpetuate their plundering — be it from the West, China or anyone else.

In the US, a small group of African American thinkers is pushing back against progressive orthodoxy on the race issue. Glenn Loury — a Professor of Economics at Brown University — has long argued that while historical discrimination against African Americans is undeniable, it is not the sole explanation for racial disparities in income or education. And Thomas Sowell, the conservative African American Stanford University economist, has taken on what he sees as progressives’ faulty answers in a new book, Social Justice Fallacies.

“At the heart of the social justice vision”, Sowell writes, “is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities”, they must be the result of “such human vices as exploitation and discrimination”. In his 2019 book, How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi stated this case plainly: “Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.” Here in Britain, leading progressive think-tanks such as the Runnymede Trust also often link racial disparities — in spheres such as health, housing, education and employment — to “systemic racism”.

Debates over the causes of group disparities are fierce precisely because they shape the answers to the practical questions of what is to be done and who is responsible for doing it. If racial disparities are caused by racism, the responsibility for redressing them lies with those perpetuating it, hence today’s progressive focus on the ideology of white supremacy.

But Sowell has other ideas about why some groups are doing much better. While he acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination do “prevent different groups of people — whether classes, races or nations — from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms”, he maintains that this is only part of the story. Some groups, he suggests, may be better off because they have, over a period of time, collectively mastered endeavours that have turned out to be profitable, teachable to younger generations and conducive to group progress. He cites people of German ancestry having created leading beer brands in countries as varied as the US, Argentina, Brazil, Australia and China — not by coincidence, but because the ancestors of today’s Germans were producing beer as far back as the days of the Roman Empire. “When a particular people have been doing a particular thing for more than a thousand years,” he writes, “is it surprising if they tend to be more successful in that particular endeavour than others who have had no such history?”

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All groups excel at something. Those statistically worse off educationally, for whatever reason, may be underrepresented in jobs where a degree is essential but over-perform in endeavours where personal talent determines success. Sowell cites sports and entertainment as spheres in which “American groups rising out of poverty” have excelled. But most people would find it odd if someone argued that the fact that 72% of NBA players are black implies that other groups are being discriminated against in US basketball. Likewise, the fact that the median per capita income of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is higher than that of white Americans is not interpreted as a sign that the US system is designed to advantage those minorities.

To “honestly admit the reality of vast differences in specific capabilities of different peoples, at different times and in different places, is no capitulation to genetic determinism”, Sowell insists. It is an assertion that will likely make more than a few people uneasy, depending on the groups being compared (although I would argue that we should always be wary of making generalisations about groups). Because China is now one of the world’s two economic superpowers, few object to comments about how the Chinese may do such-and-such better than the Americans, but the Americans are better at such-and-such than the Chinese. But most of us feel uncomfortable if similar comparisons are made between, say, Africans and Europeans. Disparities between these two groups are so wide that there exist strong fears that drawing parallels could be interpreted as arguing that the richer group is simply superior to the poorer. Which was, of course, the explicit justification for enslaving and colonising Africans — something people haven’t forgotten.

Partly because of this, if certain behavioural patterns among some groups of African ancestry — here in the West or in Africa — are pointed to as detrimental to wider black progress, Western progressives will often describe this as ‘victim-blaming’. If an African country is corruptly and ineffectively governed, the argument goes, it is because its leaders inherited exploitative colonial structures. The question of why such structures have not been dismantled or at least significantly reformed in the decades since independence will usually be answered with reference to structural constraints, imposed by the West. Africa’s ruling elites are ultimately victims — in the Western progressive worldview, anyway. No African progressive living in Africa thinks this way.

The phrase ‘victim-blaming’ was coined by psychologist William Ryan in his 1971 book, Blaming the Victim — which was a response to discussions about the role of African American family structures, which were described as perpetuating black poverty in the infamous Moynihan Report of 1965. But I believe the concept of ‘victim-blaming’ gained the power it wields today mostly thanks to feminist activists, who used it to describe how female rape victims may be questioned about what clothes they were wearing when attacked or how late they had been out. Their rhetoric was then adopted by anti-colonialists. Explaining his reasons for rejecting an MBE in 2019, British spoken word artist, George the Poet, who is of Ugandan descent, said: “Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down and took turns. They did that every day for a couple hundred years and then left her to treat her own burns.” In many a Western progressive mind, the West violates other nations via neoliberal economic exploitation, then has the gall to tell those it has exploited that their poverty is their fault — because they didn’t work hard enough, were not well-organised enough, or allowed corruption to flourish. All in order to convince the world that the system they have built is a just one, when it obviously isn’t.

But dismissing, as ‘victim-blaming’, any arguments citing a weaker group’s actions as obstacles to that group’s progress is not helpful to anyone, least of all the weaker groups themselves. It is especially unfortunate when people do this not because they genuinely believe the argument is baseless, but because they want to signal empathy by demonstrating that they always side with the underdog — which is the sine qua non to being accepted by the progressive elite. This self-serving approach is deeply hypocritical, given that progressivism’s stated aim is to uplift groups in a weaker position, and to do that we need to have frank conversations about what may be going wrong within a group. Scholars such as Sowell and Loury, for instance, argue that the questions raised in the Moynihan Report remain valid points of discussion.

In my recent book, It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s about Wealth, I argue that the future status of blackness depends not on what happens in Britain and America — where just 3% of the world’s black population live — but on what happens in Africa, where 90% of black people live. If we are ever to speak of any kind of meaningful global racial equality, Africa must succeed. If it is to succeed, we must talk about its failures.

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Does anyone genuinely believe that the mind-boggling corruption of Africa’s ruling elites is not a major factor contributing to the continent being the poorest and least economically developed? To there being close to 500 million Africans — more than the EU’s population — living on less than $2 a day? To there being 600 million people lacking access to electricity in the year 2023? Can anyone maintain that all this poverty can be blamed on legacies of colonialism and slavery?

Even if we can blame all Africa’s problems on the past, shouldn’t the focus be on what can be done to change things today? Merely identifying the root cause of a problem does not give you a solution to the problem. That is another task entirely. Without radically improving the way most African countries are run, prosperity will continue to elude the continent. Africa has been dealt a terrible hand by history, but none of us can change the past. All we can do is play the cards we have today as best we can, so that our hand may be stronger in the future.

Of course, today’s Western progressives often appear to believe that only Westerners have the power to change anything fundamental about society, including in countries thousands of kilometres away. It is the modern-day manifestation of Eurocentrism: the idea that the world revolves around what white Westerners think and do. Development outcomes elsewhere are thus always traceable to some Western action, past or present.

In his book, Sowell emphasises that the onus of changing the fortunes of worse-off groups rests primarily on them. But the debate over the factors driving group disparities — between those who emphasise individual agency and those who emphasise external factors — does not have to be a zero-sum game in which one side must ultimately triumph. Both can play their part in taking practical steps to improve things for the worse-off in this world — which would involve looking at big-picture structural changes as well as honest analysis of potentially damaging group dynamics. Ideologies like products are subject to the laws of demand and supply, and there is clearly a strong demand for the social justice vision today — signalling a genuine mass craving for a fairer world in which there is less poverty, inequality and needless human suffering. We’d surely rather this craving existed than not. The key is to apply it usefully: to always be open to evidence about what is working and what isn’t, about who needs to do what, when and how.

If the early 20th-century racial theorists of white supremacy were still alive, they would be mortified that the “tides of colour” had truly “risen”. One might also expect the Left, if it weren’t for Sunak’s conservatism, to make much of this racial inversion. But scratch below the surface, and the true story here transcends reductive categories of race — if anything, it is a reflection of both premodern and globalised realities of class and caste. Consider Sunak, who once admitted that he did not have working-class friends as a young man, and who, like Varadkar, has a parent who is a physician, placing both of their proximate origins firmly in the professional upper-middle class. Yousaf’s father, meanwhile, was an accountant, perhaps more modest in origins than his peers to the south and east, but nevertheless still solidly middle-class.

Despite today’s focus on race, class and status have always formed the bulwark of India’s elite ideology. As David Cannadine observed in Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, this explains Queen Victoria’s repeated habit of adopting and fostering children of African and Asian royals, inculcating them with Christianity. Separated from her white subjects by a chasm of class and origin, this practice was aimed at forming a ruling elite informed by 19th-century Victorian sensibilities of race, but also transcending them, harkening back to an older ideology where the rulers were a fundamentally different species from the peasants and shopkeepers they ruled.

This class element in imperial life is clear even from the perspective of Indians; it was as much a British as an Indian ideology. Mohandas K. Gandhi’s initial activism in South Africa was motivated by his offence, as an upper-caste Indian, at being categorised with black Africans. Gandhi dressed like an Indian holy man later in life, a return to indigeneity, but in South Africa he initially exhibited the sartorial affect of an English-trained barrister. A vegetarian Hindu who had married a woman from his own caste at a young age, Gandhi was still in his early years one of Macaulay’s men: “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Two hundred years later, the rise of Sunak and Yousaf illustrates how such class dynamics still hold the British nation in thrall. Both are ethnic Punjabis, but of a variety very distinct from the dominant element in British life, the Mirpuris. The Mirpuris, who hail from Pakistani Kashmir and its environs, form about 70% of the Pakistani population in Britain. These rural villagers eventually went to work in the mills of the English north, and have created their own Pakistani but essentially British working-class culture. Sunak and Yousaf’s family are ethnically related to the Mirpuris, but are more conventional Punjabis from further south: Sunak’s paternal lineage is rooted in modern Pakistani Punjab, as were Yousaf’s ancestors. But more salient than their Punjabi ethnicity is that Sunak and Yousaf both have connections to Africa. The mother and father of Britain’s Prime Minister were born in British Tanganyika and Kenya, respectively. Yousaf’s mother, though ethnically Punjabi, was born and raised in British Kenya.

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Subcontinental people of East African provenance have been prominent in British life for decades: in 2011, more than 10% of those of Indian ethnicity in the UK were born in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania (this does not include those born of African Indians in Britain). And Sunak is hardly the only prominent African Indian in Conservative politics. Both the current and former home secretary, Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, have African connections: Braverman’s father being Indian Kenyan and mother Mauritian, while Patel’s family are part of the Ugandan Indian diaspora. The Ugandan Indians, expelled in the Seventies from Idi Amin’s regime with £55 on their person, have re-established themselves as entrepreneurs and professionals in the UK, part of the reason that Indian Britons are a relatively affluent minority.

These Indians, then, are a global people for a global nation. A simple racial calculus sees in Sunak a brown-skinned Indian, but the vast majority of subcontinental people do not have connections to Africa or the influential slice of South Asians who catalysed trade and travel along the shores of the Indian Ocean. This elite diaspora was always made up of enterprising individuals from commercial castes; self-selected for the personalities and peoples who ventured across the kala pani (“black water”). Sunak’s devout Hinduism and orthodox vegetarianism reflect his indubitably Indian cultural background. But the fact that he married not only outside of his caste but his ethnicity, with his wife being a South Indian heiress of one of India’s largest fortunes, simply confirms his membership of the global elite. Sunak may be of a nation, but he is truly not of any nation. After all, he filed US tax returns while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Like Yousaf in Scotland, Varadkar in Ireland, and even Ramaswamy in the USA, Sunak is therefore hardly a representative son of the subcontinent. More than one billion South Asians live just as their ancestors have for thousands of years, tilling the land, speaking the tongues of their forefathers and venerating the landscapes of their ancestor gods and saints. But amid this population are an enterprising sliver whose skills, aptitudes and inclinations have injected them into the bloodstream of the quasi-post-national global world. These are children born to globalisation, cultures within the subcontinent who have operated inter-regionally and even internationally for centuries. Globalisation is part of their tradition, etched into their bones. Rishi Sunak was born in England, his father in Kenya, and his grandfather in Indian Punjab. But they were always of the world, their opportunities painted upon a canvas without a border.

Don’t be fooled. Despite its small size and seeming typicality, Gabon is different. Because this African country, with barely 2.3 million people, has played a massively outsized role in post-colonial Africa. For over 50 years, it has been both the exemplar case and chief facilitator of a dirty capitalism and corrupt neo-imperialism that has marred the continent.

To put it simply, Gabon’s leading Bongo dynasty is responsible for facilitating no-good transactions and all means of illicit activity — and the story of post-imperial French success cannot be told without it.

It all starts, as it so often does when it comes to France, with Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle was desperate to keep sub-Saharan Africa in French orbit — and so set about with a plan. To maintain dominance, France would do a few things. Most obviously, France would keep close institutional, personal and political links with its former colonies, embedding itself into new states. But De Gaulle also tried something else: France would use whatever means possible to ensure the right politicians got into the right places. De Gaulle had a type in mind: those pliant to French interests, but who would also be sensible and intelligent enough to maintain power, and so ensure continuing dominance.

And so it was, like most of former French sub-Saharan states, with Gabon, who had as its first President Leon M’ba, a man so pro-French, that initially he rejected independence, instead attempting to make the country part of metropolitan France. Yet, from very early on, De Gaulle and the advisors around him carved out a special role for this tiny country. Small, but nevertheless oil and mineral rich, Gabon was unassuming, easy to control, and awash with liquid cash. These characteristics and its cringingly loyal, ruthless and highly strategic second President, Omar Bongo, made Gabon the central puzzle piece in a system of continued French political control — where France could offshore its geostrategic dirty work.

So, France started using the small country as a base, a place where the messy business of getting what it wants could be done, but not traced back to it. At the centre of it all was a series of multinational companies, who exercised massive amounts of power, and acted at the behest of the French state. The largest, and by far most significant of which, was an oil company named Elf Aquitaine. The company, using Gabon as its base, facilitated all sorts of contracts, bribes and bungs that furthered its and the French governmental interests — tellingly, France chose its CEO.

Elf Gabon, a subsidiary of Elf Aquitaine, made a standard annual payment of £15 million to leaders of African states, mainly of ex-colonies. The payment, essentially from France itself, would not have been acceptable if it was transparently from the ex-colonial master. So France used Gabon to make its dirty tricks possible.

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As time went by, the size of the system exploded. By the Nineties, Elf was dealing with illicit financial flows exceeding $130 million a year. Money for contracts in places as far as Venezuela, Russia and Central Asia went in and out of the company, allowing French companies intimate to the French state strategic control of resources far outside of just its African ex-colonies.

In 1991, £250 million in euphemistically named “commissions” went through Elf for a deal involving six naval frigates being sold to Taiwan for a figure close to £1.6 billion. This was, in effect, a huge military contract for French companies, facilitated by a dodgy company based in Gabon. The country, in all senses but name, continued to act as a strange half-colony.

At other points, Gabon was used for more explicit and brazen political benefits. Funds were transferred to armed militias and rebel troops from it, using the Elf system. It also acted as one of the bases for Jacques Foccart’s Service d’Action Civique (SAC) — a French organisation that promoted its interests in a fashion not dissimilar to Russia’s Wagner Group.

In exchange for being the lynchpin of French neo-colonialism Omar Bongo, the kleptocrat President, would receive an unprecedented level of support from France. For one, Bongo became essential for French political life. And he was, as a result, kept safe by a crack-squad of French troops, connected by tunnels to the Presidential Palace from a local French military base. If protests, riots or a coup threatened Bongo, the French could always step in. The knowledge of this arrangement was all that was needed to keep him in power — for 42 years Bongo was President. Only his death parted him from the job.

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Bongo became a strange figure in French politics. His role in greasing no-good arrangements made the country not just a place for dodgy deals with other countries, but also between French politicians. It was not unheard of for French politicians to head to Gabon and return with a suitcase of cash. Jacques Chirac’s campaign for president, it is reported, gained huge quantities of campaign funding from Gabon’s oil riches. It is partly because of these intimate connections that when Nicholas Sarkozy first took office, the first man he called was not Bush or Blair or Merkel, but Omar Bongo.

That this system collapsed is the story of the recent coup. The demise of the hold of the French state over Gabon — and the collapse of its tightly controlled system of neo-colonialism — is what allowed this coup to take place: the special relationship between Gabon and France no longer exists.

There is no one reason that the French and Gabonese have given up on the tight relationship. Some might point to the Elf affair, when Eva Joly, a Norwegian-French judge revealed the sickening extent of the corruption, resulting in the French government distancing itself from the company. Though French corruption within the country continued, the extent of the revelations meant France spread its bets throughout the continent — as it could no longer afford to be so brazen in its search for an edge within its ex-colonies.

Others might point to the death of Omar Bongo, the shrewd, power-hungry kleptocrat, whose charismatic authority, political nous and diplomatic skill made challenging the Bongo regime near impossible. His son, Ali Bongo, though just as kleptocratic and brutal as his father, was far less strategically decisive when it came to geopolitical direction in global affairs. Instead of cutting fine to the French wind, Bongo junior diversified his portfolio. Out went French total control, in came the free market, Chinese investment and the Anglo-American multinationals. In 2019, Gabon even joined the Commonwealth — the surest sign yet that it was trying to move away from the French.

The result: a dramatic decline in patronage from the former colonial overlord, even if the institutional links remained strong. Gabon became unexceptional once again — no longer the hidden secret to French colonial control, it became just another African state.

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In a way, a farewell to the Bongos is a much-needed tonic for little Gabon. Most ordinary Gabonese never saw the results of so-called independence. Though Gabon gained a large middle class and a bechamel-thin class of super-rich elites, the majority of its population remained astonishingly poor. France continued to exploit the country as if it were a colony, in ways more pernicious and systematic than when it exercised real control. The loss of the dynasty that enabled huge funds to leak out of the oil-rich state and into a huge French slush fund seems like it only to be a good thing.

But it’s far from clear it is. What this latest coup means is highly ambiguous. Yes, it’s a clean break from a French-controlled dynast — but Bongo junior was already trying to move away from France anyway. And even that fact is highly contestable: the new leader of the military government of Gabon is none other than a cousin of Ali Bongo himself.

Perhaps this is typical. Gabon is a country whose recent history has been defined by secrecy —whose unassuming typicality gives it licence to hide the rhythms and patterns that govern its extraordinarily interesting and colourful political life. If there’s any conclusion we can draw from the recent coup, it is that that’s unlikely to change.

It was January 2017, and I was looking for the residence of Jean Ping, the leader of the Gabonese opposition, who was holding his first press conference in months. I was hoping to get him talking about how the Africa Cup of Nations, the football tournament I was in Gabon to cover, was another example of the Bongo regime wasting the country’s resources. But this didn’t look like somewhere a politician would live.

There was no one around, so I wandered in. It was empty. There were broken windows, torn posters, a ripped armchair. I went up to the first floor. The doors hung open, locks smashed. I went into an empty room. There was a circular hole in the window, cracks radiating outwards. The grubby cream walls were streaked with deep brownish red smears and handprints, the marks of fingers. I think I knew then what I was looking at, but it was only later that I processed it. I’m a football journalist. I was well aware I was out of my depth.

An elderly man in overalls emerged and asked what I was doing. It turned out the taxi had brought me to Ping’s campaign headquarters, rather than his residence. The caretaker pointed me in the right direction and, a few minutes later, I was drinking coffee with Ping in his villa. But by then I knew what I’d seen. A return to the campaign headquarters with two colleagues confirmed what I had suspected. The outer walls were dimpled with bullet holes. The windows of the gatehouse were shattered. Some attempts had been made to clear up, but there was plenty of evidence of blood.

Yesterday, Gabonese military officers appeared on television to announce they had seized power following disputed election results, ending the 56-year rule of the Bongo family. What I had stumbled upon six years ago was the aftermath of the previous election, held in August 2016.

Omar Bongo became president after the death of Léon M’Ba in 1967, and eagerly continued his predecessor’s work in dismantling the nascent post-independence democracy. He remained in power until his own death, in 2009. When his son, Ali, won the subsequent election, there was protracted political violence for the first time in the country since 1964, when French paratroopers had put down an attempted military coup provoked by M’Ba’s dissolution of the national assembly. In 2009, a three-month curfew was imposed on Port Gentil, a centre of anti-Bongo feeling. What followed the election in 2016 was far worse.

Initial results from the ballot suggested Ping, a former minister for Omar Bongo who had married Ali’s half-sister, Pascaline, had won in seven of Gabon’s nine provinces. As the Gabonese National Electoral Commission (Cenap) delayed announcing a result, the opposition became convinced the election was being fixed. The EU’s chief observer Mariya Gabriel later spoke of “significant weaknesses in the electoral process”.

After four days, on August 31, opposition supporters gathered at Ping’s campaign headquarters to march on Cenap and demand a result. The Assemblée Nationale was set on fire. When tear gas failed to disperse the crowds, the security forces turned to live ammunition.

One of the demonstrators was Sylvie Mbot, the head of the doctors union. “While we were marching, we heard that Bongo had won,” she said. “That’s why we were angry. We said that wasn’t possible. But there were police already on the street. They had real weapons — Kalashnikovs and tear gas. They fired the tear gas and then shot at the crowd. People were really angry. They wanted to overthrow the lorries and started pushing at one. The policemen took guns and shot directly at a man I recognised. They hit him in the thigh.

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“At about 4pm we took the injured to hospital with the Red Cross. I went back to the HQ at about 7pm. On the second floor they’d collected all the injured people. There was blood everywhere and very few doctors to look after these people.” The Red Cross helped to transport the most seriously injured to hospital. Mbot went with them.

Sometime between midnight and 1 in the morning, soldiers dressed in black approached the front of the campaign headquarters. In a pile of rubbish by the front gate, we found a helmet, with a leather flap at the back to protect the neck. Some say they were mercenaries, others that they were members of the elite presidential guard. First, they fired tear gas; then, when Ping’s supporters threw stones, they opened fire with plastic bullets.

Christophe* was hit in the calf but managed to crawl up to the fourth floor. As other demonstrators fled over the back wall or into the Equatoguinean embassy next door, the soldiers switched to live ammunition. “They came to kill,” said Christophe.

Cars were parked along the driveway to the left of the building. “Those who couldn’t get over the wall went under the cars,” said Franck*. “They shot under the cars — young people, old fathers, old mothers… I was on the top floor and could see down. I tried to bring people inside but unfortunately they had already fired tear gas into the lobby.” We found blood-stained fragments of glass in the cracks between the paving stones that seemed to corroborate the story.

Some fled to the roof, but two helicopters were circling. In the building, the lights were turned off to conceal those inside. Christophe lay on the floor, keeping below the level of the windows. He could hear the police working along the line of cars, picking off their victims. “I could hear their cries,” he said. All night this was happening. I could hear people crying: ‘Please don’t kill me! I’m Gabonese! I won’t demonstrate any more.’ Then they went quiet. We guessed they were killed. That went on until 5am.”

What happened to the bodies is unclear. A few days later, we met a disaffected former government advisor called Serge whose nephew and uncle had both gone missing that night. After a week, he finally tracked down the bodies to one of the city’s four morgues and paid for an autopsy. His nephew’s death certificate is quite clear: he had been shot twice in the leg but had died as a result of “wounds caused by the penetration of small-calibre bullets at the forehead”. His uncle had also been shot in the head.

At around 5am, police broke into the building. “They told us to kneel down, take our shirts off and put our hands on our heads,” said Christophe. “They told us one by one to get into the cars to drive to the police station. They made sure there was nobody left.” Franck believes there were around 1,500 Ping supporters in the building at the time. He got away because he knew one of the policemen.

The injured, Christophe included, were taken to hospital. He was lucky, and escaped. “I got my brother to come and get me,” he said. “I told the doctor I was just going outside for a moment to give my brother a key. I was walking with a stick so they thought I couldn’t go far, but my brother was in a car so I got in and left.”

Others were interrogated by the secret police. Those who were treated worst were those who, like Ping, were Myene, an ethnic group from the north and west of the country. Several miles from the campaign headquarters, a Myene woman was picked up by government forces who poured kerosene over her and set her on fire. She would almost certainly have died had her husband, a policeman, not managed to pull strings to get her moved to a clinic.

Back in 2017, perhaps hoping they would be able to set the record straight, the Government agreed to let me interview the then prime minister, Emmanuel Issoze-Ngondet. And so, on the day after the final, I found myself facing him across a desk in his office asking about the massacre. He insisted the protestors had fired first and claimed to be awaiting the results of a full enquiry.

The only proper investigation, though, was carried out by Sylvie Mbot. She compiled a list of victims which had reached 30 injured and six dead when she was arrested while visiting a hospital. “My phone was taken from me,” she said, “and they found photos of the injured. They asked: ‘Are these all people killed in Gabon? Or are they from previous years or from the war in Côte d’Ivoire?’ I said they were all from Gabon, that they were nothing to do with Côte d’Ivoire. They also asked why I did not mention the policemen who had been killed. I didn’t have any proof of that. They wanted me to mention that.”

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After her interrogation, Mbot was imprisoned in a small cell with no light and no food. “I was alone,” she said. “I didn’t speak to anybody for nine days.” When she was finally released, her phone and notebook with details of her investigation were confiscated.

In the aftermath of the massacre, fear prevented many families from claiming bodies. At the end of 2016, the capital Libreville’s morgues buried 23 bodies in an unmarked grave. In September, the Red Cross reported 15 dead, while the opposition tends to claim at least 27 fatalities in Libreville. Based on Mbot’s work, visits to the morgues and other interviews, I would be confident of putting the figure at a minimum of 29.

I think often about those weeks, pretending to be a proper journalist. Roughly a week before the final, the phone rang in the house I was sharing. A voice told me I was being followed, that they knew what I was doing, and that I should back off. I transferred everything off my laptop onto a memory stick, which I then hid in my dirty laundry. I remember clearly the gnawing sense of dread for the days that remained, and the relief when the plane doors closed and the wheels left the runway.

But while I could leave, those I had spoken to could not. I think about the grief of the sister of one victim, as she raised his young son. I think about Christophe and his eagerness for the fight. I think about Serge and his despairing fury. Most of all, I think about Sylvie Mbot and her implacable courage.

*Names have been changed.

I have no personal experience of Wagner, nor can I claim to know why Prigozhin was killed or by whom. Russia is like Africa, they effortlessly spin impenetrable mysteries in which the impossible becomes the truth, the possible the lie.

But I can claim to know a little about mercenaries in Africa. In my youth I co-authored a book with one of the continent’s more elusive mercenaries, a Congo veteran who was regarded as so passe by publishers that they declined to publish his story until he suddenly popped up, as mercenaries do, as part of a coup against an Indian Ocean island in 1982.

His name was Jerry Puren and he served as a mercenary in the secessionist Katanga province, later Shaba, in the Congo from 1961 until 1963. United Nations action drove him into Belgian exile with Moise Tshombe, the deposed Katangese President. He was present at Ndola in Zambia, then Northern Rhodesia, when the UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold was killed on a peace mission in 1961 in a mysterious aircraft crash. Puren always insisted to me that he had been merely passing through; it was the Americans what done it.

When Soviet-backed rebels swept into the Eastern Congo in the mid-Sixties to overthrow the Western-supported President Mobutu Sese Seko, the CIA raised a mercenary force of mostly South Africans, named Five Commando, later promoted as The Wild Geese (another historical analogy), and sent them to stop the insurgency. They did. Puren returned with Tshombe but overstayed his welcome: ensnared in the abortive Katangese Gendarmes coup of 1967, led by Belgian and French mercenaries with impossible tabloid-generated names such as Black Jack Jean Schramme and Demon Bob Denard.

Puren ended up in dead-end jobs in South Africa until again called to the colours, the green-back ones. Together with Mike Hoare, former commander of Five Commando, they launched an abortive coup against the Seychelles Government of Rene Albert in November 1982 with a hotch-potch of South African military adventurers. He had promised to take me, a hungry young journalist, on his next mission but stood me up. Just as well: it could have been a career-limiting move.

Hoare and the gang escaped by hijacking an Air India aircraft. Puren, part of a one-man self-designated forward reconnaissance unit, was left behind. As he heard the aircraft thundering overhead, he admitted to himself that he was in big shit. He spent 19 days in hiding before surrendering. Together with four other advance party scouts also captured, he was sentenced to death. Only the intercession of Archbishop Desmond Tutu saved them. Diplomacy got them an early release.

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But the spirit never dies. When he heard that I was reporting on the wars in southern Angola in the mid-Eighties, he asked me to take a proposal to UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. At over 70 years and in an age of Mig-23’s, Rooivalk attack helicopters and Mi-24 helicopters, Puren offered to build Savimbi an air force. Such the limitless optimism and naiveté of the old-style mercenary.

Puren died impoverished in a rough part of the port city of Durban. His death was hastened, his wife Julia insisted, when they were attacked and robbed in their apartment by two students from a nearby college. She said he had the look in his eyes she had seen so often in the Congo, the look of a man about to die.

Yet I learnt some things from Puren and his mob. First, many mercenaries of that era were disconcertingly charming and interesting, some educated, but all entirely lacking an internal moral compass. The lure of excitement and money suborned all nobler aspirations.

Second, most died broke. The same impetuosity that drove them to freebooting rapidly dissipated the proceeds. None seemed to regret either their lives or their penury: they lived and died content with the embers of their memories.

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Third, Puren’s generation of African freebooters are as lost a phenomenon as the Victorian adventurers who studded the history of that trampling march towards global hegemony. Gangster mercenaries served in the Biafran and early Angolan wars of the Seventies. The more professional Executive Outcomes, the South African mercenary group comprising veterans of the 15-year border wars operated in Angola, Sierra Leone and Papua New Guinea in the Nineties. They were the forerunners of the modern Private Military Companies (PMCs), the most notable being Blackwater (now Academi), which supported the Western efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wagner is proud to claim it as its conceptual progenitor, but Wagner, through its franchises, is infinitely more dangerous and untethered, perhaps more so now that its leaders are gone.

There is a fourth thing I learnt about mercenaries. They are dodgy employees, capable of switching sides at a moment’s notice or taking out their leaders. Just ask the Romans. Vladimir Putin has belatedly grasped the point which is why he is asking Russian mercenaries to sign pledges of allegiance to Russia. In a world in which developed countries are too refined to commit their military to the wet-end business of war, there will always be room for a Wagner. And so another historical analogy: after 500 years, the Middle Age private fighting companies, the Condottiere, are back big time.

In each of these coups, the military officers involved cited the same reasons for seizing power: mounting concerns about a surge in terrorism and chronic social and economic underdevelopment. Despite being one of the world’s richest regions in terms of natural resources, including oil, gold and uranium, the Sahel is also one of the poorest financially. Niger is a striking example: it is one of the world’s leading exporters of uranium, yet consistently ranks towards the bottom of the Human Development Index.

In the eyes of these countries’ new leaders and their supporters, much of the responsibility for this lies with one villain in particular: France. They are, after all, all former French colonies, part of what used to be known as Françafrique. And more than any other imperial power, France has continued to exercise a huge influence over its former outposts, replacing outright colonial rule with more subtle forms of neocolonial control — first and foremost with currency.

Before Africa’s decolonisation in the Fifties and Sixties, it was common among Western powers to impose forms of monetary subservience on their respective colonies. The latter were generally forced to use currencies issued and controlled by the imperial centres, to ensure the European countries’ economic control and financial benefit. France was no exception; rather, what set France apart from other imperial powers was the fact that its monetary empire survived decolonisation. While most African colonies, upon becoming independent, adopted national currencies, France managed to cajole most of its former outposts in Central and Western Africa into maintaining the colonial currency: the CFA franc.

In the decades that followed, various countries tried to abandon the CFA system, but very few succeeded. As the Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla and the French journalist Fanny Pigeaud write in their book Africa’s Last Colonial Currency (which I translated), France did everything it could to discourage countries from leaving the CFA: “Intimidations, destabilisation campaigns and even assassinations and coups d’état marked this period, testifying to the permanent and unequal power relations on which the relationship between France and its ‘partners’ in Africa was based — and is still based today.”

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The CFA franc, as a result, continues to be used by 14 countries, mostly former French colonies, throughout Central and Western Africa — including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Together, they form the so-called “franc zone”, with France still playing a central role. Despite the formal “Africanisation” of this group, which involved transferring the headquarters of the CFA franc’s two central banks to the African continent, France continues to enjoy far-reaching control over the system — and the countries that employ it.

“More than simply a currency,” Sylla and Pigeaud write, “the CFA franc allows France to manage its economic, monetary, financial and political relations with some of its former colonies according to a logic functional to its interests.” They contend that the CFA franc represents a form of “monetary imperialism”, which hinders the development of African economies and keeps them subservient to France.

Consider Niger: the country is France’s biggest source of uranium (providing around 20% of its supply), which is needed to fuel the nuclear plants which provide roughly 70% of the country’s electricity. Yet, only one in seven Nigeriens (and just 4% of rural residents) have access to modern electricity services, while more than 40% of the population live in extreme poverty. Just as strikingly, 85% of the company that operates Niger’s uranium industry is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies; only 15% is owned by Niger’s government.

The CFA system, and the lack of monetary and economic sovereignty it entails, is central to this systematic plundering of resources — in Niger and elsewhere in the Sahel. Of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest Human Development Index, five are part of the franc zone, including the three that have experienced recent coups.

Nor is France’s control over the franc zone limited to economic tools. Niger is also France’s main Sahelian military base, hosting around 1,500 French soldiers. To further complicate matters, the country is also home to around 1,000 US soldiers, one of the largest contingents of American troops on the African continent, operating under the umbrella of the United States Africa Command (Africom). Since 2013, the US has also been carrying out drone missions from several bases in Niger — including a recently constructed $110-million installation. For both France and the US, the purported objective is to fight Islamic terrorism; the reality, however, is that despite this massive foreign military presence, security in Niger and other countries has deteriorated over the years — as have their economic prospects.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Africa’s newest military juntas have singled out France as the main target of their ire. In Mali, the current military leader Assimi Goïta expelled the French army, cut diplomatic ties and even banned French as an official language. In Burkina Faso, the young revolutionary leader Ibrahim Traoré also expelled French troops and banned several exports.

For Sylla, this amounts to nothing less than “a second national liberation movement, which aims to bring to completion the decolonisation process which began in the Fifties and Sixties in Francophone Africa”. While the first stage of this process was about obtaining political independence from the West, this latest stage is about obtaining economic sovereignty and independence. This is why, as a recent United Nations report noted, popular support for these new military governments can be understood as being “symptomatic of a new wave of democratic aspiration that is expanding across the continent”. As Sylla told me: “In many of these countries, the militaries are seen as leaders upholding their nations’ sovereignty and independence, as opposed to elected governments, which tend to be puppets of the West and have done nothing to challenge the neocolonial order throughout the years.”

But what does this mean for Niger? For now, the country appears to be moving in the same direction as Mali and Burkina Faso. While the new government has stopped short (for now) of telling foreign troops to leave the country, it has revoked a raft of military cooperation agreements with France, closed the country’s airspace — effectively bringing to a halt US drone operations — and announced it is suspending the export of uranium to France. In response, thousands of people have taken to the streets to show their support, burning French flags and even attacking the French embassy. “Since childhood, I’ve been opposed to France,” a local businessman told the BBC. “They’ve exploited all the riches of my country such as uranium, petrol and gold. The poorest Nigeriens are unable to eat three times a day because of France.”

As if to prove his point, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) — a political and economic union of 15 countries located in West Africa which has the support of the West — immediately placed sanctions on Niger, suspending all commercial and financial transactions between Niger and Ecowas countries and, even more ominously, freezing Niger’s assets deposited in the central and commercial banks of Ecowas. The reason they can do this is precisely because Ecowas contains the West African Economic and Monetary Union, which issues the currency used by Niger, and is largely under France’s control. This allows France to weaponise the CFA franc against any government that poses a problem for it within the franc zone. The EU has also reacted punitively, suspending aid and cooperation with Niger despite it being one of the poorest countries in the world.

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More worryingly, the West African bloc said it would “take all measures necessary”, including the use of force, if the elected government was not reinstated within a week. That deadline expired on Sunday and no action was taken, but the threat has not been retracted. They are due to meet on Thursday to decide what happens next. Meanwhile, France, the EU and the US have all offered “unflagging” support to the ousted leader, and have backed Ecowas’s stance. This follows a decade of France using military force to defend its interests in Francophone Africa, intervening in the Ivory Coast, Mali and Chad.

But this is more than just a story about France’s waning hegemony and US military presence in the region. The Nigerien coup also threatens a $13-billion dollar project to build a gas pipeline connecting gas fields in Nigeria to Europe, which would pass straight through Niger. Following the EU’s decision to wean itself off Russian gas last year, this venture is arguably more urgent than ever.

The Nigerien military regime, for its part, has warned that any foreign military intervention in the country would result in a “massacre”, while Mali and Burkina Faso have both come out in support of the new government. Any military intervention, they warned in a joint statement, “would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali”, and “could destabilise the entire region”. Moreover, given Russia’s strong ties with the putschist governments, a Western-backed attack on Niger could easily mutate into what Colin P. Clarke has described as “a regional proxy war”, with Russia and the Wagner Group supporting Niger (and Burkina Faso and Mali), and Western countries supporting Ecowas.

All of which feeds into fears that we are on the verge of a new scramble for Africa, with Russia, China and the West vying for influence over this immensely resource-rich, young continent predicted to be the next frontier of growth. If this logic prevails, however, it will be a disaster for Africa. For as hard as it may be to fathom, Western countries — and France in particular — should accept that this anti-Western trend has much less to do with recent foreign influence than with historical grievances against long-running neocolonial practices. Any attempt to counter it with the same old recipe — financial blackmail and military force — will only strengthen the rebels’ resolve.

At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he is in the world. Yet, the process remains much the same as when he was in Downing Street. Those who work for him must submit their papers before the box is closed for the weekend. Blair will then review the documents and add comments before meeting his team the following week. Only those really close to the former PM can email him papers directly.

Such is the life of Blair in “retirement”. Aged 70, he works with the zeal of a man with something still to prove; something to build; something perhaps to redeem. Constantly travelling, Blair spends as much as 70% of his time abroad: raising funds, attending conferences, giving speeches and networking with world leaders, plutocrats, corporate executives and “thought leaders”. He flies on private jets and is escorted in armed cars with security always close by. This is Blair today: no longer Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but Prime Minister of Tony Blair Inc.

Formally, he is “executive chairman” of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, known to all as the TBI. The institute was born in 2017 and now employs more than 800 people worldwide, some with salaries as high as $504,000 (though Blair does not take one). He has offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Accra, and enough money to stage the slickest political conference in Britain. He has a media team to manage his media “grid”, a policy team to shape national debate, and a delivery team to project-manage his priorities across the world.

Working directly for him, Blair has a chief executive who used to work in No. 10, Catherine Rimmer, a global managing director who once worked for Justin Trudeau, Michael McNair, and an executive vice president who sits on the board of Oracle, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, Awo Ablo. His policy unit, meanwhile, is the only think tank in Britain with American levels of funding and a direct line into both the Government and Opposition, not to mention the Commissioners in Brussels and tech titans in San Francisco.

It is this arm of the TBI which has produced policy papers on everything from Brexit to AI to Covid. Its influence is such that cabinet ministers and even prime ministers — including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — are regularly in touch. Starmer’s agenda as Labour leader now so closely resembles the policy prescriptions put forward by the TBI, whether on the need for a closer relationship with Europe or a new planning regime, that there is talk throughout Westminster of a Blairite reconquista. He has openly offered his institute to help Starmer if he becomes prime minister.

And yet, it is not the policy unit that is the TBI’s driving force, but its consultancy operation. Today, the “government advisory work” is responsible for almost all of its revenue, bringing in $79.4 million of its $81 million turnover in 2021, according to the latest accounts. In a recent round of internal restructuring, this side of the organisation was prioritised, resulting in a number of policy specialists leaving, including the policy unit’s leading man, Ian Mulheirn. (When we approached the TBI a spokesman insisted policy making had not been “de-prioritised” and remained one of the three pillars of the institute’s work, alongside “strategy and delivery”.)

The consultancy arm, meanwhile, is expanding rapidly, offering advice to governments around the world on the art of “delivery”. Look at the TBI’s recruitment page and there is an extraordinary array of jobs available: four in Abu Dhabi, three in Eastern Europe, two in each of the Philippines, Rwanda, Athens and Côte d’Ivoire, and one each in Israel, Indonesia, Kenya, New York, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Miami. Meanwhile, its offices in London, Singapore and Delhi are all expanding.

The TBI has become, in the words of one figure who knows the institute well, a “McKinsey for world leaders” — a global consultancy business which advises governments on how to govern, while also acting as a middle man between the world’s political and business elites. Astride it all, of course, is Blair himself, the man who decides what the organisation should focus on, who it should help and where it should expand. Like a senior partner in a law firm, Blair brings in the clients, using his connections with the rich and powerful.

It is important to stop for a moment to appreciate just how mould-breaking Blair’s post-premiership life really is for a British politician. When Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, she joined the House of Lords. When John Major left office, he became chairman of a cricket club. Gordon Brown became a UN special envoy, David Cameron took on various chairmanship roles, Theresa May and Liz Truss remained in parliament and Boris Johnson returned to his old life writing newspaper columns. None of them tried to build anything on the scale of Blair’s globe-spanning TBI, a British “Clinton Foundation” combining philanthropy, business and political influence. Blair has assembled something so big, in fact, that according to one figure close to another former prime minister, he has approached at least one of those who succeeded him in No. 10 to see if they might be interested in working with him.

But the question I keep coming back to is: why?

II

At Blair’s Future of Britain conference in July, I watched as he weaved through a packed drinks reception, glass of water in hand, posing for selfies, imparting his wisdom. I hoped to grab a word. But such was the scrum of acolytes and security, I could not get close.

As Blair worked the room, hugging old friends and granting quick audiences to starstruck Labour MPs, it felt like being back in the early 2000s. For many of my generation, Blair will always be a defining politician. For me this is doubly so; I grew up in Sedgefield, his constituency, and knew him, tangentially, through my parents who were both Labour activists. I knew all those who worked for him and, indeed, spent time in his constituency office myself as a wide-eyed work experience kid. Back then, Blair seemed almost the ur-politician, the archetype others copied to win power. To this day, seeing him still feels a little bit like journeying back in time.

I am not the only one who thinks this. One person who worked at TBI, and has since left, compared life inside the institute to the movie Goodbye Lenin  — in which a woman who fell into a coma before the fall of the Berlin Wall is shielded from the truth by her protective son. Blair’s new life, according to some former colleagues, feels like one long prime ministerial cosplay in which everybody must play their part. There is the media grid, the box, the police protection officers, armoured cars, private jets and constant meetings with world leaders and VIPs. Spend a day in the TBI offices in central London and you might see anyone popping in: a leading Indian politician one day, Bill Clinton greeting his old friend with a bear hug the next.

Yet there are plenty of giveaways that time has not stood still: the grey hair; the suede Chelsea boots which are a shade too informal for frontline politics; the Apple Watch poking out from under his jacket. The truth is that Blair is only just emerging from a period of his life when public animosity meant that he rarely ventured out in London and, indeed, felt more comfortable not just out of the city but out of the country itself. Looking back, it is astonishing how quickly his reputation fell after leaving office.

Blair resigned as prime minister in 2007 with high hopes for his new life. He was given a standing ovation as he left the House of Commons for the last time and was immediately confirmed as the new “Middle East envoy” representing the UN, EU, US and Russia. There was hope he could do for Israel-Palestine what he had done for Northern Ireland. The tides of history, however, were no longer with him. By the time he left the envoy job in 2015, peace in the Middle East was further away than ever.

During this period, the world Blair had tried to build as prime minister seemed to collapse all around him. Soon after the financial crisis, which immediately followed his resignation, Blair lost his bid to become the first permanent president of the European Council, the stain from Iraq just too great. And then his old rival Gordon Brown ordered an independent inquiry into the Iraq War — a trial Blair could neither win nor escape.

This was when he set up the basic structure of his life today, creating a number of charities in the areas of policy he was most interested in: the Tony Blair Sports Foundation in the North East of England; the Tony Blair Faith Foundation which worked across the world; the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative focused on development. He also set up “Tony Blair Associates”, his consultancy business. To begin with, each of these organisations were nominally separate, which meant most of the attention went on the business wing, leaving the impression that he was simply hawking his services among a range of unsavoury governments — from the Kuwaitis to the Kazakhs —  to the highest bidder, his post-premiership life one primarily driven by money-making.

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Fair or not, the fact that Blair was evidently making a lot of money did not sit well with a public who had been thrust into a world of austerity immediately after he left office. He had swiftly taken a well-paid seat on the board of JPMorgan Chase and joined the lucrative speaking circuit. This work brought in enough money to allow him to swap his old constituency home Sedgefield for two multi-million pound properties: one in London and another in the Home Counties. It did not go unnoticed that he seemed to be recreating the life he had in No. 10, only now freed from having to care about public opinion. His Georgian townhouse in London looked just like Downing Street and his country retreat was not only near Chequers, but had the same air of Chilterns grandeur.

Taken together, the money-making nature of his post-Downing Street life almost destroyed Blair’s public image. Even his decision to give away the entire £4.6 million advance for his memoir, A Journey, was dismissed as a publicity stunt.

But then came Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit and Donald Trump — the populist revolt. This was the moment his resurrection really began. Brexit, in particular, replaced Iraq in the public consciousness as the defining political event, with a new set of political villains whom the public could boo and whistle.

This period of political turmoil, according to many I spoke to, shocked Blair into becoming more involved in politics again. Blair took an important step towards rebuilding his public image by merging all his business and charitable interests into one organisation — the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. From this point on, instead of having a consultancy business and several charities, Blair presided over one giant not-for-profit organisation.

In 2017, he set up a unit called “renewing the centre”, recruiting a team of smart, young Anglo-Americans to come up with ideas to save the liberal order, as they saw it. From the beginning, though, there were tensions in the team. Some believed that given Blair’s background as Labour leader, “renewing the centre” meant, in effect, renewing the centre-left, finding new policies that would rebuild the coalition of progressives he had once so successfully amassed. Others, though, saw it differently. For them, “renewing the centre” meant renewing both the centre-left and the centre-right, and even forming an alliance where necessary to defeat their existential enemy: the “populists” who must never be appeased. I was told Blair was firmly in the latter camp.

For some, he was drawing exactly the wrong conclusion, confirming the populist narrative that there was no difference between the traditional parties, and that neither of which would allow any real change to the system. Over the years that followed, some of Blair’s more Left-leaning recruits departed in frustration, believing, as one person put it, that Blair was not really any different from George Osborne when it came to austerity. Others said the tensions in the project ran even deeper.

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“It was really fraught,” said one. “We were trying to save democracy — but from Mayfair.” Could the TBI really learn lessons this way? Another simply said: “It was a failure.” At this time, Blair was devoting much of his energy to campaigning for a second referendum — a fight he would eventually lose in December 2019, when Boris Johnson comfortably defeated Corbyn’s Labour with the promise to “Get Brexit Done”. The centre was collapsing.

And yet, from this point of political impotence, Blair’s reputation and influence has recovered. As the pandemic began to spread across Europe the following year, Blair put his policy unit to work. As cases escalated, the TBI released paper after paper on everything from face masks to mass testing and even international vaccine passports, always seemingly one step ahead of the Government. When the country was desperate to be vaccinated, Blair released a paper calling for a delay between the first and second doses to improve efficiency. The Government quickly announced the same plan.

Finally, Blair seemed to be back in touch with the zeitgeist. The pandemic was an ultimate test in apolitical “delivery” — that what matters is what works. He was back. His institute was flying and donations were beginning to pour in from around the world. But under the surface, all was not well.

III

In his memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, Blair describes how he helps developing countries. First, he hires teams of “highly qualified young people” from “Governments, the World Bank, McKinsey or private banks”. Then, after hiring these bright young things, he sends them out into the world to “build capacity, so that in time the locals can do it”.

Over the past few years, Blair has rapidly expanded his team of consultants. In Africa alone, the TBI is active in Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, Mozambique, Togo, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Teams of TBI experts sit at the heart of foreign governments, advising on everything from how to improve crop yields to the creation of “presidential delivery units”.

A quick look at the description for its “Country Director Eastern Europe” job gives an indication of the kind of work the institute does. “The Country Director will lead a TBI team embedded in country at the highest level of Government,” the advert reads. One of its key responsibilities is to “build and maintain a relationship of trust with your counterpart (typically President or Prime Minister level)”. In doing so, the candidate must be able to “suggest and convince your counterpart on key development priorities that TBI could be supporting”. What would be the reaction if this was the other way round: if, say, the Clinton Foundation, advertised for a team of people to be embedded in the British government or simply to “suggest and convince” the British prime minister to follow their advice?

Yet the TBI is proud of what its teams have been able to achieve . “In Nigeria, our energy advisor worked on the design and implementation of a mass solar-connection programme called Solar Power Naija that aims to provide electricity access to 25 million Nigerians,” the report states. In another example, the TBI said it “supported the government of Burkina Faso to improve the country’s agriculture and agri-business outcomes”. In doing so, the TBI claims, they helped increase the country’s “fertiliser-blending capacity”.

To the TBI’s critics, this is just the gloss of “deliverology”, the belief that what is really holding a country back is not so much deep structural challenges such as corruption, economic exploitation or colonialism — but bad governance. And this can be fixed. The problem, in other words, is largely technocratic, not political.

Another criticism levelled at Blair is that what he is really doing is advising on how to build a version of the Downing Street he created 20 years ago — right at the very moment the British state has shown itself to be so woefully dysfunctional (something, ironically, Blair also believes).

But it’s not just cynical Brits who are questioning the effectiveness of the TBI. There are also plenty of raised eyebrows in Africa. In June, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper published an op-ed by an academic which dismissed Blair as a “self-serving lobbyist… projecting dubious altruistic inclinations”. Nigeria, it said, must not “willingly [offer] itself as a cheap financial rehabilitation home for retired British Prime Ministers”.

In Malawi, there is similar public disquiet. The TBI first arrived in the country in 2012 soon after the former president Joyce Banda came to power. However, after Banda’s government was overwhelmed by an extraordinary corruption scandal known as “Cashgate” — in which it emerged that as much as $250 million had been looted from public funds after a junior civil servant was found with $300,000 in cash in the boot of his car — the TBI left.

It returned to the country, though, in 2020, after Lazarus Chakwera, its new president, took over and asked for help to “strengthen its delivery and implementation mechanisms”. Not everyone in Malawi was happy about it. Charles Kajoloweka, executive director of the human rights and governance watchdog Youth and Society, said it was almost impossible to to find out exactly what TBI was doing. William Kambwandira, executive director at the Centre for Social Accountability and Transparency in Malawi, agreed. “Our greatest concern is that government dealings with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have been kept under wraps.” In a statement, the TBI said the “sole purpose” of its work was “to ensure the government is delivering on its commitments to improve the public services it provides to its people.”

Such criticisms get to the heart of why some are sceptical about the TBI’s modus operandi. The TBI offers technocratic support based on a technocratic assessment of development, but it does so to political leaders often based on personal relationships with Blair himself.

The former Malawian president Banda explained how her relationship with Blair worked. “When I ascended to power, he and his wife Cherie flew over to Malawi within one week of my presidency,” she told UnHerd. “When he came over, during a state banquet hosted in his honour, I had a conversation with him where I personally requested [support] and he offered to send over three of his staffers to help me, due to the fact that I had assumed the presidency abruptly. I remember that is when he told me about his global programme and offered to lend me a hand. I remember what he said: ‘I have several people working in the region and I will shift them around.’” As Banda put it: “There was no formal agreement or big ceremony because he was just helping a friend.”

IV

In April 2022, Blair needed someone to manage the TBI’s vast, global consultancy. He hired Mike McNair from McKinsey, a Canadian who had worked for years as Justin Trudeau’s policy chief in Ottawa. Since arriving, McNair has overseen a rapid expansion of the organisation.

The nature of this expansion, however, raises questions about the TBI’s future and how it is funded. There has been a push from the TBI to access philanthropic donations and to create partnerships with business. One relationship in particular jumps out from the TBI accounts: that with the tech billionaire, Larry Ellison, and his company Oracle.

Ellison, 78, is currently thought to be the world’s fourth richest man, with an estimated fortune of $140 billion. Like many tech billionaires, he has cultivated a reputation as something of an iconoclastic sage, a workaholic visionary who can see the future more clearly than others — and, importantly, deliver it. Like his friend Elon Musk, Ellison is known for his almost impish impatience, his mind moving from one grand projet to the next, often making grand claims about their revolutionary potential only to move on to something else soon after. “I am a sprinter,” Ellison once remarked. “I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.”

It should not have been a great surprise, then, when in 2020 Ellison announced that he was suddenly disbanding his entire team at the Larry Ellison Foundation in London. The unit was led by Matthew Symonds, the former Economist journalist (and father of Carrie Johnson) who wrote an “intimate” authorised biography of Ellison, published in 2003. When I rang Symonds, he immediately hung up.

Ellison’s decision to close his London operation came at the height of the pandemic, announcing that he wanted to focus all his charitable energies on “medical philanthropy”. In many ways, this made perfect sense. Ellison bankrolls the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, focused on trying to find cures for cancer.

At around the same time, Ellison began deepening his relationship with Blair. In partnership with the TBI, Ellison’s Institute for Transformative Medicine created a “Global Health Security Consortium” with scientists at Oxford University to provide “support for leaders around the world to help them prepare for the health-security challenges of tomorrow”. Ellison also began giving more and more money to the TBI. In 2019, the Larry Ellison Foundation gave the TBI $10 million with a further $20 million committed. By 2021, this had risen to $33 million, with plans for future donations of a further $49 million.

At some point, Blair was evidently able to convince Ellison that the TBI’s methods were a more effective way to make the world a better place than his previous efforts. And the partnership between the two does have a certain logic. Blair believes that “the power of technology” must be harnessed by bringing together politicians and “innovators”. This, then, is one of the central purposes of the TBI as Blair sees it: to act as a matchmaker for plutocrats such as Ellison and political figures such as himself. But it is an approach that raises awkward questions about power and transparency.

Alongside the Global Health Security Consortium, the two of them have also created a “Tech for Development” programme. The idea is to help developing countries build “comprehensive digital infrastructure”. Together, Blair and Ellison have rolled this out in Ghana, Rwanda and Senegal for free, with a view to building electronic health records so that governments know who is vaccinated and who isn’t.

Not everyone, however, looks so kindly upon the partnership. Ellison, after all, is a divisive figure. To some, he is an intense visionary in the same mould as Musk, with the same intense desire to conquer all in business. As Symonds writes in his biography, Ellison has an “unquenchable optimism and almost messianic self belief”. And he is not shy about it. During the pandemic, Ellison offered his medical research facilities to President Trump free of charge. He has bought an island in Hawaii which he uses as both an ultra-exclusive resort for the rich and a living agricultural experiment, part of his grand plan to secure global food supplies. Even as he approaches his 80th birthday, he is still dreaming of his next great breakthrough as well as his legacy. Perhaps that’s why, last year, he made one of the biggest gambles of his career.

In June 2022, Ellison bought the electronic health record company Cerner for almost $30 billion. It was the largest buy-out of his life. Almost immediately after the purchase, Ellison announced that it would help him realise his aim of building a single national database for health records. The plan was endorsed by Blair. His hope is that, using Oracle technology, every American will be able to store their medical data online. It is a visionary move, which, if it pays off, would make Oracle the Amazon of health records. To some, the partnership with the TBI makes good philanthropic and commercial sense: if Oracle can show that digital health records work in Africa, why not elsewhere? And by partnering with the TBI, Oracle gains access to parts of the world it might not have been able to reach before.

The problem is that such a scheme to create a single national health record database is not only incredibly complex and hard to deliver, but extremely contentious. In fact, the main objection is not technocratic, but political — even moral. Do we want every health record to be stored on a cloud run by one corporation? Oracle is already facing a lawsuit in the US over claims it has unlawfully collected information on 5 billion people.

Whether you see the partnership between Blair and Ellison charitably or otherwise, it reveals an important reality about today’s world and the way power works in practice. Blair and Ellison operate in a sphere of hyper-connected individuals (one board member, for instance, is Baroness Rona Fairhead, Boris Johnson’s former minister for trade and export promotion). They talk and meet each other regularly, making important decisions that affect the lives of many people, in ways which are far harder to scrutinise than those taken by governments and political leaders.

Others I spoke to said it is not possible to judge Blair’s enthusiasm for this technology without acknowledging the fact that his institute is partially dependent on donations from a tech billionaire. Some of those who have previously worked closely with Blair went further, arguing that the conflicts of interests within Blair’s new life go even deeper, extending into the heart of the organisation itself. One arm of the TBI might be writing papers on how to protect the international liberal order, for instance, while the consulting arm is embedded with illiberal governments who pose a challenge to that very same order.

Rather than hide this, the TBI actively advertises its partnerships with business, arguing that the “partnerships” it has built up, alongside the donations it receives, allow it to do “the great bulk” of its consultancy work at no cost to governments. When it comes to tricky questions such as patient privacy, Blair is adamant that they do not undermine the transformative potential of technology. In Malawi, for example, the TBI boasts of its partnership with Musk’s “Starlink” internet service, which helped hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by a cyclone. Blair’s entire vision today is for governments to become more effective by linking the kind of strategy, delivery and policy units he had in No. 10 with the kind of technology that was not available to him. Just as he wanted to introduce ID cards back then, he now supports digital ID cards today, as well as vaccine passports and vast new health databases to tackle the spread of disease. As Blair sees it, his partnership with Oracle is just pragmatic policymaking.

But like Ellison, Blair is something of a utopian futurist. He believes, almost as a faith, in the power of technology. Blair is a good boss, according to many I spoke to, because he is always so upbeat and energetic, but when it comes to technology he is a little too “naive” about its possibilities. Another former employee suggests he is “fatalist” about technology in the same way he was fatalist about globalisation — not thinking critically enough about its risks and political consequences. The greatest irony, though, is that such wide-eyed belief in technology now feels almost old-fashioned. To a younger generation who grew up in a world dominated by Big Tech and Big Pharma, the dominance of giant corporations run by tech plutocrats feels less utopian than dystopian.

V

When Blair left office, he consoled himself with the thought that his life was not over. As he wrote in A Journey, he’d always had a bigger passion than politics: religion. Religion gave him purpose. “There is so much frailty still to overcome,” he concluded in his memoir. “But in overcoming it lies the meaning of life.”

But what are these frailties Blair must overcome? According to Catholic teaching, “sins of frailty” are minor acts committed through “indecision, weakness, lack of vigilance or courage”. Those who have previously worked closely with him see a bit of all these in Blair. Some believe he too often shies away from conflict, even today. In No. 10, he outsourced being the bad guy to Alastair Campbell and did not confront and demote Gordon Brown soon enough, which undermined his premiership. Some believe Blair is now shying away from confronting Starmer, a man he believes will become prime minister, but, according to a number of people I spoke to, not a sufficiently reforming one. Even as Blair battled to save centrism, he was careful not to burn bridges with the Trump or Johnson governments, or indeed any of the illiberal governments he works with.

Is this is a sign of indecisiveness? It is striking that even those who most like and respect him are unclear what exactly he wants from the TBI. Does he really want it to be the McKinsey for world leaders? Or a think tank? And for what purpose exactly? To Blair, this type of thinking is overly reductive. To have a political impact you must have policies and the ability to implement them. But it is also for this reason that there is what one former employee described as a certain whimsy to the TBI — an organisation less committed to the service of an abstract goal than to the aspirations of Blair himself. If Tony wants something, it happens; if he wants to help someone he helps them.

The more I studied him, the more I wondered whether his biggest frailty of all is simply the desire to remain relevant, the frailty that J.D. Salinger once described as, “not having the courage to be an absolute nobody”. Blair was a somebody once and it is very difficult to give that up. He had power to do things and he still wants to do things — and so he needs power. But to get power you need money and connections and ideas and people. And he now has all those things in droves.

This is the reason he continues to work as hard as he does, taking his box home at weekends, raising money, flying around the world, attending conferences. Maintaining the network becomes an intrinsic goal in itself. This helps explain why Blair takes meetings with world leaders and works for countries many would avoid. He has what one person described as a deep, primal need to be “connected”.

Today, Blair lives the life of a prime minister, but with the freedom to shake off the petty realities of government, working on campaigns to help American governors one moment, flying in to help embattled African leaders the next; all while working on grand plans to change the world with exciting, utopian tech bros in California.

But how much of this is actually real? “Do governments really want his strategic advice,” one person who knows Blair put it to me, “or his phone number?” Do those companies he has partnered with really have only altruistic intentions? And do political leaders really only work with him to make their governments more effective? The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ambiguous soup of human motivation; in the flawed, frail characters of ordinary human beings with conflicting aspirations, trying to do good in the world and for themselves.

​​Blair today is more influential than any other former prime minister: he has built an empire that connects business to power and himself to everyone. In the 15 years since he left office, Blair has created a world in which he might not be prime minister but he remains powerful. And that is the point. The power is the point.

Additional reporting: Jack McBrams

The European Union plays a particular role in this dominant narrative. The bloc is usually seen as one of the good guys: it stands up for democracy and liberalism, two values which are threatened by Russia, a country on the side of authoritarianism and illiberalism. The EU is also viewed as the embodiment of cosmopolitanism, the opposite of the nationalism of Russia and its Eurosceptic “populist” supporters.

In reality, however, the EU occupies a much more complex space within the binaries that dominate our political thinking. As an examination of its history shows, it stands for liberalism rather than democracy, while replicating some of the features of nationalism on a larger, continental scale. Crucially, rather than limiting these tendencies, the war in Ukraine may actually be strengthening them.

The history of the European project is more problematic than the idea of it as a symbol of democracy suggests. Few “pro-Europeans” know that it began as a colonial project — what might be called its original sin. As Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson have shown, the first phase of European integration in the Fifties was partly intended to consolidate Belgian and French colonies in central and west Africa, which needed an injection of West German capital. Many in West Germany, on other hand, saw it as a chance to get back into the colonial game from which they had been excluded since the end of the First World War.

From the Sixties, however, when Belgium and France lost their remaining colonies in Africa, the six countries that had created the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community turned inwards and forgot its colonial origins. Thus the narrative that emerged around what became the EU centred on the internal lessons of European history (that is, the centuries of conflict between European countries, culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust), rather than the external lessons of European history (in particular European colonialism). Europe was increasingly imagined as a “closed system”.

The EU, as it became with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, increasingly saw itself as a vehicle through which authoritarian states could make democratic transitions. It was seen as crucial to the democratic transitions of Italy and West Germany in the early phase of European integration, and then again with Greece, Spain and Portugal, which joined in the Eighties. In reality, what the EU actually did was to constrain popular sovereignty in its member states.

Yet in the post-Cold War period, the founding story of an EU that stood for democracy continued to strengthen as the bloc enlarged to include central and eastern European countries. The post-1989 revolutions in the countries of the Warsaw Pact were seen, above all, as democratic revolutions. But as Branko Milanović has recently reminded us, they were also nationalist revolutions that aimed to create ethnically homogenous nation states. Joining the EU meant that the national and popular sovereignty of these countries was immediately constrained. In the medium term, this produced a backlash against the EU, the effects of which we now see in Hungary and Poland.

Moreover, the inclusion of central and eastern European countries strengthened the identity of the EU as a white bloc. New members viewed the accession process as a “return to Europe”. But if the “Europe” they were joining was simply the post-war integration project, it was not a “return”, because they had never been part of it before. The “Europe” they thought they were “returning” to was a much older idea of Europe — a civilisational one. The EU, for its part, saw it as completely natural that central and eastern European countries should join it — once, that is, they had carried out reforms. Morocco, on the other hand, applied to join the European Community, as it then was, in 1987, but was told it could not do so, regardless of what reforms it carried out, because it was not a European country.

During the 2010s, as the EU faced a series of cascading crises, it came to feel much more threatened and, as a result, became more defensive, which led to a revival of the concept of a “geopolitical” Europe that first emerged in the Twenties. That idea was a response to a sense of European decline after the First World War — namely, a fear that Europe was losing power relative to the Soviet Union and United States. The pan-European movement — the inspiration for the post-war “European project” — urged Europeans to unite to become a “third force” in international politics and maintain their position of power in the world. Central to this thinking was the idea of Africa as Europe’s “plantation”.

The context in the 2010s was obviously quite different. But after the euro crisis and the cascade of other crises that followed, the EU increasingly saw itself as being surrounded by threats — an “arc of instability” stretching from the east to the south of Europe. Against this background, “pro-Europeans” such as French President Emmanuel Macron imagined, in a remarkably similar way as in the Twenties, that Europeans could unite to become a third “pole” in international politics, albeit with China having replaced the Soviet Union as the second pole. This was the background for the frenetic discussion among foreign policy think tanks about concepts such as “European sovereignty” and “strategic autonomy”.

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“Pro-Europeans” had traditionally rejected the concept of sovereignty, which they saw as outdated. In fact, especially in the optimistic two decades since the end of the Cold War, many imagined that European integration would overcome not just national sovereignty but sovereignty in general as the EU became a kind of blueprint for global governance. But as they became more defensive, “pro-Europeans” now embraced the idea of sovereignty — at least at the European level. For instance, whereas previously they imagined that the removal of borders within the EU was the first step towards a borderless world, they now came to see that it actually necessitated a hard external border.

Moreover, following the refugee crisis in 2015, the threats to Europe were increasingly imagined in civilisational terms. The far-Right was rising and the centre-right began to converge with it, especially on questions of identity, immigration and Islam. The policy area where this convergence between the centre-right and the far-Right played out most clearly, and with the most horrific consequences, is immigration. Since 2014, 27,000 people have died in the Mediterranean as they desperately tried to get to Europe in boats. As Human Rights Watch put it recently, the EU’s policy can be summed up in three words: “let them die.”

Meanwhile, the “geopolitical” threats to Europe were also increasingly imagined in civilisational terms. Thus while the far-Right focused on the threat to European civilisation from immigrants, especially Muslim ones, centrist politicians such as Macron spoke more in terms of the threat to European civilisation from other powers — notably China, Russia and even the United States (hence the need for “strategic autonomy”, which implies independence from the United States in security terms). Thus when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was inevitably seen as a civilisational Other against which Europe must defend itself.

The EU’s response to the war in Ukraine was quite different from its response to other conflicts in its “neighbourhood”. Even as it continued to brutally push back migrants in the Mediterranean, it opened its borders to those fleeing from Ukraine and provided them with extraordinary support. The EU saw Ukraine as defending “European values” — which, to listen to European leaders, now apparently included territorial integrity and state sovereignty. Poland, led by a “populist” government and Ukraine’s leading supporter in the EU, was now suddenly seen as standing for the same values — including democracy — that it had previously been seen as rejecting.

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Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the European response, though, is the way that “pro-Europeans” have suddenly embraced a nationalist movement — as the ubiquitousness of Ukrainian flags illustrates. Traditionally, “pro-Europeans” did not distinguish between ethnic-cultural and civic versions of nationalism, but saw all nationalism as a dangerous force. “Nationalism is war,” as President Francois Mitterrand said in his last speech to the European Parliament. This undifferentiated rejection informed the response of “pro-Europeans” to Brexit: they saw the United Kingdom as hopelessly out of touch with the real world.

What makes the sudden “pro-European” identification with Ukrainian nationalism even stranger, however, is that it is not just any nationalism. Rather, it has a long history of anti-Semitism which extends from its 16th-century Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky to Stepan Bandera during the Second World War — both of whom are still venerated in Ukraine. Moreover, after 2014, much of the fighting in the Donbas was done by the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia that was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. Supporters of Ukraine claim that these neo-Nazi elements were later removed. But at least two of the five Azov commanders who Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky recently brought back to Ukraine as heroes are neo-Nazis who go back to the founding of Azov.

Just as it was seen as natural that central and eastern European countries should join the EU after the end of the Cold War, it is now seen as natural that Ukraine should also join. In fact, the question of Ukrainian accession is now the biggest preoccupation for “pro-Europeans”. In a typically technocratic way, they are focused on how to manage the process. But there are much bigger questions, such as whether, once in the EU, Ukraine would become a larger version of Hungary and Poland.

Meanwhile, the danger is that the war, and Ukrainian accession, will increase the EU’s tendency to see itself as the embodiment of a threatened European civilisation — and further strengthen its identity as white bloc.

The Gambia announced its first Covid lockdown, in March 2020, at a fragile moment. Following years of President Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship, the democratic government installed under President Adama Barrow in 2017 had ushered in hope. There was, for instance, a noticeable drop in Gambian youth’s attempts to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean to reach Europe. Yet the country’s pandemic response has erased those gains, and also dealt a severe blow to Gambians’ confidence in its young democracy.

The timing of The Gambia’s lockdown could not have been worse. In March 2020, as many African countries shut down in accordance with WHO advice, The Gambia’s main market at Serekunda closed for six weeks. Late March is when Gambians buy seeds to prepare for planting, in readiness for the rains. The unilateral closure of markets meant that seeds were widely unavailable. A transport shutdown meant that even where they did have seeds, people could not take them to their villages for planting. Even when public transport restarted, several weeks later, social distancing requirements meant that buses were only allowed to operate at half capacity. As this was uneconomic, many buses did not run at all.

Anyone who did manage to sow crops then had difficulties in harvesting, since social distancing protocols meant that no more than two people could work a plot at one time. When food was finally taken to market, the forced impoverishment of the population meant that few could afford to buy it and much went to waste: the UN estimated on-farm losses of 50% in Africa in 2020.

The aggregated effect of The Gambia’s Covid response was a massive reduction in farming revenue and in available food. In effect, these were policies guaranteed to cause hunger and malnutrition — and to stoke food price inflation through the destruction of stores and harvests. Food inflation quickly grew in 2021 and remains in double digits, much higher than pre-pandemic levels.

At the same time, and as in the rest of the world, the Gambian government threw money at Covid-19. Donor advice on hygiene saw all public institutions forced to buy large plastic vats and gallons of hand wash and disinfectant. This, and the costs of implementing Western biomedical surveillance regimes, was paid for by taking on new debts: the Gambian government implemented a 500 million dalasi (US$10 million) emergency response fund — a vast sum for a country with a per-capita GDP of US$772. This was financed by a World Bank loan of the same value, and by an IMF loan of US$21.3 million.

Meanwhile, Gambian tax revenues fell by half in 2020, owing to the economic cataclysm, meaning that debt repayments stacked up even higher. This is money that The Gambia does not have. It was frequently said that “we could have fed the country for 10 years for the amount of money that we spent on Covid-19”. The Gambia is beset by poverty and malnutrition. Structurally indebted to Western creditors, with a median age below 18, and where a teacher’s monthly salary is under £50, the spending of these sums to implement Western protocols for a disease quickly known to affect mostly the elderly and obese is scandalous.

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Gambians themselves protested vociferously. Some tried to break into Serekunda market to continue working, and others — when a mask was demanded — asked who would pay for it. But the question remains: why did Gambian politicians implement these policies? In fact, creditor pressure from the EU and other Western embassies, from the World Bank and the WHO, made it almost impossible to do anything else.

Still today, billboards line the country with EU funding logos, indicating the “correct” way to wear masks. This offers a flashback to the bombardment which Gambian officials received from Western agencies on handling Covid-19. Weekly flurries of information arrived with instructions on “appropriate” behaviour. Weekly “situation reports” were demanded from the Gambian Ministry of Health by these partners: these reports had to indicate the effectiveness of the Covid protocols, and case numbers. This information was a prerequisite for further access to the finance so essential in the economic meltdown.

The Covid vaccine rollout made this dynamic even clearer. When by late 2021, vaccination numbers remained low, the UK High Commission warned Gambian counterparts that tourists would not return until all those in the tourist industry were vaccinated. Indeed, the UK only removed The Gambia from the red-list of countries once the vaccine rollout had “decreased risk to British nationals”. In the end, public officials were virtually forced into vaccination. Most of these vaccines were not gifted to the country, but paid for through World Bank loans which increased structural indebtedness.

The consequences have been vast. The impact on Gambian young women has been especially severe. The closure of schools in the pandemic made schoolgirls vulnerable to being sent away for marriage by parents desperate to earn some dowry money to assuage the pain of the pandemic restrictions. One expert in the field described how early marriage had become common in The Gambia during the pandemic.

Secondly, there has been a huge increase in Gambian youths seeking to migrate to Europe illegally. The restrictions shattered the Gambian economy. Hotels, which employ more than 50,000 Gambians, were closed. The youths lost their jobs and many of them were forced into the dangerous ‘backway’ journey to Europe. Indeed, the fledgling democratic government’s noticeable achievements in youth job creation were all but wiped out by the pandemic, and the 2022-23 season tourism was still only at 30% of pre-pandemic levels.

Another harm came in the primary health sector. The pandemic and the endless Western agency briefings as to the requirements on vaccination, social distancing and masking meant that frail health facilities were completely rewired to focus on Covid-19 patients. This meant that as malaria, fevers and digestive diseases took their usual toll on the population, no one did much. The medical personnel, drugs, ambulances and facilities were all dedicated to fighting the pandemic in accordance with the demands of Western embassies and NGOs. This made maternity, child health and outpatient services suffer disruptions which were, in many cases, fatal. There was also a severe disruption in the Meningitis A, Tetanus, and Hepatitis children immunisation schedules, which still have not completely recovered.

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Given the devastating impacts of the pandemic response on the general population, Covid vaccine hesitancy is strong. A recent survey suggested that close to 70% of Gambian adults surveyed trusted “prayers” more than the vaccines. Many accuse healthcare officials of diagnosing simple cases of malaria as Covid-19. Popular distrust extended to the Government’s efforts to alleviate the food scarcity caused by the restrictions. A series of corruption scandals have broken pointing to the embezzlement of Covid-19 relief funds, while key suppliers contracted by the World Food Programme over two years failed to deliver the required 8,550 tons of rice intended as relief for needy families.

All of this could take decades to fix. Austerity has been forced on the country by external creditors and their incessant demands for information and compliance to protocols that, to most Gambians, were useless — and where Covid-19 was far from the greatest health threat they faced. As elsewhere around the world, vast levels of corruption were involved with the effective printing of money that went with the Covid response. Meanwhile, international solidarity collapsed, as Western activists appeared far more concerned by the political landscape in their own countries than by the effect of these policies on African lives — about which many remain reticent to this day.

What policymakers do not appear to have grasped are the consequences that all this will have. For all multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates’s plans, and the current US government’s ideas about future pandemic preparedness and mass vaccine manufacturing in Africa, it is clear that no citizen of that continent will be prepared to trust future lockdowns, social distancing measures or mandatory vaccinations. While policymakers opine and “official narratives” are constructed, the experience in The Gambia, and across Africa as a whole, will ensure its response to the next pandemic will be nothing of the kind.

* Co-contributor Hassoum Ceesay is writing in a personal capacity

In the process, Prigozhin has become the state-sanctioned tip of Russia’s foreign policy spear — a position that is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite recent reports suggesting that there is a growing rift between him and Vladimir Putin. The footprint of the Wagner Group has become indispensable, both for Russia’s war aims in Ukraine and for its longer-term stability. And Prigozhin is something of an enigma: he both represents the will and the policies of the Kremlin, while also being one of the few — and certainly the most prominent — voices inside Russia that can effectively challenge Putin’s state. While Kremlinology is a difficult art, it appears very possible that Prigozhin serves as controlled opposition for Putin: a hawk who can appeal both to domestic ultra-nationalists upset with the course of the war in Ukraine and to security-obsessed regimes abroad. In that sense, we should see Prigozhin more as a shadow defence minister than an entirely independent actor.

When asked about growing calls from within the House of Commons to declare his force a terrorist organisation — which the British government now plans to do within weeks — Prigozhin wrote on his Telegram channel: “The Wagner PMC has been fighting ISIL, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other terrorist organisations everywhere, and very successfully.” If Wagner is a terror group, Prigozhin sarcastically wrote in Russian, then perhaps al-Qaeda and the Islamic State should become humanitarian charities, they could even hold meetings inside Westminster. “I’m all for such an arrangement,” he wrote.

It’s remarkable smugness from the head of a fighting force responsible not just for brutal torture, executions, even possible war crimes — but for filming and broadcasting the atrocities to serve as propaganda. He presides over a group, staffed with special forces veterans and conscripted prisoners, that has helped Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad regain his grip on power in Syria and delivered some of Russia’s only recent territorial gains in Ukraine. And now, thanks to him, Russia is being venerated as an anti-colonialist, anti-terrorist power by governments and citizens in Burkina Faso, Mali, the Central African Republic, and further afield. As Jonathan Batenguene, a Cameroonian political analyst, explained to me, there is a rising perception in Africa that Russia is a “reliable partner in the struggle against terrorism”.

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Prigozhin’s play in the Sahel should be a wakeup call to the United States and France in particular. Their decades of counter-terrorism operations in the region have not brought security: self-interested efforts have, in some cases, only fomented more militancy and violence.

If the West hopes to both stabilise central Africa and deny Russia new trading partners, it will need to get serious about solving the region’s substantial security challenges — and acknowledge its own role in creating them. One problem has been that the West has spent far too much time pursuing its own counter-terrorism objectives — that is, denying groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda a base from which to launch attacks on Europe and North America — and far too little considering how best to foster long-term stability. Even when state-building has been part of a counter-terrorist strategy, it has often not gone to plan: the United States’ long-running investment in Iraq or France’s long-suffering relationship with the Malian government are prime examples.

But those investments have grown deeply unpopular. Resolve to provide security to nations in the Global South has fallen, particularly as the threat of terrorism in the West has declined significantly. In some cases, the consequences of these open-ended interventions, which inevitably lead to civilian casualties, have worsened the situation in a fundamental way.

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The ousting of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, for example, unravelled Tripoli’s security state and unleashed a flood of weapons and fighters into the region. That domino toppled a series of others, and understanding how that Western action led to calamity in Mali and Burkina Faso can help explain why these countries have welcomed Wagner with open arms.

In Northern Mali, Gaddafi’s fall prompted Tuareg militias, which once counted Gaddafi as a benefactor, to push for long-sought independence; they even briefly declared the creation of the Azawad republic in 2012. During the period of instability, Islamist groups rushed in and seized territory. Some have organised under the Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin umbrella group, affiliated with al-Qaeda; while others have joined The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. Mali has been locked in a brutal war ever since.

Militancy was on the march, but Western appetite for another Libya-style intervention was low, so the West, America in particular, wildly expanded its drone programme instead. France’s approach has been more hands on, but not by much. Operation Serval was launched in 2013 to eliminate the threat posed by these trans-national jihadist groups. The multi-national coalition was designed to help Mali’s government in Bamako regain control of the region, but as the European Council on Foreign Relations says it “dislodged the jihadist groups from Mali’s cities, but did not eliminate them”. After the operation ended in 2014, “they slipped away and reorganised”.

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The fighting soon spilled over into Burkina Faso. Following two military coups in 2022, France launched a second mission, Operation Barkhane. But it proved even less successful than Operation Serval. In a taxonomical look at how the effort floundered, analyst Nathaniel Powell writes that “broadly speaking, the answer boils down to a combination of unalterable structural features of France’s intervention, a misunderstanding of local conflict dynamics, serious political mistakes, and operational errors”. The situation worsened so severely that even Canada abandoned the parallel United Nations peacekeeping mission, to cheers from Islamist factions.

It is in this context that the Wagner Group arrived in the region. One of its first orders of business when it landed in Mali in 2021 was to go after France as a neo-colonial power which had no concern for civilian lives. According to Paris, the Russian mercenaries went so far as to stage bodies near a Malian military base in order to accuse France of a massacre. (The murders were, in fact, likely conducted by Wagner themselves.)

The citizens and decision-makers in West and Central Africa don’t need to be helped to the conclusion that Western aid and intervention has utterly failed to address the mounting security concerns in the region. But Russia is still keen to make the point.

Wagner’s propaganda campaign in Africa is a serious and well-financed affair, as revealed in those leaked American intelligence memos. “The campaign’s primary objective was to promote Russian foreign policy in a manner that would shape public opinion towards African nations pulling back from Western pressure and realigning with Russia in mutually beneficial cooperation,” the leaked intelligence reads. That includes propaganda which “highlight US and French interference in African internal affairs and conducting activities to shape a negative attitude toward the armed forces of Western countries against a backdrop of crimes committed by their military members, particularly in Burkina Faso and Mali”.

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As a result, Wagner’s footprint in the region has grown quickly. It is believed that Prigozhin’s forces are now present, at least to some degree, in the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Madagascar, Botswana, Comoros, Rwanda, and Lesotho. That presence ranges from fairly minimal, as in their single office in Lesotho, to quite substantial — US Signals Intelligence reports that 1,645 Wagner fighters were present in Mali earlier this year.

There is little doubt about Wagner’s impure intentions: there is ample evidence that Prigozhin hopes to pilfer diamonds and other natural resources while using these countries to launder weapons and goods for Russians. Yet the perception is that France and the United States are equally greedy and self-interested, if not more so — and there are certainly data points to back up that belief.

“One of the reasons that these guys are popular is because they actually die,” says John Lechner, a freelance journalist who spends considerable time in the Central African Republic. That is: Wagner fighters are on the ground, battling militants. They appear to be risking their own lives to bring security to these states. One official from an unnamed Sahel country, speaking to the US Institute of Peace, remarked: “When your house is burning you don’t judge the quality of the water you spray to stop the flames.”

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Wagner’s support also means weapons. Whereas the West has been apprehensive about selling weapons to some of these regimes, Russia has had no such qualms. Look no further than Sudan, where evidence has emerged of Wagner arming the rebellious Rapid Support Forces with missiles as they fight a deadly conflict against the ruling military regime.

Russian-backed weapons deals serve as a quid pro quo — a way for African countries to source military hardware without jumping through America’s and Europe’s hoops, while also helping Russia to prosecute its war in Ukraine. The leaked US intelligence documents state that: “According to Prigozhin affiliates, Malian Transition President Assimi Goita was involved in efforts to acquire weapons from Turkey for Vagner’s interests.”

The question of how to frustrate Russia’s Scramble for Africa is painfully simple. The West needs to work with the United Nations, African Union, and local governments to become a reliable partner in the region, not just to strike militant groups, but to bring about long-term stability and security. It also needs to look back on its past decade of involvement in the region and ask why it has failed. But a strategy that targets Wagner first and foremost is not strategy at all. Forcing the Wagner Group out of the Central African Republic in short order, Lechner argued, “could be very negative from a civilian protection standpoint”. “You better be coming with something better to replace it.”

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If the West is to supplant Russia in Africa, it must prioritise ending the human suffering caused by these interlocking crises. But it must also put a stop to Russia’s attempt to forge an international illiberal alliance. Like a new Warsaw Pact, Moscow hopes it can — using Prigozhin as its conduit — win over long-term partners to trade with and launder resources through. This will be Putin’s only hope at remaining in power as sanctions continue. Even if Prigozhin loses his favour with Moscow or, even more unlikely, if he winds up outmanoeuvring Putin and replacing the strongman as leader, these tactics are likely to continue, or even intensify.

Russia has no shortage of possible partners, especially in countries where the state has proved itself incapable of maintaining order, and where the international community has talked a good game but not delivered: Haiti is a prime example. The leaked US intelligence reports that Prigozhin has plans to approach the Haitian government with an offer to help their fight against gangs that have taken over swathes of the country. This comes as traditional Haitian partners — France, the United States, Canada — have proved unable to help Port-au-Prince restore order.

Continued violence in Yemen, Sudan, and Libya presents another opportunity for Russia to pick winners and install client states. And there are signs that Wagner is planning to foment unrest elsewhere, like Côte D’Ivoire, so it can swoop in and offer security solutions. This is just colonialism, cloaked in bilateral aid. China has perfected this strategy with its Belt-and-Road Initiative. Whereas Beijing is keen to hook developing countries up to debt bondage, Russia wants to help them outsource their domestic security to a paramilitary force with no concern for human rights.

While the fighting in Sudan is, on the face of it, little more than a power struggle between the two rival factions that control the country, there is also an important international and geopolitical dimension to the conflict. At its heart is the great powers’ competition for influence over the continent — what has been called the “new scramble for Africa”.

Given its vast natural resources, including gold, its agricultural wealth and its geopolitically strategic location, Sudan has long attracted regional and international power plays. In recent years, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel have all been cultivating economic and political ties with the country’s leadership — and its two warlords in particular.

One country, however, stands out for its “special relationship” with Sudan: Russia. Putin made sure to cultivate an alliance with the country’s former leader, Omar al-Bashir, deploying the infamous Wagner Group in 2017 to provide him with political and military support. More importantly, that same year, al-Bashir signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia which included allowing the Russians to establish a military base along the Red Sea, ensuring a permanent presence for the Russian Navy in a crucial region and easy access to the Indian Ocean.

Al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, before the agreement came into play, but Russia maintained good relations with the new administration’s military leaders, especially Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, whose Rapid Support Forces control the country’s gold mines. The transitional military-civilian government confirmed the decision to allow Russia to establish a base in 2020, but backtracked the following year under pressure from the US. However, once the civilian members of government were purged in yet another coup, in 2021, the agreement was revived.

Today, there is no indication that the issue of the naval base played a role in the recent outbreak of fighting, nor are any of the major foreign players openly backing either of the two warring factions. But if one side should explicitly align itself with, say, Russia, the conflict could easily turn into another front of the proxy war between the West and Russia, alongside Ukraine, with potentially disastrous consequences for the entire continent.

For Africa is already the stage of the New Great Game of the 21st century — the struggle between Western countries, China and Russia for influence over this immensely resource-rich, young continent predicted to be the next frontier of growth. In this game, Russia is particularly well-positioned. More so than the West, it enjoys strong historical and ideological ties with many African nations. The Soviet Union was the primary ally of several nations on the continent during the Cold War, and supported various anti-colonial and post-colonial movements; many countries are still ruled by parties that were supported by Moscow during their struggles for liberation from colonial or white supremacist rule, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC).

The West’s appeals for democracy and national independence, on the other hand, are perceived as hypocritical, given its history on the continent. Hence Russia’s argument that the war in Ukraine is actually part of a broader struggle against Western imperialism resonates in Africa, which harbours strong grievances against the West over its colonial and neocolonial practices. Indeed, a recent study carried out by the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy shows Russia remains popular across much of Africa today.

This has meant that not a single African nation has joined Western sanctions against Russia, choosing to either remain neutral — for example by abstaining in UN resolutions condemning Russia — or more or less explicitly siding with Russia, as in the case of South Africa, which in February even participated in a joint military exercise with Russia and China. It is also why Russia has actually strengthened its military, security and economies ties in the region since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Just last month, delegations from 40 African countries and 14 leaders assembled in Moscow for the international parliamentary conference “Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World”.

On that occasion, Putin gave a keynote speech in which he stressed that Russia “has always and will always consider cooperation with African states a priority”. He recalled the large Russian investment projects being implemented in Africa, emphasising the importance of electricity production on the continent. Russia also has a military presence in several African countries, either in an official guise or via the Wagner Group, including in Libya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique and Mali. It is also the region’s largest arms exporter (close to 50%).

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Meanwhile, Sino-African relations are also deepening, with China now the continent’s largest trading partner and main source of project finance in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. This has included massive infrastructural projects, including the Addis Ababa-Djibouti and Mombasa-Nairobi railways and the planned Angola-Tanzania railway, which will be the first railway section connecting the Atlantic coastline to the Indian Ocean, on top of roads, dams, ports and airports. China is also the largest political and economic supporter of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which has 43 parties and another 11 signatories, making it the largest free-trade area in population and geographic size, spanning 1.3 billion people.

Even though there is no evidence that China is engaged in so-called debt trap diplomacy, as claimed by Western representatives, Chinese activities in Africa have been associated with poor labour conditions and unsustainable environmental practices. Yet it’s a fact that “African officials overwhelmingly view China’s role in Africa positively”, as the Rand Corporation noted in 2014, as do the majority of African citizens. This is not only because they see China’s tangible contribution to their nations’ infrastructure and overall economic activity, but also because China’s approach to global affairs and development — ostensibly based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and on prioritising societal stability and economic development over political reforms — offers an alternative to the mainstream Western model for development, largely considered to have failed.

Indeed, it is telling that China has achieved all this without resorting to explicit military force: at present, China operates a single military base on the African continent, in the small East African country of Djibouti, which it inaugurated in 2017. The contrast with America’s approach to the continent couldn’t be starker. As part of its post-9/11 “War on Terror”, the US massively expanded its military presence in Africa, placing troops in at least 15 countries. In 2008, in order to coordinate its growing presence in Africa, the US placed responsibility for the continent under a single United States Africa Command, or Africom. This led to a considerable spike in the number of US troops, bases and drone strikes across the continent, most with counter-terrorism as the stated mission, as well as in coups (attempted and in some cases succeeded) carried out by US-trained troops.

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The best-known example of Africom’s impact is the US-led bombing campaign against Libya in 2011, which plunged the country into anarchy and violence. But several other African countries have been the target of US bombs in recent years. Just last year, the US bombed Somalia and Niger. Meanwhile, as Politico recently reported, American special operations teams are playing a direct role in military actions in at least eight African countries, including Somalia, Kenya, Tunisia and Niger, under a set of classified “surrogate programmes”. Officially, the US only has one permanent base in Africa — Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. But formerly classified documents obtained by The Intercept show that the US military footprint in Africa is much larger, encompassing 29 bases located in 15 different countries or territories. According to CBS News, “the US does have some military presence in virtually every African nation, even if it’s small”.

It seems to finally be dawning on US policymakers that this military-centric approach — which has sparked resistance in many African states — might not be the best way to counter Chinese influence on the continent. In recent months, several high-profile US representatives, including Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken and Jill Biden, have travelled to Africa on what has been described as a “charm offensive”, while President Biden has promised to visit this year. “The United States is all in on Africa and all in with Africa,” he said last December at the second-ever US-Africa leaders’ summit in Washington.

It signalled that America seems to be catching on to the fact that African nations no longer want to be bossed around, they want to courted. They know that today they don’t have to choose sides, as they did during the Cold War, but they can do business with anyone and everyone at the same time. And this gives them power — more power than they’ve ever had. As a result, the real winner in the new scramble for Africa is likely to be Africa itself.

Since a coup in 2021, Sudan has been run by a council of generals, led by the two men at the centre of this dispute: army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and his deputy-turned-enemy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as Hemedti), the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Al-Burhan and Hemedti represent a long-standing divide in Sudanese society, between the people living along the Nile and those on the marginalised periphery. Al-Burhan is a traditional army recruit who rose up the ranks. Raised in a small town in Northern Sudan, he looks to and is allied with Egypt.

Hemedti is very different. He comes from the western region of Darfur and his family extends into Chad. He belongs to the Rizeigat, a nomadic Arab tribe, and made his name with the Janjaweed militia (literally “devils on horseback”) by attacking settled Darfuris. In 2013, he transformed the Janjaweed into the RSF and has extended his power ever since. Today, he is one of the richest men in Sudan: a smooth operator, with vast holdings in mining and property.

This conflict, however, is much bigger than the two personalities at its heart. Indeed, there is a third character in this violent tragedy, a man who prefers to watch from afar.

Vladimir Putin already exercises influence across much of the arid Sahel through the Wagner Group. Although best known for its current activity in Ukraine, Wagner is also active in a number of African states, including Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad and Libya. In this conflict, Hemedti is the man who could add Sudan to that list.

During the Cold War, Africa was transformed into a superpower battleground, with the USSR and the USA slugging it out from Egypt and Ethiopia to Angola and Mozambique. Since then, Putin has continued to regard Africa’s conflicts as a cheap route into the continent. Using every trick in the book, from troops on the ground to digital propaganda, the Wagner Group has become one of the most powerful forces on the continent, allying with embattled political leaders and militia in exchange for cash or lucrative mining concessions.

Wagner’s chance to make inroads into Sudan came in November 2017, when then Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir visited Putin’s residence in Sochi. Publicly, the agreement reached by the two leaders was focused on their joint opposition “to US interference in the domestic affairs of Arab countries”; less publicly, it paved the way for the extension of the Wagner Group into Sudan.

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What form this took only became clear last July, after an investigation by CNN revealed that Russian aircraft had been flying Sudanese gold out of the country to the Syrian port city of Latakia, where Russia has a major airbase. The purported aim was simple: Russia was desperate to fortify its reserves against increasingly punitive Western sanctions. In total, CNN estimated that up to $13.4 billion worth of gold was missing, though Bloomberg later put the figure at $4 billion. Either way, the sums of money are enormous.

These transactions were being organised by Meroe Gold — a subsidiary of M-Invest, owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group. In return, Prigozhin provided training and arms for the Sudanese military and, increasingly, to Hemedti. As CNN pointed out, in early 2022, a day after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, Hemedti flew to Moscow, “ushering in a new phase in the RSF’s relationship with the Wagner Group”.

These reports were corroborated a few months later, when journalists from Le Monde and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) were sent a trove of documents relating to Wagner’s activities in Sudan. Their publication revealed just how deep this relationship had become. M-Invest was shown to have paid millions of dollars to a company operated by Sudanese military intelligence. And the dividends for Prigozhin were huge. In return, Wagner was granted permission to land on a military base in Khartoum and to use “the signal code of the air force for the purpose of operating internally and externally”. It was, in effect, a licence to fly weapons into the country and gold out of it — without being officially declared or detected.

For a short while, they managed to get away with this — until July 2020, when the US sanctioned Meroe for its links to Prigozhin. Last month, the Council of the European Union followed suit, claiming that: “These companies, together with Lobaye Invest Sarlu and Diamville in the CAR (Central African Republic), are sanctioned in view of their role in illegally trading gold and diamonds looted by force from local traders.”

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Yet the measures appear to have had little impact on the activities of any of the parties concerned: there is simply too much at stake. This is also partly why, in 2020, as scrutiny of Wagner’s foreign companies intensified, Meroe handed its interests to a new company called Al Sawlaj for Mining Ltd, which has no assets and lists just one employee — a former Meroe Gold manager.

While few at the time noticed this shift, on 13 April, just three days before the latest fighting erupted, Bloomberg carried an intriguing story. The Sudanese authorities, it emerged, had charged a Russian national working for Al Sawlaj with gold smuggling. This signalled, claimed the report, “an escalation in a simmering power struggle between Sudan’s military and a rival militia whose leader has forged close ties with Russia”.

One can probably assume that “the rival militia leader” with close ties to the Kremlin was Hemedti. By the time his confrontation with al-Burhan erupted, he was estimated to have had as many as 100,000 troops at his disposal. Hemedti had become, in other words, a serious political rival with a military force to boot. And from Moscow’s point of view he was more compliant than al-Burhan, who was happy to receive Putin’s foreign minister, but was nowhere near as close to Russia.

In Sudan, then, it appears we have yet another conflict sparked by a struggle for a nation’s wealth and weapons. But if that were the spark, the Wagner Group was the match. A new Cold War is playing out in Africa — and Africa seems unlikely to win.

As the most populous black state, Nigeria’s prospects are crucial to the future of global race dynamics, a reality often forgotten in the exasperatingly parochial race debate here in the Anglosphere. Black people worldwide yearn for a black nation that can compete with Western powers — a yearning embodied by the make-believe state of Wakanda in the enormously popular Black Panther movies. So, as Nigerians head to the polls tomorrow to choose their president in a highly unpredictable election, it is worth remembering that the result will have implications far beyond West Africa.

Contrary to expectations at the beginning of the campaign, the poll is now a three-way contest between two establishment figures and a popular third contender promising to upturn the status quo. Eight months ago, the odds-on favourite was the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu. A 70-year-old long-time politician, Tinubu is widely considered to be one of Nigeria’s chief “godfathers” — very wealthy political actors who engage in industrial-scale vote-buying, paying poor citizens cash to support their candidates. Tinubu openly brags about how many politicians owe him their positions, including current president Muhammadu Buhari.

His critics cite his corruption, increasingly visible ill-health, and numerous campaign gaffes as reasons he is unfit for the job. Tinubu once suggested the Nigerian army should recruit “50 million youths” to tackle the country’s staggering 33% unemployment rate (arguing that the policy would not be costly because they could be fed on locally-grown corn). In one attempt to laud the achievements of a governor from his party, he described him as having “turned a rotten situation to a bad one”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Tinubu did not agree to live one-on-one media interviews during the campaign and refused to attend presidential debates. At an event at Chatham House, here in the UK, he instructed colleagues to answer audience questions directed at him. His hands have been observed shaking in public and speculation is rife he may be suffering from Parkinson’s, a suggestion his campaign team stoutly refutes. They insist the gaffes are mere slips of the tongue, and tout his record of overseeing significant growth of Lagos’s economy during his 1999-2007 stint as governor, as proof that he is the can-do leader the nation needs.

The other establishment candidate is Atiku Abubakar, a 76-year-old former vice-president running on the platform of the opposition, the People’s Democratic Party. Atiku is likewise wealthy, considered corrupt, and part of the old guard in Nigerian politics. He is even more economically liberal than Tinubu and vows to privatise many state-held assets if elected. “In every great nation in this world, you find out that it is the private sector that is driving the economy, they provide the jobs, they provide the prosperity, and they do everything,” he stated in a 2022 interview. He admires Margaret Thatcher.

Though there are often a dozen or more candidates, Nigerian presidential elections are virtually always a de facto two-horse race between establishment candidates. Nigerian voters are therefore usually faced with weighing up the “lesser evil”. Many Nigerians are dissatisfied with this status quo, but don’t see it changing. But during this latest campaign, sometime in the second half of last year, a third contender started setting Nigerian social media alight, provoking excitement among voters seeking a new order.

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The insurgent candidate is the 61-year-old Peter Obi who, while a former state governor and thus no newbie to politics, is running on the platform of the hitherto marginal Labour Party. Once a banker and entrepreneur, Obi is wealthy, very pro-business and sees economic development as Nigeria’s chief priority. One of his main campaign slogans was “From Consumption to Production”, highlighting the need for the nation to boost its manufacturing prowess, as Asia’s leading economies have in recent decades.

However, while all three frontrunners are on the same page in terms of what Nigeria needs most — economic growth and job creation — what sets Obi apart is that he is not considered corrupt. His attitudes are evidently very different from the average Nigerian politician’s. For one, he shuns the ostentatious displays of wealth and Big Man behaviour commonly associated with the nation’s elites. Videos of him carrying his own luggage at airports excite Nigerian voters tired of arrogant politicians who consider such things beneath them, travelling with entourages of briefcase-carriers and yes-men to limit their contact with the public.

A people used to politicians striving to be as inaccessible and aloof as possible have been pleasantly surprised by a candidate who doesn’t place himself on a pedestal. Obi is known to shun patronage politics — his party has explicitly stated that it will not pay people to vote for him — which makes his promises to manage public finances prudently and honestly sound credible. His down-to-earth persona also lends an air of sincerity to his vows to make Nigeria a fairer and more meritocratic society. In the end, pretty much all politicians say the same thing — that they want to improve our lives. What matters is who we believe means it. Obi has been very successful in convincing young voters that he is genuine — which, given that 60% of Nigerians are under-25, has given him an edge.

But this is not a simple old versus young scenario. It is, at heart, a contest between those who believe Nigeria can be transformed into a fairer, more inclusive society, and those who consider such beliefs naïvely unrealistic. The fruits of economic growth, and the country’s natural resources, have long been gobbled up by the nation’s tiny but overbearing elite, while the vast majority remain ruinously poor. There are hardly any Nigerians who would not like to see the kind of fairer society Obi promises — the question is whether they believe it is possible.

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Persuading people that it is constitutes no small task in an extremely low-trust society. Just 7% of Nigerians believe “most people can be trusted”, while 93% believe “you must be very careful” in dealing with people. (In comparison, 67% of Brits believe most people can be trusted.) These low trust levels help Nigeria’s corrupt political class. Since the popular assumption is that pretty much everyone will help themselves to the till once in power, many conclude that you may as well stick with the devils you know, or at least those from your own ethnic group. There are those who like Obi’s message (and even him as a candidate) but doubt he would be able to reform Nigeria or even get elected, despite all the social media attention and the spate of voter surveys that have shown him in the lead.

One major issue sceptics raise is that Obi is from the Igbo ethnic group concentrated in the south-east of Nigeria; they say group-level antipathies between Igbos and northern Nigerians mean the latter would never vote for him in significant numbers — a problem, considering a slight majority of the country’s 93 million registered voters live in the North. His supporters counter that adults under the age of 35, who now constitute 40% of all registered voters, are far less ethnocentric than older generations, and will turn out for Obi in large numbers.

The undyingly aspirational nature of Nigerianness means that many simply refuse to give up on the idea of the nation becoming a great one. So Obi might be the right man at the right time: an overwhelming 89% of Nigerians currently believe the country is headed “in the wrong direction”. Additionally, 79% of Nigerians think the Buhari government has done a poor job when it comes to security — which now ranks at the top of Nigerian concerns, just ahead of the economy. As a result, trust in the ruling APC party is at an all-time low of 26%. The main opposition party, PDP — which governed the country from 1999 to 2015 — is likewise quite unpopular, and is seen as essentially a carbon copy of the current ruling party. Many want fundamental change from outside of the establishment.

The mood is not helped by the ongoing cash crisis. In October 2022, Nigeria’s central bank announced that redesigned naira notes would be introduced, and the existing ones phased out. The professed aim was to tackle counterfeiting and inflation, but some saw the move as designed to scupper the plans of politicians hoarding cash to buy votes in this year’s various elections. More than a few welcomed the idea, at first.

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However, since the new notes were introduced, many Nigerians have been unable to get them from ATMs; the central bank appears to be struggling to print enough to meet demand. Meanwhile, many businesses no longer accept the old notes. In an economy where 40% of the population don’t have bank accounts and conduct their everyday transactions in cash, this leaves many unable to pay for basic goods, including food — which has sparked riots across the country.

The stakes in tomorrow’s election are high, then. A win for Tinubu or Atiku would mean business-as-usual for the next four years. Economic growth might pick up from the currently sluggish 3% rate: either candidate’s pro-business policies would be an improvement on President Buhari’s statist inclinations. But the elite-dominated, nepotistic and corrupt status quo would hold, hampering the creative potential of Nigeria’s growing population.

A win for Obi, on the other hand, would be the Nigerian equivalent of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, a feat considered impossible at the start of the campaign for reasons including the candidate’s ethnic origins. It would open a new chapter in Nigerian politics, encouraging the belief that the nation can be organised into a well-run, economically successful and fair society. A successful Nigeria would be the pride and power of not only Africa but of blackness as a whole; it would also provide a backyard role model for other African nations hoping to clean up their politics. A real-life Wakanda for the 21st century and beyond.

Many factors connected to the pandemic response are at the heart of Africa’s current crisis, even if many economists choose to ignore them. Some point to the fact that Africa’s long-term loans more than doubled in the 2010s, both across the continent and in specific regions such as Eastern and Southern Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, the country’s external loan value reached $28.57 billion by December 2020, meaning an extra $21.27 billion of debt had been accumulated in the five years before the pandemic.

Yet the reason for the increasing loans prior to Covid was not that the continent was already in economic difficulty. On the contrary, it was the booming nature of Africa’s macroeconomic position before Covid hit that saw it accumulate this debt. In the 2010s, as countries such as Ethiopia saw an increase in GDP of almost 30% per year at some points, economies grew and so did the capacity of African countries to take out new loans to build infrastructure.

This all amounted to fairly standard economics — until the pandemic hit, when these plans were upended almost overnight, and mainstream economists tried instead to blame the impending austerity on overextended finance. First, there was the worldwide collapse in GDP in 2020, which led to an average fall of 4-5% across the continent; while, according to the African Development Bank, one of the very few African countries to ignore WHO policy advice, Tanzania, saw its economy grow by 4.5% that year. On top of this, there was the fall in remittances from the diaspora, triggered by the collapse in service sector jobs in wealthier countries such as the UK: remittances to Africa had surpassed foreign aid in 2019, but fell by 14% in 2021.

The combined impact of these colossal declines in economic activity was catastrophic: in South Africa, 47.2% of small businesses were forced to close in 2020. Meanwhile, global lockdown policies also triggered widespread inflation which long predated the Russian war in Ukraine — even if this has also exacerbated it. All this means that while GDP has started to recover in Africa, its gains are largely wiped out by the soaring price of goods, which makes it harder to keep pace with debt repayments.

This toxic mess created a debt crisis which was predicted from the start. Emmanuel Macron initiated calls to address the debt crisis as early as April 2020, but the plans which were put together failed to address its underlying issues or the continent’s pandemic policy responses. Elsewhere, a number of African countries were wary of taking up the offers to suspend debt repayments for fear it might impact their credit ratings. And with many of the additional loans being offered by the World Bank linked to purchasing stocks of Covid vaccines, rather than anything to deal with the real debt crisis, none of this relieved any of the fundamental issues at stake.

Compounding this is the fact that while income has fallen across the board, the cost of servicing the continent’s debt burden has soared along with the value of the dollar. As it stands, the US has emerged as the one major macroeconomic winner of the global pandemic policy response — and with debts held in dollars, this is catastrophic for low-income countries whose economies have not fully recovered from the carnage of 2020-1.

For most of Africa, the signs are bleak, with some commentators already labelling the policy framework “Structural Adjustment 2.0” — a revamp of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund following the debt crisis in the Eighties. Triggered by the oil crisis of the previous decade, and the spiralling interest rates that followed, this policy came at the worst possible time for newly independent African countries, which had taken out extensive dollar loans to build new infrastructure. The original SAP bailout loans were predicated on the sell-off of African state assets to private (usually Western) corporations, and the erosion of public services on the continent such as healthcare and education. The arrival on the scene of the new NGO industry to pick up the pieces swiftly followed.

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The current situation certainly seems reminiscent of the early Eighties. Then, as now, a decade of booming economies was abruptly reversed by a severe external economic shock. Back then, external lenders “helped” to stabilise debts with SAP 1.0, in return for a fire sale of state assets to predatory external corporations; today, the connection of “bailout loans” to future austerity and asset-stripping (privatisation) was clear right from the outset of the pandemic policy response. Oxfam warned in 2021 and 2022 that the vast majority of the IMF Covid loans to low-income countries were predicated on future austerity. The impact of this was apparent three months ago, following reports that half of the world’s low-income countries had cut health spending during the pandemic. The stark reality is that the global Covid policy response has crippled the continent’s economies, and will result in lowered spending on healthcare for years to come — and all to fight a disease which, given the continent’s median age of 19.7, did not pose a great threat to the vast majority of Africans.

Alongside a looming decade of austerity, a decade of uncertainty is starting to take shape. Last month, Ghana defaulted on most of its international debt, following a crisis that had been brewing for months. Meanwhile, in nearby Nigeria (which faces elections next month), the country’s debt crisis is deemed “insurmountable”. And with debt interest payments for low-income countries projected to rise by 35% in 2023, things are not about to get any easier, increasing the potential for civil unrest.

What this might look like became clear in Senegal’s New Year’s Eve protests, led by young people furious at the release of a report which showed widespread government corruption in the funds released to “deal with the pandemic”. As in the UK and the US, the printing of vast sums of money to chuck at the new suite of pandemic policies was inevitably accompanied by widespread fraud — while, in the African context, producing mountains of debt which now seem almost impossible to repay.

With Senegal’s informal economy yet to show even minimum signs of recovery, this anger can only get worse. As one Senegalese resident told me recently: “If this government seeks re-election, there will be a genuine revolution.” People, he explained, are angry at the corruption of government Covid contracts, at the fact that Covid saw the largest Senegalese government spending in history where there are many other priorities, at the roll-out of policies which have destroyed people’s livelihoods, and at the promise of years of austerity to pay for it all.

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It is true that some silver linings may yet emerge from this catastrophe. In March last year, Ghana introduced a new electronic levy to tax internal money transfers at 1.5%, partly in an attempt to deal with its looming debt crisis. Though the source of much anger at the time, a more stable tax base is surely a prerequisite for building governments which do not require expensive foreign loans to subsist, and could seem like a wise move in 10 years’ time.

For the time being, though, many people are worried as to what the more immediate future may bring. A senior figure in international development recently described the Covid response to me as “the most regressive policy in three decades, and yet no one’s talking about it”. This may change in the year ahead, as the debt crisis becomes impossible to ignore. On the basis of recent events, there is going to be a desperate effort by policymakers to avoid looking at the true causes of this human disaster, and at their role in creating it — but as the recent Senegalese protests suggest, Africans may have other ideas.

I’ll come to all the controversies in a moment. But on one level, the story behind The Woman King is actually pretty simple. As its producer, the former Hollywood actress Maria Bello, has explained, she came up with the idea a few years ago after visiting the West African republic of Benin. There she had learned about a regiment of immensely fierce female warriors called the Agojie, who fought for the Kingdom of Dahomey in the 18th and 19th centuries. Entirely predictably, European travellers, missionaries and slave-traders called them “Amazons” — and since few of us can resist a story about terrifying statuesque Amazons, Bello was immediately struck by their cinematic potential. And with Marvel’s Black Panther having proved that there’s an enormous international audience for stories with sword-wielding black heroes, Sony executives agreed with her. So far, so uncomplicated.

What of the plot? Again, not very complicated. Historical epics usually tend to be pretty melodramatic, with impossibly admirable heroes and fiendishly cruel villains, and The Woman King is no exception. To cut a two-and-a-quarter-hour story mercifully short, we are in Dahomey in the 1820s. King Ghezo, played by John Boyega, is basically a decent fellow, at least by the standards of warrior kings in turbulent times. He depends on Viola Davis and her regiment of Amazons, not least against his neighbours, the Oyo, whose murderous, rapacious leader is in league with Portuguese slavers.

There are various familial goings-on of the “Luke, I am your father” quality, but we don’t really need to get into them now. Does one apparently orphaned character turn to be the daughter of another? I’m not saying. Anyway, in an entirely unpredictable development, some of the goodies are taken prisoner. Equally unpredictably, the king is reluctant to stake everything on a risky rescue mission. So in a twist that nobody could possibly have imagined, Viola Davis defies orders and leads an expedition to save them anyway. (You may think you’ve seen this before, but you haven’t, because it wasn’t set in Africa when you did see it before, so this time it’s completely different.) So what happens? Well, I don’t want to spoil it. Are they all slaughtered where they stand? Does the film end on a startlingly low note? Or do the goodies win the day? You’ll have to see it yourself to find out.

The producers claim, as they always do, that The Woman King is “based on true events”. And in fairness, they’re not entirely wrong. There certainly was a kingdom of Dahomey in the 19th century: proud, independent, fiercely aggressive — and that’s putting it mildly. The historian Stanley B. Alpern, author of the definitive English-language history of the Agojie, calls it a state “dedicated to warfare and slave-raiding…with the king controlling and regimenting practically every aspect of social life”. One of those kings was indeed called Ghezo. And the Agojie definitely existed, too. As an excellent essay for the Smithsonian magazine explains, they were probably founded around the turn of the 18th century, and boasted some 6,000 female warriors who “raided villages under cover of darkness, took captives and slashed off resisters’ heads to return to their king as trophies of war”.

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So were they as intimidating as the film suggests? Even more intimidating, actually. Forbidden from sleeping with men, the Agojie were recruited when young and forced to undergo the kind of military training that would turn most of us into conscientious objectors. One British traveller described how they were forced to scramble across dense thickets of acacia thorns, without anything to protect their feet from bleeding.

Other tests were designed to desensitise them to the horrors of combat. Every year, according to the Smithsonian, “new recruits of both sexes were required to mount a platform 16 feet high, pick up baskets containing bound and gagged prisoners of war, and hurl them over the parapet to a baying mob below”. And in perhaps the most horribly memorable detail, a French officer called Jean Bayol watched as a teenage recruit called Nanisca, “who had not yet killed anyone”, was brought before a captured young man whose hands were bound. According to Bayol, she “swung her sword three times with both hands, then calmly cut the last flesh that attached the head to the trunk. … She then squeezed the blood off her weapon and swallowed it.”

Nice. It was this Nanisca, by the way, who seems to have inspired the name of Viola Davis’s character. She ended up her days fighting the French, cutting the head off an artillery officer before being shot down in her turn. It was what she would have wanted. Of course plenty of historical films romanticise their terrifyingly violent heroes, as anybody who has seen Gladiator or 300 will attest. Such is the nature of storytelling. The problem for The Woman King, though, is that Dahomey wasn’t just a violent society; it was a violent slave-trading society. Hence the tsunami of controversy.

Although we’re always been told that slavery is a terribly difficult and complicated subject, the history behind all this is actually pretty straightforward. Slave-trading was enormously important, if not essential, to the kingdom of Dahomey. As the Brazilian historian Ana Lucia Araujo has pointed out, Dahomey’s expansion was exactly contemporary with the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. In particular, Dahomey seized and controlled the port of Ouidah, one of the most important hubs in the entire network. From here, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million African captives were forcibly embarked on ships for the New World.

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And although this was a story in which European slave-traders played a leading role, the women warriors of Dahomey were hardly innocent. Quite the reverse. As Araujo notes, The Woman King opens with a scene in which the Adojie attack a neighbouring village, killing the men but chivalrously sparing the women. This is pure fiction, though. In reality, she writes, “the soldiers of the Dahomean army (both women and men) would take the healthy, younger villagers as prisoners and walk them to Dahomey’s capital, Abomey”. Here some would become local slaves, others butchered in human sacrifices. But “most would be transported to the coast, where they would be sold, and board slave ships sailing to the Americas, especially Brazil”.

This isn’t the only distortion of the truth. In the film, King Ghezo is persuaded to end Dahomey’s reliance on European slave-traders and embrace palm-oil production instead. But this is nonsense. Indeed, to his neighbours, the idea that he and his Amazon warriors were reforming liberators would have seemed downright obscene. In reality, Ghezo was as brutal and self-interested as any European imperialist. When he seized the throne in 1818, one of his first acts was to punish his family rivals by selling them into slavery. And for much of his reign he actively resisted pressure from Europe to end the trade in human beings, since by the 1830s and 1840s the British were vigorously trying to stamp it out, even blockading his coastline with Royal Navy ships.

Does all this matter? Maybe not. To repeat: all historical films turn fact into fiction. If you go to Hollywood for your history, that’s your problem, not theirs. Addressing her critics in Variety, Viola Davis insisted that a movie is just, well, a movie. “If we just told a history lesson, which we very well could have, that would be a documentary,” she said bluntly. “Unfortunately, people wouldn’t be in the theaters.” As for John Boyega, he fell back on the kind of impenetrable gibberish for which actors have long been admired across the world. “Art can live in a moral or immoral space and could sometimes just be about shining a light on human nature, history, and the reality of that conflict,” he said gnomically. “So, for me, including that just shows that there is a way in which we can embrace stories that accept the fact that humanity is not perfect, while also being entertaining and something you can learn from.”

What does that mean? I suspect we will never know.

But because it’s Africa and it’s slavery, some people don’t see this as a trivial matter at all. A month ago the New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, mastermind of the crazy “1619 Project” to rewrite all American history around the theme of slavery, issued an ominous warning that she was looking forward to seeing “how a movie that seems to glorify the all-female military unit of the Dahomey deals with the fact that this kingdom derived its wealth from capturing Africans for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade”. The New Yorker, poring over the film’s many distortions, condemned it as not merely “muddled” and “disingenuous” but a “cynical distortion of history”.

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And on Twitter, the usual suspects have been out in force, pitchforks at the ready. In a way it doesn’t really matter which side you’re on; merely to enter the lists is to expose yourself to charges of heresy. So when Ana Lucia Araujo, expert on the slave trade at Howard University, ventured online to discuss a book about another African warrior queen from Angola, and made the mistake of using the word “deported” to describe the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic — well, that was the end of her. “The absolute caucasity of this person!” thundered one of her critics — himself, judging by his picture, distinctly Caucasian. Academics, eh? “What an absolute clown show!” read one reply. Well, you said it.

At heart, then, the story of The Woman King isn’t really a story about Dahomey in the 19th century, but one about the wildly hysterical racial politics of America in the 21st. I haven’t even got into the fact that the actress Lupita Nyong’o, who was originally supposed to be in the film, went to West Africa, made a documentary about the slave trade, broke down in tears when she discovered the Agojies’ involvement in slavery — and then pulled out of the film. Nor do I have time to get into the unbridled joy of the American Right at the spectacle of so many Hollywood liberals and academic nutcases tearing one another to shreds about a film about slavery. “Few of the governments extinguished by European colonialism,” exulted one writer in the National Review, “so richly deserved to be destroyed as Dahomey’s”. I bet he wouldn’t dare say that to John Boyega, though.

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Am I bothered by the film’s distortion of history, then? Well, perhaps a little. Films do matter. Given its enduring legacy in former slave societies such as the United States and Brazil, it would have been much better to tell the story of slavery in a careful, nuanced way, instead of reducing it to a cartoonish, wildly distorted, risibly woke melodrama of heroes and villains. And if the filmmakers had had the courage to tell the true story of Dahomey — a story in which bold, independent African women were sometimes just as cruel and exploitative as the most vicious Portuguese sea-captains — then it might have encouraged their viewers to move beyond the infantile goodies-and-baddies view of imperial history that’s become so common today.

All the same, I’m not going to get too exercised about it. Shrieking and shouting about Hollywood films is never a good look. They come and they go, and most ordinary viewers are far too sensible to take them seriously. Let the lunatics rage on Twitter. The rest of us know it’s only a movie.

No matter how sensitively you try to approach it, colonial history is an inherently divisive issue in Britain. It cannot be otherwise in a country where the descendants of those who were colonised live alongside the descendants of those who did the colonising. One’s story of successful expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

Akala poignantly expressed this in his book, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire: “Even at five years old, we already know on some level that, in this society at least, we are indeed lesser citizens with all the baggage of racialised history following us ghost-like about our days. We are conquered people living in the conquerors’ land, and as such we are people without honour.” It is an emotion rarely voiced and so rarely captured in polls or surveys.

In my fellow African immigrant circles, when we complain about racism in the West, we often sum up the situation with something along the lines of: “Well, it’s not their fault, it’s because we’ve had to leave our countries to come and live in their country, that’s why they think they can misbehave towards us.” Our situation is psychologically easier to handle because we came here of our own accord, usually as adults, and can at least envisage somewhere else in the world we could go if things were to become unbearable here. This allows us an empowering sense of autonomy.

But Akala was speaking about those who, like him, were born here, in the land of their former conquerors, and who can’t envisage living anywhere else. Britain is all they know. Naturally their frustrations at the current status quo are often stronger. Why is it that they have to live in the land of their former conquerors? Why do their life options seem restricted in comparison with their white peers? Why is it that they live in a world where even if they feel Britain is a white supremacist hellhole, they can’t simply say: “Sod it, I’m jumping on a plane and moving to an African or Caribbean country where I won’t have to deal with white racists?”

Race is sometimes, but not always, a relevant proxy for the key dividing line in our world which is between so-far successful groups and so-far unsuccessful groups. The Japanese, South Koreans, Singaporeans, Emiratis and increasingly the Chinese are not on the same side of this divide as Kenyans, Pakistanis or Yemenis. They are, along with most white or white-majority nations, in the successful group camp.

It is no coincidence that, even though they’re not white and have been victims of racism and colonisation in the past, you won’t find too many Singaporeans or South Koreans today focusing on the ills colonialism rendered their societies. Successful nations and peoples usually find the present quite satisfying; when they discuss the past, it’s generally for the feel-good reason of reminding themselves how far they have come. It is not that a South Korean may not face racism here in Britain, but that, like Jewish people today, they always have the option of a wealthy well-developed ancestral homeland they can move to, if need really be. This knowledge creates a completely different psychological dynamic.

A lot of effort, however, is put into recalling the colonial pasts of nations not doing that well today for two major reasons. First, to convince the world that this is not the result of current misrule, but because of problems that have their “root causes” in colonialism and, possibly, slavery as well. In other words, something attributable to external forces beyond their control.

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The second aim is to bring white folk, Westerners especially, down a peg or two. This group tends to consider itself more civilisationally advanced as a result of having built several dozen successful states across the globe. No amount of political correctness can hide this. Their sense of superiority at having built “developed” societies while we are still “developing” engenders in us a strong psychological need to make the point that the only reason they are so rich, and we are not, is because they robbed us through colonisation and slavery and caused the problems our nations face today.

Olivia Rutazibwa outlines this position: “It is only through sustained colonial amnesia in knowledge production in [Western] society that the ills in the global South are systematically and almost exclusively attributed to the now and the local (over there)… this allows for the sustained… presentation of Western actors as firefighters when they are more often than not the arsonists.” What is thus needed, according to Rutazibwa, is to “first and foremost foreground the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial encounter as the sites from which any thinking about development-related issues need to be addressed”.

In other words, you simply can’t discuss any development issues of Nigeria or Pakistan today without first discussing colonialism. Indeed, there wouldn’t even be a Nigeria today, a country comprised of hundreds of ethnic groups speaking some 500 different languages, if not for British colonialism. Though colonialism is often portrayed as having divided Africans, it actually forced together thousands of formerly disparate communities, city-states, empires and autonomous groups into 54 Western-style nation states.

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Nigerians over the years have countered by arguing that this forcing together of overly (culturally) different peoples has created an “artificial” country that struggles to develop consensus on national norms and forge a sense of nationhood. The practicality of this point is valid in Nigeria’s case, but we should also be aware that this is precisely the argument some deploy against multiculturalism in Western societies. They say white Europeans shouldn’t be forced to live with so many people from different cultures with different value-systems. So this particular critique of colonialism is a slippery slope. We can’t argue “forced” multiculturalism is bad for African states but good for Western ones.

What is certainly the case, however, is that colonialism brought massive disruptions to the ways of life of millions of people in colonised territories, rubbishing their cultures, belief-systems, values and traditions — all the things Queen Elizabeth is praised for upholding here in Britain. Postcolonial Africans are yet to recover (and may well never recover) from this assault on their identities and are still trying to figure out what exactly they are or want to be. People were also killed, something that cannot be glossed over. Colonialism wrought serious damage.

But it is not to blame for everything. It is fanciful, for example, to suggest that the $600 billion stolen from the Nigerian people by Nigerian rulers since independence is down to colonialism. If that had been used to fund roads, schools, hospitals, universities and power systems, Nigeria would be in a very different place today. We would definitely not be in a situation whereby three-quarters of Nigerians aged 18-24 want to emigrate to richer pastures, including often to the land of their former conquerors, Britain.

Nonetheless when the issue of corruption among African ruling elites is discussed, the fact that these stolen funds are often deposited in Western banks is often raised along with the implication that it is the white man who is again robbing Africa of its wealth. I cannot imagine that, were it to emerge that Boris Johnson had stolen £2 billion from the UK treasury and deposited it in a bank in Dubai, there would be people more concerned with the role of the Emiratis in the whole affair than in the fact Johnson stole £2 billion from Britain.

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Yet a tranche of white Westerners lap up these anti-colonial arguments. They nod their heads, displaying an incredibly paternalistic and patronising attitude to Africans, painting them as helpless children who, even when they steal from their people, probably do it because the white man has told them to. All this only serves to downplay the role of corrupt African leaders in impoverishing their people: how thrilled these rulers must be as those useful idiots make the “corruption is all the West’s fault” argument for them.

And no, accounts of massive corruption in African states are not exaggerated stereotypes. In a 2021 survey of citizens in 34 African countries, an average of 58% said corruption was getting steadily worse. And not just among their elites; a third of respondents had been forced to bribe the police at least once in the past year. They also rated their civil servants, judges and local government councillors as very corrupt. Worse, 71% said “ordinary citizens risk retaliation or other negative consequences if they report corruption to the authorities”, proof they see it as a systemic arrangement. Is that the white man’s doing as well?

Of course there are global structural hangovers from the colonial era that impede the progress of African and other (poorer) global South countries today. Western countries have far more influence over and within major international organisations — from the UN to the IMF and World Bank. African countries have very weak positions in these institutions because they lack financial muscle, determined by their position in the world economy. Basically, the more you pay, the more you say.

The general stance of Africans who live in Africa is certainly not to blame the former colonialists for the problems of their countries today. They place the blame squarely on their ruling elites as a cursory glance of a newspaper in any African country will evidence. A majority — 59% — of Africans aged 18-24 believe that the impact their country’s former colonial powers have on their education systems is positive, while a quarter (25%) disagree. A majority — 57% — also feel trade relations with the former colonial power have a positive impact, while 27% disagree. Surprisingly for me, 47% even think the former colonial power’s impact on their country’s culture and identity is positive and 46% think their access to its natural resources has a positive effect, compared with 32% and 36% who disagree, respectively.

Six in ten, meanwhile, believe that foreign companies have been allowed to take advantage of their country’s resources without sufficiently benefitting or contributing to the local populations. These figures suggest the majority of African youths who actually live in Africa have quite different views from those in the West who are attempting to speak on their behalf — usually Guardianistas or their equivalents in the US. Kehinde Andrews’s The New Age of Empire at least makes the argument explicitly. Most others hide behind implication to generally say the same thing.

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Any white person who would suggest colonialism is not one of the “root causes” of Africa’s problems today is engaging in colonial amnesia, white denialism (both real but over-exaggerated phenomena), or is simply a racist. This tactic has the dual advantage of putting whites on the moral and psychological defensive as well as rallying Africans and other black folk to join in repelling the racist denialists. And if any black people in the West suggest colonialism does not really explain all African problems today, the tactic will be to portray them as “brainwashed” by the white man, dim-witted coconuts or mercenaries who in order to reap the rewards of pandering to white prejudices, are enabling “ahistorical” arguments that ignore the legacies of colonialism and slavery. An “ahistorical” argument is any argument that does not firmly point to the white man as the root of Africa’s problems today. White people who make the “colonialism is the root cause” argument will be praised as “thoughtful” and generally given the thumbs-up for showing how informed they are; they get it.

But who is this helping? Certainly not the 500 million Africans who currently have to survive on less than $1.90 a day or the hundreds of millions more who live on $2-$5 a day which is still serious poverty. It is not helping those living in countries with 50% or higher unemployment rates who are dying of easily curable diseases because they often lack access to basic healthcare. It is not helping the Africans who often live under governments that often think nothing of unleashing open violence on them to stay in power.

It is, at best, helping some black folk here in the West who might genuinely feel better believing white people have what they have while black people lack what they lack because of colonialism.

The root cause of Africa’s problems today is not colonialism or Queen Elizabeth — it is the way it is being ruled. And until that changes, the status quo will remain the same, no matter how many times we yell “colonialism”.

But then a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire at repeated abuse from the police, and the Arab Spring began. Ferjani and his family knew they had to return. Four months later, they finally did.

“It was completely and utterly amazing to me,” he remembers. “Tunisia had changed. What first struck me was something that might seem odd: there were garbage strikes everywhere. People were refusing to pick up the garbage because they were not being paid enough. That, to me, was symptomatic of a new day.”

Almost 12 years later, these words seem almost forlorn. If the yearning for Arab democracy began in Tunisia, it looks like it might finally have ended there, too, when last week the Tunisian President Kais Saied held a referendum that effectively cancelled democracy in the country.

Saied — more commonly known as Kais — has been President since October 2019. He is, in a mordant irony, a retired law professor who initially campaigned on a platform to allow citizens to recall elected officials, while claiming that many of the country’s problems came from widespread disregard of the country’s “many constitutional laws”.

But just under three years later, on 25 July, in a referendum he simply ordered (he’s been ruling by decree since July 2021), voters granted him full executive control of the country, supreme command of the army and the ability to appoint a government without the consent of parliament. Fewer than a third of voters turned out, but of those who did, 94.6% voted for a series of expanded powers that also weaken the judiciary and remove checks on the powers of the presidency. All in all, it’s what we might legitimately call a democratic coup.

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When Ferjani returned to Tunisia, his father Said was one of those given the job of mediating the peaceful move to elections in 2011, or as Ferjani puts it, “negotiating the country’s way into democracy”. In another irony, sinister this time, the first people Said had to deal with were the same who had been involved in his torture in 1987. “It was necessary: he needed to help create a sense that there would be laws protecting the transition — that it wouldn’t just be a free for all,” Ferjani tells me. “And to that extent, I think my father did something that he should be proud of, because the situation didn’t escalate into street killings or acts of vengeance or anything like that, which was what so many people feared would happen.”

If that was a high point, it didn’t last for long. The new government soon found it hard to provide for the enlarged expectations of its citizenry. People began to feel they weren’t being represented. The new 2014 constitution — the explicit goal of which was to “build the state, for freedom from tyranny, responding to its free will, and to achieve the objectives of the revolution for freedom and dignity” — was not properly implemented.

Alongside these failures of governance was an explosion of disinformation in the media and online, particularly on Facebook. A favoured target was Nabil Karoui, a media mogul and candidate in the 2019 presidential elections, who was accused of hiring a Mossad agent to lobby for him in DC, which led to widespread accusations that he was an Israeli plant.

Into this chaos walked Kais — “an unremarkable teacher at university,” according to Ferjani — who was also a longstanding conservative who believed homosexuality was a conspiracy wrought by foreign powers. But he had one advantage. He was, quite simply, someone who could appeal to everybody. He spoke the language of nationalism to the Arab nationalists; of Islamism to the Islamists; and of law and change to the youth. In the end, everyone saw him as someone who was different — the change the country so desperately needed.

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Once in power, Kais began to speak out against anyone who might feasibly check his authority, especially the judiciary. He was always hinting at near-invisible, conspiratorial forces that were undermining the government and the rights of ordinary Tunisians. On 25 July 2021, he dissolved parliament and sacked the Prime Minister in the face of mass protests after years of government paralysis, corruption and a worsening economy. He has ruled by decree ever since.

In February, he dissolved the country’s Supreme Judicial Council, accusing it of bias. The council rejected his decision, saying in a statement that “it would continue carrying out its duties”. The move struck at the heart of Tunisia’s legal system because the council is charged with ensuring the independence of its judiciary. If it wasn’t clear before that Kais had abandoned even the pretence of being a democratic leader, there is no doubt about it now.

“We have seen a ruler undermine every single democratic institution that was built by Tunisian people following their careful development post-revolution,” says Rashad Ali, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Even worse, he explains, “European democracies have stood by, watched, or at times tacitly supported these regressive measures.”

Ferjani agrees. “Right now, it’s up in the air. There’s even been pressure to concede the referendum result because of fears for stability and threats of violence in the streets.” On 28 July, just days after the referendum, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concerns that “Tunisia has experienced an alarming erosion of democratic norms over the past year and reversed many of the Tunisian people’s hard-won gains since 2011.” In response, through a statement on the presidential Facebook page, Kais affirmed “the independence of the national decision and his rejection of any form of interference in national affairs” and declared the “only voice is the voice of the people”.

Ferjani claims that the response to these words from European capitals was “mealy-mouthed”, which has only emboldened Kais. He sees EU powers as partly culpable for recent events in Tunisia. “The EU,” he says, “is part of the reason for the return of autocracy in Tunisia.”

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According to Ali, events in Tunisia now pose a danger to the whole continent. “Safeguarding democracy and democratic values and supporting those fighting for it is in Europe’s interest and recent events in Ukraine have shown the dangers of allowing regressive and authoritarian politics any foothold within or around European frontiers,” he concludes.

There are clear things that the Europeans can do. First, as the Blinken episode revealed, Kais Saeed and his inner circle are sensitive to messaging. Holding them to account in terms of their failure to meet democratic standards, not normalising claims that what is unfolding is democratic, is key. EU powers must therefore accept that the parliamentary elections coming this December will not be fair, rather than bolster the absurd government claims that they will be a democratic step which aids Kais enormously.

Second, they must ring-fence aid and tie it to enhanced scrutiny of Kais’s inner circle and Tunisia’s tender process. At present there is no real way of checking that the money earmarked for helping Tunisians, and ensuring the economy doesn’t collapse, is going to the right place. The finances of Kais and his inner circle need to be investigated and the results properly communicated, so that policy makers in donor states are aware of where the money is actually going. Not least because Kais and his inner circle are always blaming outsiders for the country’s financial problems.

And finally, they should be unequivocally supportive of the Tunisian voices opposing Kais. In the end, Ferjani’s message is simple: “If Europe wants help Tunisia, it needs to admit publicly that it is no longer a democracy.”

It’s common in European capitals to lament the curdling of the Arab Spring into winter; less common is to hear the same lament for multiple failings of EU governments. Most of what happened during those revolutions across the Middle East was and is obviously beyond their control. But the case of Tunisia shows that when you are content only to mouth the platitudes of democracy, you not only fail to support it but end up enabling its opposite: autocracy. In the end, while the diplomats in Brussels and Berlin sleep and dine in comfort, it is the people on the ground who suffer, as they always do.

Mbeki, it must be said immediately, has his own form. During his 1999-2008 form, he disbanded the country’s highly effective anti-corruption special task team, The Scorpions, when it was getting close to the criminal activities of some senior ANC members (including the National Police Commissioner). He introduced a state-sanctioned system of race-based extortion of wealth and opportunity under the guise of black empowerment, ushered in a new era of political cronyism, and gave rise to a new and truly avaricious economic elite, a multi-tentacled screen of parasites through which little national wealth percolates to the masses.

In The Mbeki Legacy, I labelled Mbeki a de-moderniser, for the simple reason that through ideological misdirection, he severely weakened the country’s institutional capacity, something the entirely malignant former president Jacob Zuma later took full advantage of to create his gangster state. Yet it would be unwise to ignore this attack from a cantankerous 80-year-old ex-president on the basis that a pot should not call a kettle black. It comes at a time of acute fragility in the life of the presidency, ruling party and nation — and has found wide resonance across racial lines. It is the stuff on which history sometimes hinges.

President Ramaphosa, once hailed as the modernising saviour of the country after the depredations of his predecessor, has not turned the country away from its trajectory towards a failed state. Institutional collapse is obvious in many state and para-state institutions and physical infrastructure is dire. Those citizens who can afford to have turned to private suppliers of health care, security and education. Going off-grid is now a staple of dinner conversation. Recognising the danger of a collapse of the national energy grid, Ramaphosa has belatedly sought support from private energy producers, primarily renewables.

In short, for many years now the country has already been undergoing an Arab Spring of its own as people take charge of their own communities: sometimes orderly, often chaotically and occasionally violently. The feuding ANC and its bankrupt state apparatus have lost real influence in the lives of ordinary citizens: so much so that an organisation called Afriforum, initially an Afrikaner civil rights group but now enjoying wide support across all race groups because of its feisty legal defence of wronged citizens, has stated its intention to make communities “state-proof”, ending their reliance on state-provided services.

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All of this is a direct consequence of Ramaphosa’s refusal to reverse the core drivers of collapse and the enablers of corruption: race-based economic empowerment policies, inappropriate state appointments, expensive social welfare programmes, land seizures and a culture of impunity at all levels of state and elected office.

Perhaps more terminally, Ramaphosa’s integrity itself is now at stake. A bizarre incident, mischievously exposed by Zuma’s former head of State Security, himself accused of corruption, has emerged about hundreds of thousands of dollar bills (perhaps millions) being stolen from the President’s bush lodge two years ago. The theft, confirmed by Ramaphosa, was apparently not recorded by the police and the villains were pursued secretly by state intelligence agencies and bounty hunters in a bid to recover the loot.

Ramaphosa has thus far refused to give his version of this Netflix-type drama: typically, he hides behind a ponderous police inquiry to avoid having to personally deal with the criminals in his party. For years there has been little doubt about the President’s inability to control his cabinet, parliamentary caucus, party and country. But now not even his holiday home?

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Last weekend, he finally lost control of the ANC KwaZulu Region, the largest bloc in his party and the strongest supporter of the ousted KwaZulu-based Jacob Zuma. The new grouping is largely pro-Zuma and headed by Siboniso Duma, a young and energetic man, who voted for Ramaphosa in the 2017 party elections but now, perhaps exasperated, has turned to the rebel and indeed insurrectionist faction grouped around Zuma.

None of this was entirely surprising. The Zulu traditionalists who make up a large part of the provincial ANC constituency have taken badly the usurpation of their man, Zuma, three years ago. The majority believe Ramaphosa is manipulating the legal system to persecute his opponents within the party. The province itself has been buffeted by a violent but failed insurrection in July last year, devastating 60-year floods, rampant politico-criminal gangs a la Sicily or Colombia, best-of-breed state corruption and high unemployment following the pandemic.

In the face of this growing crisis, President Ramaphosa, now widely and cruelly dubbed Cyril The Silent, has done virtually nothing more than offer trite homilies, anodyne solutions and occasional bunches of money. The people gathered at the ANC Conference, then, represented both the architects and the victims of their own misfortune. Either way, they have had enough of Ramaphosa.

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Wenzeni uZuma (What has Zuma done?), the delegates to the regional conference in Durban sang when Ramaphosa arrived, a rather surprising question given the complex and wide range of criminal proceedings now underway against the 80-year-old Zuma. The conference also moved that the party’s “Step Aside” rule, requiring elected officials charged in criminal court to step down, should itself step aside. That something so glaringly right and necessary should be contested is a measure of how far the provincial party has drifted from modern tradition and how much they distrust Ramaphosa.

But the loss of KwaZulu Natal support will not necessarily end Ramaphosa’s bid for a second term as ANC Leader at the elective conference in December this year. He seems to have the other regions pretty much on side despite, perhaps because of, KwaZulu Natal’s bolshy stand. But the tumult, this further example of Cyril The Silent’s inability to control his party, certainly affects the ANC’s chance of retaining power in the 2024 general elections.

The consensus view is that the ANC will not win a majority, opening the way for a novel coalition-based form of government. The optimists foresee the prospect of a resurgent modernising coalition, perhaps including reformist elements of the ANC, the sort that Big Business had hoped Ramaphosa would deliver when they massively invested in his campaign for ANC leader in 2017 but did not get. The numbers from the municipal elections this year in which the ANC lost heavily, support this possibility.

The pessimists foresee things being pretty much the same after 2024: the ANC in alliance with like-minded groups, just more and different fingers in the till, a continuation of South Africa’s shambling march to irrelevance. The incorrigible simply do not believe the ANC would vacate office if voted out.

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With all this looming, Mbeki’s reference to the Arab Spring is intriguing. Then, Arab despots were thrown out by a popular democratic uprising. Despite the limitless optimism of Western liberalism, most of the countries subsequently relapsed into either civil war or a re-engineered authoritarianism. All South Africans can do is pray that in 2024 they get the first part without the latter.

Ultimately, it may not matter much who governs South Africa. The existential threat faced by the country is the terrifying loss of skills, much of it driven out by the ANC’s affirmative action policies. Collapsed state training and educational institutions cannot introduce black candidates at sufficient a rate. There is the rub.

Yet South Africans are by and large a patient people. Even their rage tends to be expressed through activist forums, marches and legal channels. The prospects of a general insurrection, an Arab Spring, are thus limited. After all, the nation had that chance in July last year when KwaZulu Natal and parts of Gauteng burnt. It remained quiescent.

But without a competent state the nation will devolve into communal zones. The rich will live well. The poor will endure. The gaps will grow. This cantonising of the country is already happening and it is still largely around apartheid-era geographical divisions. The threat is therefore not popular uprising but decay: social, economic, political and cultural, just like the old days.