Oh Africa

Quagmire on the Continent

I had an interesting dialogue with a local acquaintance who posted this on his Facebook page last week:

Right now many countries in Africa are standing up to the west, saying “you can no longer plunder our country. We want to own and manage our own resources.” The US, yes under a democratic president, is planning on trying to keep this from happening. They’re already gearing up for action—they’ll either directly war with them, or they’ll use covert operations by arming some violent group, to stop these African countries from claiming their sovereignty. This is why so many of us don’t believe there is much of a difference between democrats and republicans. Democrats will ignore these stories, remain ignorant of the facts, because they’d have to grapple with the truth that we are the bully of the world. They’d have to admit that the democrats aren’t the good guys, they’re just the “good cop” that follows the “bad cop”. I seriously beg you to make ALL of our politicians accountable for this deplorable behavior. How much longer will the world put up with out shit? And how accountable are YOU for conveniently being ignorant of what the rest of the world knows as fact. That this nation exploits the world and that liberals want so much to believe they’re the good guys, when they’re just the “good cop”? If you really care about the truth, and care about justice and equality and all the things you say you care about, you must realize when your candidates of choice are being evil. Don’t pretend that in the past you’d choose the side of justice when today you’re choosing ignorance. When you ask yourself “how can these Trumpies be so ignorant of facts?” know that this is how some of us see you. How can YOU be so ignorant of history and current affairs that you can believe democrats are the good guys? They’re not. They’re just as beholden to the oligarchy as republicans. They’re just part of the culture war manipulation that splits our country, so conveniently, in half. I don’t claim to know what to do about all this, only that sticking my head in the sand isn’t an option.

I didn’t want to jump into a public debate, especially regarding the political lie of the "Both Sides" spider hole, so I messaged him with this:

I agree the U.S. has always been imperialistic no matter the party. As there are 54 countries in Africa I’m interested in specifics regarding where and to whom the U.S. dollars are going. My knowledge of the continent is pretty limited, and I’ve not traveled there, but it seems that many conflicts are coming from Muslims who demand strict compliance to the Sharia law, exerting violence against other Muslims who aren’t as strict in their beliefs (infidels), and Christians (we could do with less of these…). I have read that funding for Boko Haram comes primarily from extortions, robberies and looting, cattle and livestock rustling, Islamic donations, local enterprises, kidnappings for ransom, arms smuggling, and bank robberies.

Unfortunately, the entire continent has been exploited for centuries by outsiders. But there are so many conflicts in places like Rwanda and the Congo that are internal. I have no idea if these horrors are funded by U.S., France, Russia…who knows? Human Rights Watch reports recent events that are just horrific and mostly outside the scope of most of us living our privileged lives in so-called first world countries. (I do believe our country is a mess, BTW)

I appreciate your perspective and it’s of interest to me. If you aren’t hip to Ted Rall, his writings take both parties to task. When I write, I make an attempt to cite sources and see around the edges the best I can.

I wasn’t sure if I’d get a response as I’m not normally in his sphere of friends. But I did:

The sharia law narrative is bullshit. It’s used to round up the democrats and it’s incredibly racist as it only applies to a few areas. Recently Niger said NO to an oil line and the US is building up troops to counter them. We want their Uranium. Remember that the CIA actively puts out disinformation campaigns about all our “enemies”. What we know about the world is so limited by the smoke screen of lies the government puts out. We live in 1984. Our media often lies (yes all of the outlets even our beloved NPR). And we’ve been gaslit.

Yeah, OK, but I pushed him a bit:

Maybe so but please cite sources. This info can’t be just coming out of the sky into your head. Share the info wealth.

I thought that might’ve been the end of that…not so:

I read so much. Books, papers, and news. But the African news is easy to find. And it’s better if you watch news not from the US. I can’t do everyone’s homework for them. I barely have the time to do my own. I don’t mean that to sound rude, I just am working and don’t have the time to dig up all that stuff. I do my reading on the wee hours when I wake up. I will also say that, counterintuitively, TikTok is great if you follow academics and world leaders. They put out information and it doesn’t get filtered by US media. You can hear direct voices there. But you have to spend some time on there first to inform the algorithms and the beginning is annoying prank videos and dumb shit. But there are so many great voices in there.

At that point all I felt I could do was respond with a ‘thumbs up’ emoji. Heh.

Amy Goodman posted on Democracy Now an interview by Juan González and Stephanie Savell, the co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs about the recent coup in Niger. It appears that one of the coup’s leaders, Brigadier General Moussa Salaou Barmou, was trained by the U.S., making the Nigerien coup the 11th in West Africa since 2008 to involve U.S.-trained military officers. Savell went on to say that So, what happens when the U.S. and other Western powers pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the security assistance sector — this is basically money for the military and the gendarmes, the police, that also fight the insurgency — is that the military is really boosted at the expense of other government institutions. A recent UNDP study showed that countries that have oversized involvement of the military in political life and a very politicized military and a long history of military leadership in government, which Niger and a lot of these countries do, they’re far more likely to have an ongoing pattern of military coups. So there’s a lot of factors at stake that make a coup more likely, but certainly the U.S. pouring all of this money and this kind of outsize reliance on the military as a tool for aid to these countries is a contributing factor.

There was also a piece in the Guardian a year ago that takes to task Shell Oil for many of the problems with pollution and profits syphoned out of the country. I don’t know if our military is there to support huge corporate conglomerates but it seems likely. Since 1956 – when Shell first discovered oil in the Niger Delta – the industry has pumped the region for profits and propped up a rapidly growing Nigerian economy. By 2000, oil accounted for 40% of the country’s GDP. In the last decade, there have been thousands of oil spills in the Niger Delta. Shell is particularly culpable; the company has publicly reported 1,010 oil leaks since 2011, amounting to 17.5m litres of oil spilled into the region. The pollution has cost many residents their livelihoods, sparking local uprisings and attacks on oil sites that are often violently quelled by Nigerian security forces. The oil conglomerates at the heart of the devastation largely managed to evade accountability for decades. They leave behind a legacy of turning the Niger Delta into one of the most polluted places on the planet.

As far as Democrats and Republicans being the same, I’ve argued consistently in my writings that observable reality shows us that the Republican Party, particularly in the last half-dozen years, has become the party of lunatics and liars. It doesn’t mean that all Democrats are saints but only one party hosts the crazies. Just last night Heather Cox Richardson posted of the lies of the orangeman’s campaign promises: “[w]e’re going to get infrastructure built quickly, inexpensively, relatively speaking and the permitting process will go very, very quickly…. No longer will we allow the infrastructure of our magnificent country to crumble and decay, while protecting the environment we will build gleaming new roads, bridges, railways, waterways, tunnels and highways. We will rebuild our country with American workers, American iron, American aluminum, American steel. We will create millions of new jobs and make millions of American dreams come true. Our infrastructure will again be the best in the world…and we will restore the pride in our communities, our nation…. We want products made in the country…. You have to bring this work back to this country…. I want manufacturing to be back into [sic] the United States so that workers can benefit.” Cox wrote that Instead, six years later, it is President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who have delivered that revival. They reordered the nation’s economic policies away from supply-side economics back toward the economic policies that guided the nation from 1933 to 1981, and now are taking a victory lap for actually rebuilding infrastructure, creating manufacturing jobs, and bringing supply chains home by investing in ordinary Americans.

Anyway, I digress a bit as the goings-on in Africa are too complex to gloss over, and it’s a hole I don’t want to jump into. If you are interested, here are a few links to start that I found last weekend.

Sharia Law myths

Mounting Islamist Armed Group Killings

Rwanda’s role in DRC war crimes to save UK’s migrant deal

More on the coup in Niger

And now…