Africa: the wind of change stirs again

By Richard North - September 1, 2023

Africa instability should concern the West, the Telegraph intones in yesterday’s editorial, telling us that “a series of coups” cannot be dismissed as the usual political ructions in countries prone to disorder. They have, says the paper, “serious consequences”.

It takes the Financial Times, though, to put a number on these coups. This week’s military takeover in Gabon, it says, marks the eighth putsch in central and west Africa since 2020. The overthrow of Ali Bongo follows July’s ousting of Mohamed Bazoum in Niger, France’s strategic ally in the Sahel. Before that there were coups in Chad, Guinea and two each in Mali and Burkina Faso.

That the Telegraph is so lacking in detail is perhaps a reflection of its general lack of interest in African affairs. This it shares with much of the rest of the British media, which, after the outbreak of war in Sudan, led me to question the way the foreign news was handled, and why coverage was so poor.

In a separate piece, I also noted that – in the general way of things – Africa had become, in news terms, the “invisible continent”.

In that piece, I was writing particularly in the context of Nigeria, the affairs of which are of some importance to us as the country is, currently, a major source of immigration to the UK, driven to a great extent by the economic and political instability in what should be a very wealthy country.

More recently, there has been talk of Nigeria joining the BRICS grouping and, while it was not part of the first enlargement round, there is an active debate in the African press about whether it should join in the next round.

Very much from the school of “as others see us”, some of the commentary is far from complimentary about the West. Aderemi Salako, a Nigerian economist and banker, observes that, by 1 October 2023, Nigeria’s relationship with the West will be 63 years old. The country, he says, should review that relationship, its benefits and losses, to see if it is worth continuing.

“For me, Nigeria has little or nothing to show for the 63 years of hobnobbing with the Western powers. I think it is time to realise that nothing good will come out it in the next 63 years because the West is only concerned about their interests in that relationship”, Salako says.

He attributes the success of the “Asian Tigers” to their non-aligned status, challenging the status quo by creating new world economic order with the BRIC bloc. Most of them rejected IMF and World Bank loans and thus avoided being subject to their “baby-sitting orders”.

“Look at the BRICS bloc”, Salako goes on to say. “They are all doing well despite the campaign against them by the West. Russia is ready for them, China is tougher and more powerful now, India has surprised them with her technological and economic feats, Brazil is the headache of the US and South Africa is leading in Africa”.

Thus, he concludes, “Nigeria should join the bloc, but not necessarily cutting its ties with the West, just rethinking and adjusting it to make room for the necessary change that will impact her economic development and security”, Salako said.

This view gains support from Samuel Onikoyi, a Nigerian academic in Brussels. Although he recognises that joining BRICS will pitch Nigeria against the West, he thinks that the alignment with the West has not helped the country. Rather it made Nigeria dependent on their aids and loans.

“I live in Europe”, he says, “and I now understand how they see us here. Many still see Africa as their colonies and still dictate for them because the aids still come from them. Joining new blocs like BRICS will help Nigeria to break away from that cage”.

Venturing on the very territory addressed in yesterday’s Telegraph and Financial times, he points to what is happening in Niger, Mali and Chad. They are challenging France and are doing so because of BRICS power, he asserts. They are not members but are somehow backed by the bloc. “That cannot happen before, France would have crushed them in a day, but the challenge has been sustained this time”, he adds.

Try as you might, though, you will struggle to see any discussion of Nigeria’s issues in the British press – or the Western media generally. It seems that the BBC last addressed the issue of whether Nigeria should join BRICS in 2013, in an embarrassingly superficial report.

One apparent exception to this might be the US news magazine Time, which in early August published a long piece written by two Denver academics, headed: “Why Many Nigeriens Want Russia in and the West Out”.

From the spelling, though, one realises that the authors are writing about the denizens of Niger, the Sahel regions which had just mounted a coup. But the sentiments are remarkably similar,

The sight of Nigeriens waving pro-Putin protest signs and Russian flags, we are told, has left many in the West feeling uneasy. Particularly, these images provide a sharp contrast for a Western public that has frequently been told that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a “pariah around the world”.

In recent years, the Denver academics assert, we have witnessed a “new scramble for Africa,” with major powers like Russia and China as well as growing regional powers such as the United Arab Emirates making substantial diplomatic and economic forays into the continent.

These powers, the narrative goes, are displacing the influence of traditional colonial powers like Britain and France. For example, in largely francophone West Africa, France was once the dominant foreign power in nine of the region’s 16 countries as of 1980 compared with only three today,

However, the thesis is advanced that Russia’s presence in Africa is hardly new. Ghana, Guinea, and Mali are cases in point, where the Soviet Union, led by Russia, is remembered as a potent anti-colonial force seeking to free Africans from European and American (and capitalist) oppression.

Last year, it was not Niger where protestors were waving Russian flags, but Burkina Faso, where there had also been a coup. If the US and European leaders are keen to avoid another repeat of this pattern, the academics warn, they will need to change tack.

The Denver academic team forecasts that a business-as-usual mindset will lead to an African continent that is far more closely aligned with Russia and its “no limits friendship” with China than to the West. Unless a course correction is made, the US and Europe are poised to fall further and further behind in terms of aid, trade, arms transfers, and diplomatic engagement – key sources of international influence.

Writing at the same time, before the death of Prigozhin, CNN News cites Remi Adekoya, an associate lecturer in politics at York University.

“When people were talking about potential rivals of Western influence in Africa”, Adekoya says, “it was always China. Now in the past couple years, essentially since the war with Ukraine, Russia has intensified its efforts, and all of a sudden Russia is now back almost as a geopolitical player on the African continent, and Western intelligence services are worried”.

Much of the effort has centred on the Wagner group, and the situation may now be changing. But, before his death, Prigozhin was blaming the coup in Niger on the legacy of colonialism – a cry which continues to have resonance in the region.

Yet, the Telegraph argues that much of the turmoil has been triggered by “the rolling consequences of the Covid lockdowns in the West, which disrupted global supply chains and by some estimates drove millions of Africans into poverty”.

In the longer term, the paper says, this instability could rebound on the West, warning that parts of Africa threaten to become havens for terrorists (as if they were not already). Moreover, it adds, if governments cannot create the conditions for the prosperity that their populations expect, the current migration crisis may be just a foretaste of events to come.

Migration is certainly an issue, as we are already seeing with Nigeria, and EU member states are seeing to a greater extent from a wider range of nations. But this is not even the half of it, with even the Financial Times failing to join the dots.

The best the Telegraph can offer is a shallow piece asserting that “Macron’s bungling has helped push swathes of Africa into Putin’s arms” – as if this was a phenomenon which only affected former French colonies.

It was on 3 February 1960 that the UK’s then prime minister, Harold Macmillan delivered his famous speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town, declaring of Africa, that: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent”.

That same wind is blowing again – over the whole continent – with little sign of it abating. Some aver that the end result will be the establishment of a new order, part of a new global order – one in which the West plays a vastly diminished role.

Whether that is fanciful or not remains to be seen, but there can be no doubt that Africa is stirring, and the West is scarcely listening.