The Real Author of African Poverty Across generations and across borders, African governments have demonstrated a remarkable talent for dissipating public wealth, a talent that might inspire admiration were it not responsible for so much human suffering(...). Before European partition, people moved across this continent with a freedom that the artificial precision of colonial cartography was specifically designed to destroy. The borders that today separate Ghana from Togo, Nigeria from Niger, South Africa from Zimbabwe were not drawn by the people who lived on either side of them. They were drawn in Berlin in 1884 by men who sorted human communities, languages, ethnic groups and centuries of shared civilisation into administrative units according to the logic of European imperial competition and not the logic of African human geography. Postcolonial politics transformed these imposed borders into the primary unit of belonging, and African governments have enforced them against their own continental siblings with a thoroughness the colonisers who drew them would have found entirely satisfying. The Ewe, Dagomba and Akan, divided between Ghana, Togo, Benin and Côte d’Ivoire by lines drawn in Europe by men who could not have named their villages. The Hausa and the Fulani, split between Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger. The Wolof, parcelled between Senegal and Gambia. The Tswana divided between Botswana and South Africa. The Swazi between Eswatini and South Africa. The Ndebele between Zimbabwe and South Africa. The Lozi between Zambia and Botswana. The Chewa between Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. The Maasai split between Kenya and Tanzania. The Somali fragmented across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti, a dispossession so complete that it contributed directly to a century of conflict that the international community has consistently misread as tribal pathology rather than colonial cartography. These communities did not become South African or Botswanan, Nigerian or Nigerien, Kenyan or Tanzanian because their histories pointed in that direction. They became so because partition required it, and because postcolonial governments, having inherited the colonial state’s territorial logic, chose to reproduce it rather than interrogate it. Communities that predate the borders defining them were made foreigners in landscapes their ancestors had shaped for centuries. And the governments presiding over that dispossession have had the audacity, at every xenophobic crisis, to invoke the language of African brotherhood. We did not create these borders. But we have used them to dispossess, expel and scapegoat each other with a consistency that serves the interests of every corrupt government on this continent and the interests of no ordinary African people anywhere. The Moral of a History Nobody Wants to Own No African government raising its voice against the xenophobic violence in South Africa today has clean hands. Ghana expelled half a million people while its own governance failures went unexamined. Nigeria expelled two million while its oil revenues were being systematically looted. Zambia, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Gabon: every corner of this continent has, at some moment of economic or political stress produced by the failures of its own political class, reached for the same instrument. The foreign national as the answer to a question whose real answer would require the powerful to account for themselves. This is the function that xenophobia serves in the political landscape of African governance, and it is a function that will continue to be served as long as African populations can be induced to direct their frustration downward toward the most vulnerable people among them rather than upward toward the class that has consistently failed them(...). Read full piece: medium.com/p/6cdb2e7570f1?po…

Let me tell you how it happened. Nigeria’s ginger export hit zero from N26 billion within 3 years. The official story blames fungal blight. But here is what actually happened. When Nigerian farmers lost their indigenous seed supply, grant-aided interventions arrived with replacement seeds. An associate professor at Lagos Business School flagged publicly that some of those interventions involved GMO organisms that weakened indigenous crops and compromised soil health. That is not a conspiracy theory because it is a documented academic concern. Now that Nigeria spoke got destroyed by the GMO seedlings….what is not the result? Nigeria was forced to import ginger from China to fill domestic demand. Chinese ginger has none of the pungency, oleoresin content, or quality that made Nigerian ginger a global premium product. And the ginger now sitting in Nigerian markets tastes like wood because it essentially is wood. The two indigenous varieties that built Nigeria’s global ginger reputation, the Tafin Giwa and Yatsun Biri, had decades of soil relationship and quality built into them. Once the soil was degraded and those seed varieties were displaced, the product that returned was a pale imitation. Nigeria did not just lose a market. It lost a seed. And without a National Ginger Seed Bank, which nobody has built, it may never fully get it back.

Trump vient de bombarder Nigéria 🇳🇬, pour les crimes des chrétiens. Les États-Unis ont attaqué : le Salvador (1980), la Libye (1981), le Sinaï (1982), le Liban (1982-1983), l’Égypte (1983), la Grenade (1983), le Honduras (1983), le Tchad (1983), le golfe Persique (1984)…