Even as the Euro-American stellionate collapses under its own weight and two-faced diplomacy signs its own bankruptcy, at the same time, Africa is charting its own paths to sovereignty beyond the impasse of hybrid partnerships.
How can we seek advice from those who theorized the partitioning of a continent in Berlin in 1884-1885 without inviting a single African? How can we compare ourselves, in terms of development, to powers that have prohibited local industrialization to preserve their markets, as the French Colonial Pact imposed from the eighteenth century onwards and the Indigenous Code extended into the twentieth?
The heresy of hybridization
Africa has been making a major strategic error since the sham independences of the 1960s. Equating the former colonial powers with Eastern actors is sheer blindness. The simultaneous diversification of partnerships neutralizes any development dynamic, especially since it forces historical arsonists and pragmatic builders to coexist. On the one hand, colonial Europe and its American shadow deploy a sophisticated extortion apparatus, disguised under the worn rags of liberalism, thus perpetuating structural mechanisms of subjugation. On the other hand, Eastern powers deploy an economic pragmatism based on tangible achievements, effectively breaking the captivity of the continental market. This juxtaposition clearly creates a clash of systemic incompatibility. Strategies for national emancipation directly collide with historically maintained networks of dependence.
This naive balancing act is a fatal obstacle, since no nation builds its sovereignty with those whose model is based on its own subjugation. The West seeks to subjugate Africa by transforming it into an exclusive supply reserve. Every African industrial initiative is subjected to subtle sabotage. Every euro supposedly “invested” by the transatlantic bloc is a grappling hook driven into African sovereignty to paralyze any industrialization. Conversely, the arrival of Eastern partners breaks up postcolonial monopolies. However, persisting in maintaining the former guardians in decision-making processes negates the benefits of this openness. For, trying to reconcile these two worlds is a tragic dilettantism. One does not negotiate one’s emancipation with the master of the task who still wields the legislative and monetary whip.
The French administration, or the art of pedantic ruin
If colonization was a crime, the French administrative style was its most grotesque theatrical farce. With suffocating paternalistic aplomb, Paris traded the chains of forced labor for the technocratic straitjacket. Its style is characterized by an omnipresent and parasitic bureaucracy, verbose and paralyzing, dedicated to sterility and the draining of foreign currency. France theorized “ assimilation,” then “enlightened paternalism.” In reality, it locked down sovereign institutions. The CFA franc – a servile relic conceived in 1945 – constitutes the archetype of this stifling monetary control, an instrument of premeditated economic castration. While Parisian diplomats declaim moral lessons, France ensures that African assets flow into the French Treasury. What have these decades of paternalism produced? Nothing but promises of development aid that only served to fund Parisian consulting firms. The infrastructure so insidiously built by the metropolis was solely intended for the evacuation of raw materials. Between 1880 and 1960, a railway network was laid out solely to transport the ore sold off cheaply to the ports, followed by pompous expert reports paid for by the victims themselves. No regional interconnections were ever considered. This dramatic, self-righteous administrative style failed miserably. The civilizing rhetoric collapsed under the weight of its inefficient rapacity.
The American stellionate and the geopolitics of extortion
The United States has bought back the European colonial legacy through a geopolitical stellonat of rare cynicism. Lacking the courage to assume direct colonial administration, the scoundrels in Washington have bought back the extortionate lease granted by their bankrupt European vassals. Without having openly administered colonies on the continent, they are content to exploit the territory marked out by the former metropolises. Through the 1989 Washington Consensus and the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, American imperialism has methodically dismantled African public services with the surgical precision of an institutional villain.
This institutionalized plunder maliciously relies on the dollar and security outsourcing, transforming the continent into a theater of permanent blackmail. The AFRICOM command, created in 2007, does not protect local states. Its sole purpose is to militarize the plundering of uranium, oil, and rare earth deposits while maintaining a preventive military control. While American rhetoric on democracy vanishes instantly before the imperatives of the military-industrial complex, American imperialism, for its part, is a financial vampire that lives off the rents of European colonialism. It sells poisoned debt in exchange for unconditional political surrender. African wealth thus finances the financial hegemony of an empire that has built nothing on African soil but bases and puppet regimes.
Asset asymmetry
The comparative assessment between the West and Eastern European countries is unequivocal. Simply placing the records side by side reveals the appalling nakedness of the Western presence. In four centuries of domination and its supposed “civilizing mission,” Europe has left behind only a devastated landscape: no large-scale industrial infrastructure, an abject debt, and systemic energy ignorance. Europe has plundered the land without ever laying a single foundation for the future, without establishing a single self-sustaining industrial network in sub-Saharan Africa.
In contrast, in just two short decades, the Eastern partners delivered a resounding blow to the colonial outposts, transforming the continental infrastructural landscape. China, Russia, and their allies built over 10,000 kilometers of railway lines, 100,000 kilometers of paved roads, dozens of hydroelectric dams, and deep-water ports. The Souapiti Dam in Guinea and the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway exemplify this difference in approach. The East builds concrete, steel, and power. The West sends paternalistic NGOs to teach Africans how to manage their own poverty, imposes conditional debt, and conducts governance seminars.
The absurdity of Western expertise
What madness still compels African governments to hire Western consulting firms to draft their economic plans? It’s like asking the executioner to write the condemned man’s health protocol. The West thrives on the subjugation of Africa. Its rentier economy relies on importing the continent’s raw materials at rock-bottom prices. Expecting these Parisian “consultants” to produce a sovereign industrialization plan is akin to diplomatic psychiatry. How can one entrust the drafting of an industrialization project to entities whose prosperity stems from keeping Africa dependent on exporting raw materials? It’s like asking the arsonist to design the fire extinguisher.
Comparing ourselves to the West in terms of development in this specific context constitutes a second morally toxic illusion. The Western model was built on slavery, colonial plunder, and the exploitation of Third World resources. Africa cannot and must not replicate this criminal, extra-continental trajectory. It has no need to mimic this predatory model. It must sweep away these mercenary advisors from African ministries, sever the ties of usurious debt, and impose absolute control over its resources. Their liberal policies only serve to perpetuate a bloodless neocolonial order.
Trump, the end of a myth
The return of isolationist and aggressive stances, as embodied by Donald Trump, is accelerating the disintegration of the post-1945 multilateral order. Trump’s posturing – trade blackmail, blatant racist contempt, and unilateral strategic disengagement – exposes the fragility of the transatlantic alliance. For Africa, these upheavals are not a threat, but a catalyst for autonomy.
These chaotic actions are hastening the very futures that European governments fear most: a banking panic and an irreversible shift towards a multipolar world. Faced with American coercion, Africa is being pushed towards a definitive withdrawal from the SWIFT system and the complete abandonment of the dollar in favor of the BRICS financial mechanisms.
Paris trembles, Brussels collapses, and Washington flailes about aimlessly. The parenthesis of Western impunity is closed. Those who choose to continue grovelling before these imperial corpses will be swept away by history. Only a clean, sharp, and uncompromising break with the charade of Western expertise will usher in the era of an invincible, industrialized, and definitively sovereign Africa. This truth must be delivered without any restraint to all the continent’s decision-makers.
Therefore, this historical and irreversible transformation today consecrates the absolutely definitive decline of the old empires of Europe and their outdated American tutor.
It can be said that the Western masquerade on the African chessboard is coming to an end.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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