"Many countries that gained independence after most African nations are doing far better today. Why?"
The answer lies partly in the term 'neocolonization.' Neocolonization refers to the subtle influence and continued interference by Western or European powers aimed at sustaining their centuries-long extraction from the continent. In this piece, I will focus on Africa, specifically Nigeria. For a nation emerging from colonization to truly enjoy the fruits of sovereignty, it must fight two battles: one against local elites and another against foreign interference by those intent on exploitation. While my previous articles have addressed many of Nigeria’s internal failings, this piece will focus on the external forces at play.
If you do not fight with blood and tears against your oppressors in an actual war, you will most likely remain under their rule. So, regardless of the agreements you signed post-independence, if your institutions (the practiced form of government) are not strong enough, they will return to continue extracting value from you and your people until you can never recover.
Most of those non-African countries that are blossoming now resisted foreign interference in the forms of government they established. They didn't have coups that destabilized their countries and weren't in bed with former and new colonizers for an extended period. Singapore, headed by Lee Kuan Yew, was an authoritarian state; they needed to maintain control to prevent anyone from being influenced by foreign governments. Coups are not tolerated in the West or in Europe, yet, when it comes to Africa, they treat them as if they are expected. This is mostly so they could say, "See, we should have never left; you can't govern yourselves." Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote a piece essentially saying this. He has always been pro-colonialism; he once recited a disgusting poem while on a visit to a former colonial state. The ambassador had to warn him several times to stop.
Coups on the African continent are often supported by foreign governments. Typically, an uneducated military officer appears, claims the previous government was corrupt, declares himself in charge, and promises to bring order to the chaos. What we get instead is far more chaos and a complete destruction of the rule of law. Nigeria had six successful coup attempts post-independence. Each one brought massive corruption - from Buhari's missing NGN2.5 billion PTF funds that Saraki exposed in an interview with Vera Ifudu, to Babangida's massive looting of the treasury, to Abacha's own that we are still trying to recover from various foreign countries where he stashed it. As mentioned earlier, the idea of a coup is met with great resistance in Western countries - consider the attempted January 6th, 2021 Capitol attack. At least 1,500 persons involved were charged by the Justice Department, which is why it is surprising to see President Reagan addressing Babangida, a coup plotter and military dictator, as "President" in his letters! Western countries will always act to promote their own interests, even at the expense of other nations. In his letters, Reagan casually mentions a transition to democracy and other supposed economic benefits their partnership would bring. Why? Because they put him there so they could impose their disastrous Structural Adjustment Program or Reform.
Maryam Babangida, the wife of the so-called President, reportedly had a single bank account containing £72 million in 1993. This was just one account. This is how they built generational wealth, supported by the silence—or complicity—of the West. The same West that imposed economic policies (Structural Adjustment Programs) through institutions like the IMF and World Bank, further crippling Nigeria. These policies devalued the naira, dismantled subsidies, and privatized national assets. Sovereign nations should never take policy advice from others, especially from those who have historically exploited them. But Babangida accepted these policies hook, line, and sinker, setting the stage for the naira's endless free fall. By 1986, the naira had been devalued from near parity with the dollar to about 4 naira per dollar, and when he finally left, the naira was at 17 to a dollar—the sharpest devaluation Nigeria had ever seen. A 2,000% appreciation of the usd against the naira using standard depreciation method and slightly above 90% depreciation. They essentially unzipped their pants and took a piss on the currency.
Let us not forget the brutality of these regimes. Babangida annulled the 1993 presidential election, which was widely regarded as free and fair. This election was supposed to usher in a democratic Nigeria. Instead, it was crushed, and the hope of millions was dashed. Dissent during these regimes was met with torture, imprisonment, or death. Reagan, who extolled the virtues of freedom at home, could never imagine such repression in the United States.
Every war and coup the United States has backed has strictly been about extracting as much value as possible from those countries while destabilizing them.U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham demonstrated this clearly when speaking about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war on Sean Hannity's Show on Fox News:
"This war's about money. The richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine, two to seven trillion dollars worth. It's in our interest to make sure Russia doesn't take over the place."
Whether he's citing accurate statistics is a topic for another day; the main point is that they are never there to preach the gospel of democracy and freedom - they're there to solidify and expand their global power.
Non-Profit and Foreign Interference
Over the years, non-profits have begun to spring up; one prominent example is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation are reshaping the aid landscape. These organizations often operate independently of traditional foreign policy goals and focus on issues such as health and education, particularly in Africa. Their approach is sometimes more flexible and experimental but can also lack accountability compared to governmental or multilateral donors. The foundation has provided funding for Think Tank Groups (lobbying groups) to advocate for various initiatives. This behavior would never be tolerated in America. A foreign non-profit actively funding and overseeing policy implementation is a recipe for disaster. When non-profits provide funding for your organization, you must complete their milestones/targets, which makes it particularly shocking to see that they have funded the jamboree called Nigerian Governors' Forum.
NESG, a think tank, is heavily funded by Gates (U.S.); it has received $7 million and additional funding from MacArthur, while NASSBER (a partnership between the Senate, NESG, and private stakeholders) is funded by the UK/DFID. They operated discretely at first, pushing for various policy implementations before becoming an organization with a secretariat.
Multilateral debt and aid intensified when Buhari showed up. What made things clearer was that they were actively proposing policy implementations for the private sector(e.g increasing ministries, something Nigerian government cannot dream of doing to them) and funding the corrupt NGGF(governor's forum) since 2012 with $14,414,781 while claiming that we had a corruption problem. Nothing that was given to them translated to any meaningful impact on the lives of Nigerians. The thing about foreign NGO’s is that unlike Grant giving in the Crypto space, Nothing is open. Milestones, who approved what, when and comments are not available for the public they claim to be helping.
You don't reward bad behavior with more money, they don't run their personal companies that way.
Prior to 2015, the country was doing great economically. It was far better than whatever we have now. Crude oil production was 2.2 million barrels, we had Negotiated our way out of the Paris club debt thanks to Ngozi Nkonjo iweala, the new Director General of the WTO that the U.S strongly opposed.
I also noticed they funded news outlets that criticized the government. The Omidyar Network categorizes this as funding for information systems and dissent, which would definitely cause instability and conflict escalation because they are funding both sides.
Yemi Kale, the former Director of National Bureau of Statistics, mentioned the importance of not collecting external funding from certain organizations.
“If the World bank or the UNDP are bringing their money, you are going to do exactly what they want… I had to turn down a lot of funding because i was being compelled to do a lot of things that didn’t help policy makers”
Festus Keyamo, a man with no morals that defended the authoritarian style of Buhari, the former Military dictator turned President during the ENDSARS Protest in Nigeria, mentioned how the Nigerian Government was being pressured to accept a terrible deal for a National Airline that wasn’t exactly owned by Nigeria.
“Where will all that profit go? It’s not Nigeria….. I said it in another forum, where i saw the facilitator of that forum, one American man, he had been crying, crying from one TV station to another, from one Blog to another saying that we lost foreign direct investment. We did not lose any foreign direct investment”
There’s always a westerner lurking around.
This was a rare win from Keyamo and this only came out because the subtlety of Neocolonialism in that deal was completely absent, and the Nigerian government(the new colonizers) were not benefiting in any way from the arrangement.
Neocolonialism pushes for a form of Capitalism far more capital efficient, brutal and desperate in it’s implementation. Corporate interests come first, always. The citizens be damned as long as their profits keep rising—stay poor, brokies.
Strong Nations are not built on cash transfer economic experiments
The cost of labor in Nigeria has remained stagnant in many regions despite spiraling inflation, creating an exploitative environment that foreign entities and multilateral organizations capitalize on through currency devaluation. Each devaluation triggers a cascading effect where segments of the middle class readjust downward - the lower middle class descends into the lower class, while the lower class falls into extreme poverty.
The World Bank then presents cash transfers as a solution to pull people out of extreme poverty. However, these transfers are not grants but loans that accrue interest, forcing the government to raise taxes as it lacks alternative revenue generation methods. When taxes increase, businesses reassess and raise prices accordingly. This creates a perverse cycle where cash transfers serve to redefine poverty rather than alleviate it - temporarily lifting people just above new, lower poverty thresholds while the fundamental economic conditions continue to deteriorate. The brief duration of these transfers, typically lasting only three months in Nigeria's case, ensures that recipients quickly fall back below even these reduced standards of living. All while the nation accumulates more debt that will further impoverish future generations.
The 2022 IMF Article IV consultation with Nigeria, coupled with the World Bank's $800 million aid package, presents a masterclass in modern economic colonization. Through careful analysis of policy prescriptions, implementation mechanisms, and outcomes, you can see a sophisticated system of control that operates through financial instruments rather than direct colonial administration.
The IMF's recommendations came packaged with foreknowledge of their devastating impacts. They explicitly acknowledged their prescribed policies would increase poverty, trigger inflation, and potentially cause social unrest. Yet, rather than reconsidering these prescriptions, they offered loans to 'mitigate' the very crises they were engineering.
In Nigeria, the IMF’s policy prescriptions—removing fuel subsidies, enforcing exchange rate "flexibility," restructuring the Central Bank, and dismantling protective economic policies—set the country up for failure. These are not mere suggestions; they are demands embedded in the conditionality of loans and aid.
The image above is from the 2022 consultation document, IMF continues to justify the removal of subsidy even in the 2024 consultation by saying “that these subsidies are costly and poorly targeted, with higher income groups benefiting more than the vulnerable.” This is completely false and not backed by any data. You raised prices up and caused people to become wretched then offered relief package in the name of cash transfer program(which is a subsidy that we are now paying interest on) that completely failed. By 2025, the president will be back for more loans and you will welcome him with more recommendations that ensure the people of Nigeria continuously keep begging for money you will provide at disturbing interest rates.
A staggering 83% of the funds from the program are funneled to urban areas, despite rural communities bearing the brunt of poverty. With over 106 million rural poor compared to 27 million urban poor, this allocation is a stark reversal of actual need. Aid becomes a tool for control rather than relief, fostering political loyalty and patronage networks while leaving the rural poor to languish. Barriers to accessing this aid are equally telling. Despite lofty targets of reaching 15 million households, only 3 million—just 20%—actually benefit. The requirements for a National Identification Number (NIN) and digital payment systems effectively exclude the majority of the impoverished, particularly in rural areas where infrastructure is virtually nonexistent.
As of early December 2024, despite repeated government assurances about the widespread distribution of palliatives like Nigeria is some sort of war torn country thanks to their disastrous policies, temporary teachers continue to face severe economic hardship. Their situation exemplifies a broader pattern of exclusion from government aid programs - registered for benefits they never receive while earning salaries far below the national minimum wage. While Minister Edun claims 25 million Nigerians(1 in every 8 Nigerian) have benefited from cash transfers, the reality for these 9,300 educators reveals significant gaps between official statements and ground-level implementation. Their plight takes on added urgency as fuel subsidy removal continues to drive up living costs, with many teachers now struggling to afford basic necessities despite their critical role in educating the next generation of Nigerian military personnel.
If the government truly believes that cash transfer programs can lift millions of Nigerians out of poverty, it should have redirected the funds saved from the removal of fuel subsidies toward these initiatives instead of resorting to borrowing. Historically, fuel and electricity subsidies have had a meaningful impact on the poorest segments of society by making essential goods and services affordable nationwide. Unlike many other subsidies, these directly reach individuals at their doorstep, easing the financial burden on households.
In contrast, cash transfer programs, particularly those without stringent oversight and clear regulatory frameworks, risk exacerbating inequality rather than alleviating it. Even in the United States—where the IMF is headquartered—COVID-19 relief funds often did not benefit those most in need. Instead, these measures frequently ended up concentrating wealth in the hands of the affluent, ultimately widening the inequality gap.
The misuse of such funds has been well documented. For instance, high-profile recipients of COVID relief in the U.S. include celebrities who used taxpayer money for lavish personal expenses. Lil Wayne reportedly received $8.9 million in taxpayer funds, spending it on private jets ($1.3 million), designer clothes ($460,000), luxury hotels, and even an $88,000 New Year’s Eve event he did not attend. Similarly, Chris Brown is said to have used COVID relief funds to finance an $80,000 birthday party with “atmosphere models” and $29,000 in bottle service.
The IMF labels its own projects as "highly risky" and recommends suspension of field activities after their staff was killed by suspected bandits1. But their "risk analysis" conveniently ignores:
The glaring urban-rural disparity in aid distribution.
An 80% exclusion rate for targeted beneficiaries.
Barriers like documentation and digital requirements.
Perhaps most telling is what's missing from the IMF's risk assessments in their prescribed programs - The inevitable political capture and corruption vulnerabilities baked into the system. When they announced the cash transfer program for the market women, they called it the Iyaloja Market women fund, the iyaloja is the relative of Tinubu, Nigeria’s president. This selective blindness suggests corruption isn't a bug but a feature, allowing both international control and domestic political capture while maintaining plausible deniability. This same thing was done with the COVID-19 Palliative where politicians locked up grains till election period and distributed it with their faces on the bags.
Post-COVID, the mask is finally off. There is no more pretending that neocolonialism does not exist or that it is some fringe concept or conspiracy theory. This was Senator Lindsey(He loves rubbing it in everyone’s face) saying “The Rome Statute doesn't apply to Israel, the United States, France, Germany, or Great Britain because it wasn't conceived to come after us”
Rules, laws and policies they manufacture never apply to them, but to smaller nations they want to exert dominance over.
The Western accountability problem
When you bring forth this talk before a western audience, they see this as some form of assault or attack on them. While average Americans are not to be blamed, the ruling class backed by corporate and private interests are the ones behind this disaster called foreign policy. They believe they are justified in their government’s actions mainly because they are not on the receiving end of the corporate-owned American hammer, which is always eager to 'fix' issues that were never truly broken, as described to an ill-informed populace. With time, the truth which some have started to see will no longer be able to be suppressed and people will hopefully have to answer for the dastardly actions committed in the name of protecting U.S interests or Foreign Policy.
Some might feel this topic is too complicated to grasp, but it is not. The lack of empathy toward global issues—caused by a push for the American dream that prioritizes individuals over the collective—is why it appears that way.
I want to be financially stable, but not at the expense of other impoverished people’s financial status.
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