That means fuck ECOWAS as a tool of the oppressors also. Critical support for every coup in Africa, and for the rights of Africans to demand the French and US militaries leave their country.
Critical Readings:
- Neocolonialism by Kwame Nkrumah.
- How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney.
- Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa by T.D. Harper-Shipman.
Recommended readings:
- Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawaii Statehood by Dean Itsugi Saranillio.
- Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl.
I’m not talking about them performing a coup. Although I don’t like coups, they’re property of nobody but themselves, and eventually democracy will return.
But French troops doing bad stuff, or doing neither bad nor good stuff (that’s doing nothing at all), that doesn’t mean they should be replaced by another foreign nation troops, being either private or not. If we agree that African nations are sovereign enough to decide their own future, they’re also sovereign enough to defend themselves, or to ask for help to neighbouring countries in exchange of nothing. But in the countries we’re talking about, they asked for help to another potential colonial nation in exchange of natural resources, that could be manufactured in place, thus creating employment, wealth and other benefits.
That’s a perspective I can understand. I was pretty disappointed to see Wagner given a mine in Burkina Faso, for sure.
I think, though, that unfortunately, it is an inevitable consequence of western reaction to the coups and their history of suppressing African sovereignty.
Fighting off jihadis(which is what Wagner is being contracted to do in Burkina Faso) is a global problem, and can’t be tackled by any one nation, especially not a poor, landlocked one like Burkina Faso. However, the wests actions in fighting Islamic extremism in Africa has been so heavily fraught with abuse of Africans among other issues that I don’t think we’ll ever see the return of trust between West Africa and the West, and so, when paired with the global Wests refusal to work with the coup governments, and tendency to issue sanctions which even further damage civilian populations while leaving governmental structures nearly untouched (and not to mention that sanctions have been definitively proven to increase support for a regime), the newly free African nations have no choice but to look to alternative economic blocs for support, and in our current world, that alternative block is essentially just Russia.