As powers battle, where’s Africa, the sh-hole?
Everybody who has followed Donald Trump’s rhetoric ever since he expressed interest in ruling America - I mean, long before his inauguration on January 20, 2017 as the 45th president and his return on January 20, 2025 as the 47th President - could always predict a certain inevitability about a Third World War.
Unfortunately, unlike the 50 long years after World War 2, Trump has China, Russia, North Korea whose leaders are as war hungry as he.
They never sleep, their fingers always on the trigger, each ready to prove the destructive power of their arsenal.
I pray that day never comes.
When it does, none of us presently alive will be there to report the outcome.
We would all be wiped out in a minute.
My prediction is that when this Hot War is triggered, the composition of the alliances that have existed since the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 will have shifted.
There will be no NATO because Trump would have succeeded in dismantling it.
The United States of America will be in a military alliance with Russia and North Korea. Oceania and Africa will not fight.
Can’t tell where China will stand, now that Canada has intensified trade with Beijing, much to the chagrin of Trump.
With ceaseless threats of tariffs, no one was surprised to find Canadian Premier Mark Carney visiting Beijing this week “to forge a new Canada-China partnership”, followed by a visit by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to Beijing “for talks he hopes will deepen their economic relationship.”
The visit is described as “signalling a breakthrough in ties after years of distrust and acrimony.
Europe has never been angrier with America. Licking its wounds after the Turnberry customs deal trade reached between the EU and the US. Anti-US sentiment is waxing stronger, Europe feels humiliated.
Pollsters found that while 70 per cent of Europeans polled want to remain in the EU, “Euroscepticism” is rising, especially in France, where 30 per cent back exiting the bloc.
In Germany, the number of those favouring withdrawal has reached 22 per cent.
In an online survey with 5,302 respondents in France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Poland between August 30 and September 4, nearly half of respondents (44 per cent) described Trump as an “enemy of Europe.”
Overall, 77 per cent of Europeans expressed dissatisfaction with how the EU has managed its relationship with Washington.
For the first time since the end of World War 2, a British Prime Minister openly rebuked a sitting American President for his “insulting and frankly appalling” – in reference to Trump’s remarks about British troops in Afghanistan.
In Davos at the World Economic Forum last week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, without mentioning Trump’s name, condemned “economic coercion by great powers on smaller countries”.
In Africa, Kenyan Law Professor PLO Lumumba described the goings on as “a verbal civil war” between NATO partners.
For sure, when a 3rd World War does break, there will be no African colonial soldiers fighting other people’s battles in Burma, Middle East, India, Myanmar; Africa will not be counting one million dead out of the two million people dragged by their colonial masters into the World War 2; there will be no Congo fool enough to open up a wide range of metallic and non-metallic ores, minerals which played an indispensable, actually decisive role, in the Allied victory in 1945.
Dear African reading this article, did you listen to the Canadian Premier in Davos? Didn’t he remind us of the “Africa Must Unite”, “We unite or perish” cry of Kwame Nkrumah?
The Canadian Premier’s speech threw me back into time, when, in the first few years of the 1960s, Nkrumah, Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesian president Sukarno and United Arab Republic president Gamal Abdel Nasser articulated their vision for a Non-Aligned Movement, in the "struggle against imperialism and all forms of foreign aggression, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics."
This year, 2026, with NATO crumbling, with America breathing down the necks of weaker countries, threatening tariffs on every country that annoys him, isn’t this the best time in the life of Africa to begin to accelerate towards intra-Africa trade in a united federation?
Sir Sam Esson Jonah had this in mind when he declared this week that “Africa must act selfishly…”
If Trump can look at his European allies, eyeball to eyeball, and spit in their face, what will be Africa to him?
This is the man who, in 2018, described Africa and Haiti as a “shit hole”.
After the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), headquartered in Accra, the next natural step forward is an African Federation.
Will the federation metamorphose into a military alliance, in fulfilment of Nkrumah’s dream?
I don’t know for much longer the former colonial powers will allow Burkinabe Head of State, Ibrahim Traore, to continue to tread his path of development in economic freedom but, so far, he has spat on the Bretton Woods institutions and survived 19 coups.
This young man is succeeding – alone.
What makes Africa think that acting together, we will fail?
