Back then, after all, the United Kingdom was a fairly prosperous, settled nation, and would soon be on the winning side of the Cold War. As for Nigeria? A dictatorship with some crude oil. Now, of course, everything has changed. As Elizabeth’s son welcomes Bola Tinubu today, it’s Nigeria, not Britain, that holds the best cards. Indeed the UK’s long-term prospects feel rather uncertain — precisely why courting Nigeria, and countries like it, is so important to its future.

For much of the post-Cold War period, Britain and its Western allies could sort the world into two broad zones: stable and unstable. In the stable countries, money was safe, governments were predictable and the future discernible enough for long-term bets. In the unstable places, governance was erratic, investment risky, and violence never far off. This mental mapping had real consequences, shaping where capital, attention and diplomatic respect all flowed.

Nigeria long sat on the wrong side of that divide. With Marxist-Leninism just about still a going concern, the anti-communist Babangida was an important friend to have, likely explaining the 1989 state visit. At the same time, though, Nigeria’s economy was taken far less seriously. Through the Eighties and Nineties, after all, the country lurched through coups, aborted transitions and IMF austerity schemes, while its politicians acquired a reputation for predation and volatility. As late as 2016, David Cameron was filmed describing Nigeria as a “fantastically corrupt” country.

Over recent years, of course, our neat ideas of stability and corruption have started to collapse. A major war has raged on European soil for four years now, with the Baltics and Poland fearing for their very sovereignty. The Gulf, long an oasis of affluent calm, suddenly looks much less secure. America, hitherto the chief guarantor of Western stability, is now a country whose Capitol can be stormed by an angry mob, and whose president can levy tariffs or launch foreign adventures overnight. As for Britain, one-in-three Britons now believe civil war could occur here in the next decade.

This does not mean that Britain or America are “just like” Nigeria. But it does mean that disorder, or at least the serious prospect of it, is no longer something that simply happens over there. That in turn changes the relative position of countries like Nigeria. Their problems hardly vanish, but they no longer look like uniquely disqualifying flaws in an otherwise ordered world. Now, Britain’s Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle says that “the UK and Nigeria share a belief in the power of enterprise, innovation and education” — with a new strategic partnership between the two countries promising a flourishing of finance and fintech jobs.

To be clear, Nigeria still remains a difficult, exasperating country, whose promise has long been squandered by its own elites. Tinubu himself is hardly the personification of clean government, with allegations of corruption trailing him throughout his career. In this, Nigeria’s president shares much with the country’s broad political class. For instance, a court in London is currently hearing bribery charges against Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former petroleum minister, who supposedly spent £2 million at Harrods gotten from industry figures keen on government contracts.

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Meanwhile, though wealthier now than they were in 1989, most Nigerians remain poor, even as the state struggles to deal with a plethora of jihadist terrorists and criminal gangs. Kidnapping for ransom is so rife that it’s become a multimillion dollar industry of its own. The country’s size and natural resources have often made outsiders assume its eventual success is somehow inevitable. It never was — and isn’t now.

Yet it’s also true that Tinubu’s government, in power since 2023, has done something previous Nigerian administrations long avoided: embarking on reforms that acknowledged the country’s economic model was bust. Oil rents, import dependence, the sheer hustle of its citizens — none of these make an advanced economy. The broad direction of Tinubu’s changes, including lifting fuel subsidies and generally liberalizing the economy, have won praise from the IMF and World Bank. This matters not because their approval is all that matters, but because many Nigerians agree that the old system was unsustainable. The year before they were removed, the fuel subsidies consumed a quarter of Nigeria’s budget.

What many Nigerians rightly complain about is the brutal way in which Tinubu’s reforms were implemented. For instance, the sudden removal of fuel subsidies has drastically raised costs, with some basic staples now costing two or three times what they used to. That’s a big deal in a country where poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food. In other words, then, measures that look rational on an IMF spreadsheet can feel like punishment to regular citizens, especially if they’re already distrustful of their rulers. With 8-in-10 Nigerians expressing little to no trust in Tinubu’s government, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

Yet if Tinubu’s reforms succeed, Nigeria’s strategic position offers reasons to cheer. Aside from the country’s transition to democracy, the country’s GDP has also jumped eightfold since 1989, while its population has tripled to around 230 million, roughly 60% of whom are under 25. This makes Nigeria one of the youngest nations in the world, in sharp contrast to the aging societies of Britain and the wider West. That youthfulness offers both opportunities and risks in a land where some estimates put youth unemployment at around 50%. Fail to create enough jobs and the government is in trouble.

Nonetheless, Nigeria’s youthfulness remains a strategic fact. And besides, it has other strengths Britain can only dream of. Alongside the crude oil reserves it’s long been famous for — especially helpful given events in the Middle East — Nigeria also enjoys significant deposits of lithium, beryllium, zinc and other metals critical to technology supply chains. Britain needs access to critical minerals to power its renewable, high-tech and defense industries, even as it actively seeks to “full-proof” its supply chain over the years ahead.

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Britain has more basic reasons to cultivate economic ties with Africa’s most populous nation too. Since 2008, its GDP per capita growth has fallen to a sluggish 0.46% per year, hardly enough to cover the galloping rise in living costs. The country’s long-run economic story is hardly cheering either. In that context, a fast-growing market of over 200 million people looks less like a realpolitik ally — and more like an opportunity. Britain and Nigeria already do about £8 billion of trade a year, and British ministers have spent the last two years pushing new agreements in legal services, finance, education and energy. And why not? This is precisely the kind of fast-growing, English-speaking market Britain cannot afford to dismiss.

The feeling is mutual. For decades, and despite being such a vast oil producer, Nigeria imported much of the refined petroleum it consumed: its own state-run refineries barely functioned. Now, though, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria and Africa’s richest man, has built one of the world’s largest oil refineries in Lagos, spearheading investments in steel as part of a broader industrialization push. These are the most serious recent attempts to drag Nigeria up the value chain, and Britain can prod things along with targeted investment.

All the while, Nigerian immigration to the UK, reckoned to be around 300,000 over the last five years, means that the country’s cultural influence has blossomed too. Afrobeats stars now fill arenas and top music charts the world over, while the Nigerian diaspora is helping shape British society from KSI to Bukayo Saka — to Kemi Badenoch.

Altogether, then, it’s clear that Britain needs meaningful relationships in the rising global south, relationships based on more than postcolonial guilt, paternalism or nostalgia. In our increasingly dangerous geopolitical age, friendship is not ornamental. Rather, it shapes supply chains, diplomatic leverage and investment decisions. Britain can no longer simply announce its importance everywhere. It has to work out where history, language, and diaspora networks give it a real foothold, then build out from there.

Nigeria is one of those places. And while some on the fringes of British politics — both the radical Right and Left — are uncomfortable with that fact, Nigerians themselves seem far more relaxed. As a 2020 Ipsos survey of young Nigerians found, Britain’s people, government and institutions are the most trusted among foreign nations. Tinubu’s office has described Nigeria and Britain as sharing a “special bond”, while many wealthy Nigerians send their children to British universities, maintain homes here, and consider London a serious place to do business. Nigerians who live or spend most of their time in Nigeria itself have little time for the performative anti-colonial waxing some British-Nigerians indulge in here.

That, in turn, should prompt a change in British sensibility. A mature relationship with Nigeria cannot be conducted as though London still dispenses order while Nigeria merely receives it. The old imperial habit — part condescension, part nostalgia — is now not only unattractive but also impractical. If Nigerians are prepared to engage Britain as an equal, Britain will have to learn to reciprocate.

Whitehall is already learning these lessons in its dealings with countries like India, where capital, demography and strategic leverage increasingly matter more than inherited assumptions of rank. That is likely to become one of the century’s governing patterns: former imperial subjects, or once dismissed peripheries, gaining influence as Western states lose their monopoly on confidence. The sensible response is neither sentimentality nor resentment, but realism.

The takeover in Venezuela brings under US control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Under Trump, Washington saw Venezuelan energy bolstering hostile countries, especially oil-import-dependent China. For now, the Venezuela coup deprives the Middle Kingdom of upwards of 800,000 daily barrels, while taking away a valuable customer as well as an intelligence asset for the Russians and their Islamist allies.

This naked neo-imperialism could prove beneficial, not least for the hard-pressed Venezuelans. American supermajors like Chevron are also natural beneficiaries, with huge resources being placed to modernize the country’s shambolic energy industry and thus to restore its once proud relative prosperity.

The larger point is that successful economies either have fossil fuels or need easy access to them. Gas reserves, and the revenues they generate, grant places the Persian Gulf monarchies far more influence than populous Arab states like Egypt, which lack oil and gas. Russia has been able to underwrite its invasion of eastern Ukraine and withstand severe Western sanctions thanks to its hydrocarbon reserves. China and India look to secure imports of the same wherever they can, especially at bargain prices. Core European powers like Britain, France, and Germany, meanwhile, could punch far above their weight if they would but tap their own plentiful supplies of shale gas, but their governments refuse to do so owing to irrational green phobias about hydraulic fracturing.

Beyond Europe, however, the recognition of fossil fuels as a key element of geopolitics puts a stopper on decades of green campaigns designed to instill fear of emissions and promote wishful thinking about how to reduce them. In academia and the media, dissenters from the narrative, even academics who accepted anthropogenic climate change, are hounded if they fail to submit to the green papacy’s encyclicals.

But the green doomerism has failed to meet the reality test. We now know that predictions of climate crises, some of which date back to the 1970s, have turned out to be exaggerated or even plain wrong. For example, both ABC and NBC boldly predicted in 2008 that New York would be under water by 2015; last time I visited my familial home town, however, it seemed very much on dry land. Extinction rates, often blamed on climate change, have slowed, with even the polar bears continuing to thrive in somewhat warmed temperatures.

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A 2021 paper by Carnegie Mellon University researchers David Rode and Paul Fishbeck tracked apocalyptic predictions dating from the first Earth Day in 1970. Across half a century, 61% of the forecasts of planetary collapse have come and gone (and the planet is still here, chugging along). Even the committed climate sirens at Nature journal have been forced to retract a study that claimed the world economy would contract due to climate change.

The collapse of the worst-case scenario goes hand-in-hand with the continued strength of fossil fuels, which remain the dominant source of energy; even coal is ascendant. Despite billions spent by Western taxpayers to subsidize renewables, global hydrocarbon use is 30 times bigger than wind and solar combined, as the energy analyst Robert Bryce notes; in the last decade, the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours per year of energy consumption from wind and solar, but 13,000 from fossil fuels.     

Fossil-fuel energy remains “the blood” that wins economic battles, including the drive to build data centers for artificial intelligence. For a while, China was catching all the upside from the fossil-fuel resurgence by going on a coal-plant building spree (this, even as the People’s Republic invested heavily in green technologies). Meanwhile, the West, including the United States under President Joe Biden, hamstrung itself.

Americans and Europeans suffered. Living standards in the de-industrializing West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe, especially, has endured a decade of stagnation. Americans laboring under the joint rule of green capital and green government likewise suffered.

In my adopted home state of California, electricity rates have surged a staggering 80% since 2008, compared with 28% nationwide. Once a major oil producer, the Golden State now suffers the nation’s highest energy prices and is utterly dependent on foreign sources in South America and Saudi Arabia.

High energy prices most hurt those in California’s less temperate, heavily Latino interior. The crisis has driven an erosion of industrial jobs; since 1990, one-third of California’s manufacturing jobs — 1.3 million of them — have disappeared. The disparate class impacts have been confirmed recently in a study by the California Air Resources Board, which projects that these policies will result in significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above this threshold.

If they stick to the climate agenda, the only way places like Europe and California can get to “net zero” by 2050 — a goal China put off for at least another decade — is by squelching future growth. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes that such policies would have  catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West. But China’s leaders won’t sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost.

But America under President Trump is pulling in another, better direction. And even some Democrats are going along in recognition of geopolitical reality. In the United States, Axios recently reported, Democratic lawmakers have all but abandoned use of the Green New Deal, even amid their never-ending denunciations of all things Trump. “Today,” notes longtime Democratic policy expert Will Marshall, “the Green New Deal seems to have fallen to earth, borne down by the inexorable gravity of economic and political reality.” Among Democrats in Congress, mentions of the once-hyped program have fallen to a bare handful, down from more than 1,000 citations in 2020.

Only 6% of Americans rank climate as a top concern, a sliver of those who see inflation as their major problem. As these concerns have faded, even ultra-green California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been begging refiners to stay in the state.   

The prospects for greens are even worse in the developing world. In Africa — the only continent whose population is growing strongly; also now home to five of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies — governments generally recoil from adopting net-zero ideologies. Leaders choose to ignore the scolding of Greta Thunberg and the green nonprofits. Instead, they prioritize bringing electricity to the roughly 600 million in sub-Saharan Africa who do not have it now.  

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Former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, for example, has warned that the climate policies favored by Western nonprofits and aid agencies could precipitate a continent-wide energy crisis. Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, launched a scathing attack on European climate policies in November 2022, declaring it “morally bankrupt” for Europe to use African fossil fuels while denying Africa the same right. Museveni accused Western nations of imposing “one rule for them and another rule for us”, while expecting Africa to sacrifice development for climate goals Europe has failed to meet.

“The climate-industrial complex,” as Bjorn Lonborg has put it, is, well, running out of energy. Even before the return of Trump, many green companies, despite subsidies, were failing, the product of high costs and poor delivery. 

Yet it is far too early to proclaim the permanent demise of the climatistas. They remain deeply entrenched in the universities and the mainstream media and are busy grifting in the massive nonprofit sector. A generation of children who have already been schooled in climate-change science, however exaggerated, may help them resurge. Also, those who have invested in “renewables” will be interested in recouping their losses under Trump.

Rather than ruin the basis of our prosperity and hopes for the developing world, humanity needs to adapt, much as our species has done during previous, and often more dramatic, climactic changes. In the coming years, the world must muddle through reducing emissions through practical steps like adopting natural gas over coal and restoring nuclear power.  Trump’s successors may not fully embrace these realities. But for the immediate future, at least, fossil fuels are back, for better or worse, shaping history much as they have for the past century.  

Trump, it would seem, has detected an opportunity to enthuse his evangelical supporters. But Nigeria’s troubles are about more than Trump, American politics, or simplistic “West versus Africa” narratives. Nigeria is a state that is failing at its most basic duty: protecting its citizens.

Tens of thousands have been killed in recent years by jihadist groups and various militias. In the past year alone, thousands more have died; 3.6 million Nigerians are internally displaced — more than the entire population of Qatar. Another 400,000 have fled the violence to neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Whole villages have been razed, farms and schools abandoned for fear of violence. A kidnapping economy has metastasized into one of the most lucrative industries in the country; in some regions, families now expect to pay ransom as routinely as school fees. The violence is not episodic. It is systemic, grinding and national in scope. Life in vast swathes of the country is lived under constant threat.

Trump has characteristically oversimplified the crisis by framing it solely as Christians besieged by Islamist extremists. Yes, many Christians have been murdered for being Christians, in churches. But the violence is often, if not always, indiscriminate, and Muslims have also been killed in large numbers. Many attacks are driven by resource disputes and opportunistic criminality wrapped in religious rhetoric.

In Nigeria’s northwestern region alone, there are over two dozen major criminal groups whose activities involve violent robberies, the extortion of motorists, kidnappings for ransom, and illegal mining. As the African Center for Strategic Studies has noted: “Even though they sometimes call on God during attacks or while making propaganda videos, these criminal gangs do not discriminate against their targets based on religious affiliation.” For these particular groups, Islamism is more of a useful rallying cry to lure recruits than their core activity, and Muslims are just as likely to suffer violence at their hands. Moreover, considering 46% of Nigerians — 133 million people — live in extreme poverty, scarcity is a defining feature of everyday Nigerian life. This fuels a fierce competition for resources that can sometimes spill into intercommunal violence that is more driven by socioeconomics than identities. And the Nigerian government cannot, and will not, bring an end to the anarchy. Nigeria is not simply living through religious war — it is living through state abandonment.

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In fairness, the Nigerian government faces immense challenges in combating insecurity. With a population of 230 million, four times that of Britain, Nigeria is policed by some 370,000 underfunded, under-equipped officers. For comparison, Britain has 170,000 better equipped officers. Nigeria’s military, meanwhile, is stretched thin, fighting jihadists and various armed militias across the country. Even the most capable government would struggle under these conditions.

Still, acknowledging these challenges does not absolve Nigeria’s rulers of responsibility. There is something revealing about the reflexive response from some Nigerian officials and Western media eager to “correct” Trump by emphasizing that Muslims are also dying. The implication is perverse: that a representative distribution of victims somehow redeems the Nigerian state. That Trump is exaggerating. “Yes, thousands have been killed,” the BBC reports, “but there is no evidence Christians are disproportionately targeted.”

Imagine that logic being applied to Britain: that mass murder is somehow less of a crisis if all faiths are represented in the body count. This is the modern version of the old racist shrug: “Just the usual violence in Africa.” Regrettable but normal, nothing to get all worked up about.

The Nigerian government’s official response to Trump’s threat has been to invoke Nigeria’s “sovereignty.” The problem is not with the principle itself, but with how it is being invoked as a shield not for Nigeria’s people, but for its rulers.

It is an easy tactic: the principle of sovereignty retains a quasi-religious aura despite the sometimes questionable outcomes of its practice for regular people. It brings to mind autonomy, dignity and resistance to foreign domination. That is why corrupt elites enthusiastically exploit its emotional power to divert attention from their negligence. Sovereignty has been used as a license for governments to neglect or, in extreme cases like North Korea, even kill their own citizens: after all, the argument goes, no one outside has the right to question what happens inside our borders. Meanwhile, the ordinary Nigerian buries children, pays ransoms, flees farms, and lives with the terrible knowledge that their government will not come to save them.

The contrast between Nigerian rulers’ rhetoric of sovereignty and their actions would be comic if it were not tragic. They decry Western meddling while sending their children to Western schools, stashing the funds they have looted in Western banks, and jetting off to Western hospitals after a sneeze. Nigeria’s current president Bola Tinubu prefers French hospitals, which he regularly visits, over those he oversees in Nigeria. His predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, favored London hospitals, eventually dying in one of them earlier this year. Nigeria’s rulers don’t trust Nigerian hospitals with their own care because they know they have grossly neglected and underfunded them. Where is their patriotism on this front? Can anyone imagine a French president or British prime minister jetting off to a foreign country anytime they needed medical care? What would that say about the seriousness of French or British “sovereignty” Nigeria’s political rulers, who have usually built fabulous levels of wealth through corrupt practices in politics, speak of reliance and national pride while moving around in heavily-armored convoys that speed past the insecurity endured by the citizens they govern.

In healthy democracies, mass killings trigger reckoning — inquiries, resignations, reform. In Nigeria, they trigger wooden statements of condolence from the government and little more. Nigerians complain that sometimes even these perfunctory presidential condolences take a while coming after mass killings. The political classes accept the violence because it does not touch them. They are secure behind their layers of security. And the consequences of their hypocrisy are visible in polling that would alarm the leaders of any genuine democracy: 83% of Nigerians today say they have little or no trust in President Tinubu’s government; 82% say the same of the legislature while 79% distrust the judiciary.

Nigeria’s institutions have been hollowed out by state capture and patronage. Elections are routinely rigged and manipulated. The system is not corrupt; corruption is the system. A democracy becomes a “shadow state” — to borrow the phrase of the political scientist William Reno — when informal power networks and elite interests override institutions. The corruption directly fuels insecurity: funds designated for counterterrorism efforts are often embezzled by senior military officials, undermining the entire exercise. In such systems, insecurity is not an aberration; it is a constant. And it is treated as a crisis only if it threatens the survival of elites.

So why, among the general indiscriminate violence, are Nigerian Christians so often attacked, with impunity, for being Christians? It is because the country’s rulers calculate that Christians are less likely than Muslims to respond to violence with more violence and large-scale violence. Conventional wisdom in Nigeria has it that the country’s Muslims, especially its more fervent faithful concentrated in the northern regions, are volatile if they perceive any threat to their faith. So, if the situation were reversed, and Christian terrorists were regularly slaughtering Muslims in Mosques, Nigeria’s government would be seriously concerned that a full-scale religious war could erupt. They would move more swiftly to apprehend the Christian attackers to placate Muslims, if only for the self-preservative motive of fearing they might lose control of the situation completely.

Nigeria’s Christians, meanwhile, are seen as less likely to respond with mass violence to attacks on them by jihadists, and so in the brutal arithmetic of Nigeria’s rulers, their killings are more ignorable. They are not seen as representing a threat to elite survival. Life is disturbingly cheap in the eyes of Nigeria’s ruling class — especially when that life belongs to the poor and the powerless. Contrary to their rhetoric, they simply do not place the same premium on human life as Western, and many other governments do. This is often the case in too many other African states.

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Tinubu, Nigeria’s current president, once forfeited $460,000 to US authorities to avoid further investigation into his alleged links to drug trafficking. He once famously told his supporters, “Power is not served à la carte. Fight for it, grab it and run with it.” This is hardly the language of a guardian of noble principles. It is high time the world started distinguishing between the people of Nigeria and a political class that claims to speak for them. This is especially true if that political class often attains its positions of power through manipulated and sometimes openly rigged elections, as Tinubu himself is accused of doing. Elite sovereignty without accountability is but impunity draped in a flag.

None of this means the answer lies in American boots on Nigerian soil. Military interventions in Africa usually produce more damage than solutions. The 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya which led to the overthrow of the government of Muammar Gaddafi and subsequent disintegration of Libya readily comes to mind. Nigerians and Africans generally are rightly allergic to paternalism masquerading as humanitarianism. But the rejection of foreign intervention cannot become the acceptance of perpetual slaughter. That is why it is good that Trump is ramping up pressure on Nigeria’s rulers to tackle insecurity more energetically. He should bring maximum pressure to bear on them in this regard, including personal sanctions. They need to believe that not acting could potentially trigger US actions that would cost them their power and privileges. Their self-preservative instincts are the only plausible pathway towards making them take action to properly fund and equip Nigeria’s security forces, curb the corruption that fuels insecurity and address the socioeconomic deprivation that makes recruitment into violent groups so easy.

Nigerians deserve the same safety as Britons or Americans. If “sovereignty” is to mean anything, it must begin with the right of citizens not to be hunted in their own homes. States do not exist to be sovereign. They exist to provide their citizens an environment that is safe and enabling of their prosperity. Sovereignty is merely supposed to be the best means to achieving those ends.

For too long, cynical leaders in Nigeria have used the language of national pride while behaving as though the state is their personal estate. They invoke the ghost of foreign domination to deflect attention from domestic plunder. Yes, Trump’s comments were self-serving. Yes, they were framed to please an American evangelical constituency. Yes, one can question why he is not considering US intervention to stop the larger-scale slaughter currently ongoing in Sudan, for instance. But to downplay Nigeria’s ongoing crisis because one dislikes the messenger is not going to help the four million Nigerians currently too afraid to return to their homes. Their suffering will not be eased by diplomatic platitudes, nor by misguided military intervention. One need not trust Trump or American foreign policy to recognize that a government not protecting its citizens should not be able to hide behind flags and slogans indefinitely. From this point of view, anyone putting unignorable pressure on the Nigerian government to finally do its job is doing a good thing.

Having inherited a party that has hemorrhaged voters to the Liberal Democrats on the Left, and Reform on the Right, and collapsed among the under-25s, Badenoch’s core challenge is to win them back. Ingeniously, despite facing an utterly unrepresentative electorate of die-hard Tories, she has won the leadership contest without committing herself to a specific program that would further alienate these three groups. She now needs to craft a strategy that attracts them back.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have made this far easier than it ought to be. Their series of missteps continues, not only with Starmer’s active support for the Harris campaign making relations with our crucial ally more difficult than necessary. Closer to home, Labour has presented its opponents with more voter-sensitive gift-horses as the economy nose-dives into stagflation. Advancing the EV-only policy to 2030 from the EU-aligned 2035, and the prospective Trump date of Never, ranks the priorities of young metropolitans over the job losses that will be inflicted on the Northern working class — not to mention or the 1,300 workers just gone from Vauxhall vans. It’s no wonder that an astonishing 31% of Labour voters already rate Starmer “unfavorably”. Having won a huge parliamentary majority on only 32% of the vote, many of his new MPs are sitting on tiny majorities destined for defeat in 2029. But whether the beneficiaries are the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Reform, the SNP, or the Tories, depends heavily on Kemi Badenoch. As Leader of the Opposition, she is in pole position both to grab media attention, and to set out a credible alternative to the managed decline embodied by Labour.

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As an immigrant from Nigeria at its most dysfunctional, Badenoch sees Britain as a haven of order. She has already offered her immigrant’s perspective on the virtues and flaws of British society to good effect. In interviews, when asked about her moral values, she describes herself as “an agnostic who is culturally Christian”. Would any current Labour politician dare to make such a remark? To understand its full significance, I found myself re-reading Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual, a landmark book in political philosophy. It traces the early Christian origins of the ideas and institutions on which our distinctive notion of rights and duties in European and North American societies still rests.

The Nigeria that the young Badenoch left in 1996 lacked common national values, being riven by bitter divisions. Its north was largely an Islamic culture recognizing a duty of submission to authority; its south was predominantly Christian fundamentalist; and around the country there were pockets of deference to pre-colonial kingship. Enabled by this lack of common moral foundations, a corrupt military dictator thrived, rewarding loyalty with commercial privileges.

Badenoch recognized that the Britain of 1996 was far more functional than the society she had left behind and was astonished to find her fellow students here denigrating it. They were taking for granted an inheritance that she realized must have been built by centuries of struggle and could easily be eroded. While such ideas have become deeply unfashionable within the liberal establishment on both sides of the Atlantic, the liberals are in the minority — as Kamala Harris disastrously discovered. Badenoch may have the same skin color as Harris, but her political philosophy and backstory edge closer to that of the Vice-President-Elect J.D. Vance. As a black immigrant, she can craft a credible and ethical Britain First agenda without taints of racism or imperialism.

Badenoch needs to start, though, by getting rid of the greedy stench of the Liz Truss package that still cloaks the party: the tax-cutting for the rich and public-service cutting for everyone else. This was widely recognised as morally repellent, alienating the many Conservative voters who fled to the Liberal Democrats. The worst news for Badenoch, according to YouGov, is that 59% of Liberal Democrat voters view her unfavourably, compared to only 13% favourably. She needs to use some of that hard-won flexibility to apologise for that greed-agenda and decisively renounce it. She must renounce, too, the financier vision of Singapore-on-Thames: such a programme would gift high-earners in the City and Canary Wharf rates of taxation comparable to the low level of Singapore. It’s an image that alienated many Tories. It dismissed the Britains beyond the Thames bubble — and sure enough, it was beyond the Thames that most Tory seats were lost. Many of those lost to the Liberal Democrats live in towns in the southwest; those lost in the Red Wall are on the east and west coasts. Here, there is further bad news for Badenoch: she is seen as Metropolitan — 23% of Londoners are favourable to her compared to only 18% of Northerners. It’s early days, but I have not detected any signs of this yet in her messaging.

With such negative ratings among Liberal Democrat voters, she should start by courting them. Historically, the NHS has been key to this cohort: David Cameron won the Tory leadership in 2007 by boldly stating that he was in politics to support the NHS — even during the ensuing austerity, the NHS’s budget was fully protected. Although Reeves has announced a huge increase in spending for the NHS, this will be a shocking waste of billions if it doesn’t come with reform. Gwyn Bevan’s How did Britain Come to This? sets out the coruscating evidence of how, over decades, the Treasury has repeatedly and grossly mismanaged the health sector. Powers and budgets should be torn from its incompetent maws and localized. But while she can gleefully use Bevan’s evidence to embarrass Starmer, the recent Tory record on health is so bad that I cannot see her outcompeting Ed Davey.

So what else could she do which would appeal to good-hearted Liberal Democrats, but also to the alienated voters of the Red Wall? She can prioritise healing the rift inherent in the two-tier country and the resulting “huge and persistent inequalities” which are such a block on growth. There was a flashpoint in Red Wall areas over the summer which perfectly illustrated the attitude of the Government to our divided country and pinpointed an opportunity for Badenoch: the riots.

What triggered this sudden outpouring of furious dissatisfaction? We can trace it back to Boris Johnson’s bragging incompetence that with Brexit we could “have our cake and eat it”; this ensured that the European Commission would not cooperate with continuing the Dublin Principle, which enabled us to return asylum seekers coming from mainland Europe. This casual disregard for the consequences of increasing immigration was compounded by a Whitehall decision to house these incomers in four-star hotels. Hell bent on value for money, the Treasury minimised the cost by choosing hotels in the poorest provincial towns. This penny-pinching reduced the cost per asylum seeker to the still staggering figure of £41,000.

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These towns, though, were at the heart of the empty Tory promise to “Level Up”. The Treasury hated the programme and had released only £400 million for it — that’s a measly £8 per person in provincial Britain, barely enough to give the High Street a lick of paint. The contrast between this insulting parsimony and largesse to the asylum-seekers housed in the same towns was explosive. Inevitably, the powder-keg of resentment did attract racists, mostly from outside the town. But overall, the Government’s reaction — relying on the criminal justice system to quell the immediate effect of violence, rather than considering a longer-term approach to the root causes of alienation — fuelled the impression that the working class, and those who lived outside London, were considered second-class citizens. Contrast Labour’s reaction with Margaret Thatcher’s after the Toxteth riots of 1981, when she immediately dispatched Michael Heseltine to lead a programme of urban regeneration. Reeves, meanwhile, has dismissed not just the phraseology of Levelling Up, but even the notion that the divergence between London and provincial England matters: “there are poor people in London.” YouGov finds that Starmer is seen as being as metropolitan as Badenoch, but her big advantage is that whereas only 10% of voters have yet to make up their minds about him, 39% remain uncertain about her..

And so, Labour has left a wide-open goal. If Kemi Badenoch does nothing, many of the Red Wall voters who supported Labour in the last election will abstain or defect to Reform. But she already has the advantage, leading the more powerful opposition; Nigel Farage has little chance of ever being in government. She must therefore directly appeal to the disenfranchised and hold out the promise that she will help those left-behind towns and cities to renew themselves.

The Levelling Up program, which as an unpaid advisor I saw from the inside, failed not just for lack of money. It failed, as the NHS is failing, through a lack of innovative vision. So here’s a thought for Badenoch. What provincial Britain needs, and wants, are jobs for those trained with vocational skills. By 2029, working class (CDE) under-25s will be approaching 30. Those in the North and Midlands will be worried about their lack of opportunities. Local governments will be bankrupt. Decent jobs can only come by helping the most innovative provincial SMEs to grow more rapidly. Such firms exist in their hundreds despite the hostile policy environment. But to grow fast, they need venture capital. Britain abounds in this, but two-thirds of it goes to London and its Oxbridge satellites. The other three-quarters of Britain’s population is a venture-capital desert. No wonder there’s no growth: the greater part of our island is a stagnation nation. The migration nation follows Kemi to London.

Back in the early days of those “wasted 14 years” dismissed by Labour, we created two valuable public investment agencies. The British Business Bank (2014) and the National Infrastructure Fund (2015) have the expertise to finance the public infrastructure and private-sector venture capital which will ultimately be the essential driver of growth. Rishi Sunak had no interest in them, and nor has Reeves, but they are a Tory solution to a national problem waiting to be harnessed. Kemi Badenoch could announce that their mandates would be to equalize economic opportunities around the country and commit to devolving decision-taking to them. Thereby, she would have in her holster a credible strategy that the rival opposition parties cannot offer, and that Reeves has opted to ignore. As she and the Prime Minister announced to the Board of BlackRock, her preferred solution to past short-termism is to set up a new unit within the Treasury. One of its tasks will be to craft an “industrial policy”. Yet the Treasury and the rest of Whitehall are so bereft of the necessary skills to formulate one that it can only lead to further embarrassments. To dig itself out of the comedy that HS2 ends at Royal Oak, the Treasury has just committed £6 billion to extend it to Euston: an “industrial policy” only for London.

Badenoch has the gumption to deride the pretensions of Whitehall and the wit to make it amusing. Keir Starmer is, it’s sad to say, the perfect foil for such barbs. By using her expertise in finance for a unifying public purpose, Badenoch would kill three birds with one stone. She would combine an inspiring backstory with an appealingly optimistic agenda to Britain’s youth: Cool Britannia Redux. She would test the moral mettle of those former Tories who switched to the Liberal Democrats repelled by the greed agenda. Equalizing economic opportunities around the nation is something that Ed Davey can neither deride nor deliver. And she can win the provincial working class — the Red Wall voters adrift, already disillusioned by Labour, tempted by Farage, but knowing in their hearts that regardless of his rhetoric, he will never have the power to improve their lives. In the process, she can reset the image of her party vis-à-vis its biggest problem. In 2007, it was that the Tories could not be trusted with the NHS. David Cameron courageously and successfully took that bull by the horns. In 2024, it is that the Tories cater to a finance industry dominated by greedy asset-strippers. Let BlackRock carouse with Labour. By repurposing Britain’s financial renown to heal the divide in our society, Badenoch can turn vice into virtue. Forget stagnation nation and migration nation: we could become innovation nation..

To back up this claim, liberals cite polls which invariably give countries under the US security umbrella disproportionate representation, and which seem to confirm that the rest of the world shares their view. But as anyone who has lived or travelled extensively outside of the West in recent years will tell you, the reality on the ground is much more complex. Trump’s base extends far beyond the United States.

Trump’s allies abroad take many forms, with motivations ranging from an ideological affinity for Right-wing anti-communism to a preference for a limited “America First” policy over the Democrats’ liberal internationalism. When liberals encounter these positions, they tend to label Trump’s foreign admirers as authoritarian. There may be some truth to this: Trump’s populist tough-guy persona is something that people in many parts of the world like, perhaps because it’s familiar. But such linear explanations are also self-serving, and neither entirely accurate nor honest.

The reality is that Trump’s overseas approval can be found in unlikely places. For instance, according to polls from the 2020 election, the country where Trump was most perceived to care about “ordinary people” was Nigeria. In that year, to the incredulity of American reporters, hundreds of Nigerians held a rally for the former president, clad in t-shirts showing his face and waving placards calling for his re-election. At the time, one 23-year-old artist told Reuters that Nigerians appreciated Trump’s “radical” approach to politics. Some liked him so much, in fact, that they weren’t that concerned with the Muslim ban. “If we have a person like Trump… Nigeria will be a better place to stay,” another supporter said. “There will be no need to go outside the country.”

Some attribute Trump’s popularity in Africa to the continent’s Christian minority, and the perception that Trump is the defender of Christians and their interests. He is, for example, a perennial favourite of African preachers and prophets — and none more so than Uebert Angel, a Pentecostal minister from Zimbabwe and an ambassador for the African Union’s Pan-African Parliament. In a recent broadcast, Angel — who has three million Instagram followers and over half a million YouTube subscribers —explored Trump’s “spiritual alignment”. “Donald means the ruler,” Angel explained. And “John, for J, means ‘the voice’”. Angel believes that prayers transmitted by his enormous following saved Trump from that fateful bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Nigerian televangelist Christian Oyakhilome, known as “Pastor Chris”, has also openly backed Trump. As the founder of the megachurch Christ Embassy, which has spread internationally, he alleges that Trump has been targeted for advocating for his flock. “They are angry at Trump for supporting Christians,” Oyakhilome has said. “So the real ones they hate are you who are Christians.”

Elsewhere, some in Africa explicitly support Trump’s dismissive approach to the continent, including his insistence on cutting aid. “For some strange reason, while I despise his divisive rhetoric and certainly don’t think he’s the best choice for President of the United States, I agree with Mr Trump’s position on Africa,” business strategy specialist John-Paul Iwuoha wrote in 2016. “Africa needs to wean itself off the tranquilising milk of foreign aid… and thanks to Mr Trump’s nationalistic ideals, Africa now has a rare opportunity to stand on its own and create a bright and prosperous future for itself.”

This aversion to aid is largely a response to its politicised and transactional nature. On one recent pan-Africanist podcast discussion about Trump and Kamala Harris’s hypothetical Africa policies, the hosts agreed that Harris would step up engagement and aid for Africa, while Trump would likely scale it back. But as they saw it, the Democrats’ supposed generosity with aid is an underhanded tool of manipulation — a means of buying the support of corrupt African leaders and ensuring continued allegiance to the US.

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Further afield, Trump seems to be just as popular in Vietnam, where scooter businesses bear his name and the wall of a Domino’s Pizza restaurant displays a picture of him on The Apprentice. Binh Lee, an entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City, has written that Vietnam’s “love affair” with Trump can be explained in part by his nationalism. In the West, nationalism is often associated with ethnic cleansing and genocide. But in Vietnam, as in much of the so-called Global South, nationalism served as the ideological basis for decolonisation. While many rightly emphasise the sharp distinction between these two contexts, some in Vietnam do not. As Lee explained: “With his slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, Donald Trump… embodied the kind of ideal leader forever ingrained in our collective psyche: the hero who would appear at the darkest moment of his country and lead his people through the struggle to ultimate triumph.” Meanwhile, others link Trump’s appeal to Vietnam’s fast-growing economy, where new would-be entrepreneurs view the former president as the embodiment of capitalist success. Others still attribute Trump’s popularity to his anti-China sentiments, which some in Vietnam share.

In Indonesia, meanwhile, the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, attitudes about Trump are also unexpectedly mixed. While some leaders lambasted him for his bellicose rhetoric, others were more circumspect. One prominent lawmaker dismissed Trump’s Indonesian critics, stressing that the president had only adopted anti-Muslim rhetoric to drum up support among the electorate, while another minister described Trump as a “non-ideological and non-confrontational” leader who would treat Indonesia as a “democratic equal”. In a similar vein, researcher Andrew Matong has noted that Trump’s presidency was conspicuously free of the American flag burnings across the Muslim world that were ubiquitous in the time of George W. Bush. Many of these countries’ citizens may find Trump’s language repugnant and dislike his policies, but for many, these pale in comparison to the wholesale destruction of countries overseen by “respectable” Republicans and Democrats.

Similarly, few foreign countries celebrated Trump’s 2016 victory more than Serbia, where Bill Clinton is still despised as the leader who spearheaded the bombing of then-Yugoslavia in 1999. Trump has appeared on billboards there, and you can buy socks emblazoned with his face on Belgrade’s central streets. More recently, the current Right-wing Serbian government has made little secret of its preference for another Trump presidency. Indeed, it has already signed an agreement with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to develop a complex on the site of the old Yugoslav Army headquarters, which was bombed by Nato in 1999. The planned development will reportedly include a controversial memorial complex “dedicated to all the victims of Nato aggression”.

Yet perhaps the most surprising locus for Trump approval is China. Within hours of the assassination attempt, Chinese vendors had printed t-shirts depicting the image of a bloodied, defiant Trump with the slogans “fight, fight, fight” and “shooting makes me stronger”. One vendor on the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao claimed he had received 2,000 orders within three hours of putting the t-shirts online.

No doubt many of Trump’s Chinese supporters find him appealing because he shares their distaste for platitudinous liberalism. On a more elite level, however, there is some muted hope that another Trump presidency might be “realistic and balanced”. This is an echo of the Seventies’ logic that “only Nixon could go to China” — the implication being that only an anti-communist hawk could oversee US-China rapprochement, because the same move by a centre-left Democrat would have been tarred as “soft on China”.

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In many instances, then, Trump’s foreign support is motivated by his businessman credentials: he is viewed as someone who prefers making deals to launching secular crusades in the name of democracy and human rights. At the negotiating table, we can surmise, such a distinction matters. While liberal internationalism is sustained by faith, deal-making implies a certain crass rationality.

Indeed, this line of thinking was even evident in a recent interview with Mohammed Al-Hindi, a top leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, who was asked whether Biden or Trump would be better for Palestine. (The interview was carried out prior to Biden stepping down as the 2024 nominee.) While noting that “Trump, at the end of the day, just like Biden, would be looking after American interests”, Al-Hindi seemed to suggest that Trump might be slightly preferable. “We kind of miss Trump now, his debates and statements,” he explained. After observing that the current war in Gaza had affected Israel’s standing “in the eyes of the world and the region”, he concluded that “any future president will find those changes on the table and they cannot be disregarded — especially if he is a businessman like Trump”.

Thus, a more complicated picture of US foreign policy emerges from beyond the West. Democrats like to say that the world’s dictators will be happy if Trump comes to power, because he will put an end to Washington’s promotion of “democracy” abroad. But plenty of people who’ve endured such policies do not view their outcomes in the same self-mythologising terms. In fact, many see them as disastrous. The result is something less flattering for both sides of the US political divide: while some of Trump’s overseas defenders like him for what he is, many more like him for what he is not.

Nigerians have responded with a wave of “hardship protests”. Since February, demonstrations have rocked many large cities including Lagos, Ibadan and Kano. In Lagos, police responded with sympathy, handing out biscuits and water to the protesters to prevent them fainting from hunger. After ration sizes in Nigerian prisons were cut, protests broke out in the prison of the central city of Jos at the end of February.

Many have blamed the crisis on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who was elected in controversial circumstances last year. The powerful emir of Kano, Aminu Ado Bayero, said in February that Nigerians faced “economic hardships, hunger and starvation” and called on President Tinubu to take action. Later that month, Tinubu agreed to release 102,000 tonnes of a strategic grain reserve at subsidised prices, but such is the hardship faced by most Nigerians that when this happened there was a stampede at the depot.

On the face of it, President Tinubu’s economic policies are to blame. In May 2023, he removed fuel subsidies, which the World Bank estimated could save the Nigerian government $5 billion a year. It was part of a wider strategy to increase foreign investment. Yet, in spite of the pain this catastrophic strategy has already caused, global investors warned last week that the Central Bank had to “tighten” monetary policy further to attract investment — even after a 4% increase in Nigeria’s interest rate, to 22.75%.

This tightening of the screws will only worsen the crisis. The call from investors runs counter to what financial leaders said last year: that scrapping fuel subsidies was already giving markets “everything they hoped for”. Even the Financial Times reported last week that, in retrospect, “many are questioning the wisdom of abruptly removing the subsidies without a shock-absorbing plan”.

But Tinubu can’t be blamed for everything. When he was elected, Nigeria was already facing an economic crisis. By late 2021, analysts were pointing to a looming debt crisis, with public debt having soared under the previous president Muhammadu Buhari. This followed a decade during which, as Bloomberg reported, long-term loans had more than doubled. In 2022, the last year of Buhari’s government, annual debt repayments stood at $7.5 billion, which exceeded the government’s total revenue by almost $1 billion.

However, it’s worth noting that in 2019, the picture was the reverse. That year, the African Development Bank issued its annual report, which said that “the state of the continent is good. Africa’s general economic performance continues to improve”. This followed a decade of sustained economic growth across Africa, with some claiming at the time that the eradication of poverty by 2030 was possible. As two Dutch economists concluded in 2018, there were “broadened opportunities for sustained economic growth in the longer term”.

What changed between 2019 and 2022? The obvious answer is the Covid pandemic response, which not only interrupted economic growth across Africa, but in the Nigerian case, saw a collapse in the oil price that resulted in a sharp drop in revenues. It also saw a huge increase in the debt burden. In April 2020, the IMF approved a $3.4 billion loan to Nigeria to fund its Covid response — almost half of the government’s annual revenues. The Central Bank of Nigeria drew on this to offer credit facilities to businesses in distress. Now, however, those loans are being called in, and some accuse the government of “conning” Nigerians.

Worse still, at the end of February, the Nigerian Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability network filed a lawsuit against President Tinubu for the government’s failure to account for the disbursements from this huge loan. In a tale that will be grimly familiar to readers in the UK and the US, the effective printing of money that accompanied the Covid response is alleged to have led to diversion or theft of the funds that have never been accounted for.

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This suggests that the real cause of Nigeria’s crisis is what scholars Ruben Andersson and David Keen aptly label “wreckonomics” in their provocative new book of the same name: a label that describes how the setting of a war economic model is used for profiteering by existing institutional interests. For these interest groups, the purpose of the war is not necessarily in winning it, but in extracting profit from the crisis situation — often by extending it for as long as possible.

Such analysis offers a different twist to the concept of the neoliberal “permacrisis”. While these rolling crises are usually spoken of in political terms, wreckonomics shows that it is part of an economic framework. In each crisis framed as a war — whether real wars such as in Ukraine, or the “war on Covid” — existing economic interests have the institutional frameworks to leap in and profit from them. This corporate money printing comes at the cost of state budgets, leading to future indebtedness, which is paid for by those who had no hand in the profits — and who must put up with crumbling state services.

The Nigerian crisis perfectly fits the wreckonomics mode. A “war on Covid” was declared worldwide. This created a massive external shock and led to the printing of money financed with credit from the IMF. Existing interests took advantage of this to profiteer from the debt in Nigeria, as also happened in Senegal, the UK and the US. And none of this had anything to do with the threat posed to the Nigerian population by Covid itself, since, with a median age below 20, this was always low risk compared to a disease like malaria that kills 600,000 people annually across Africa. Indeed, at present, the registered Covid deaths in Nigeria total 3,155.

The consequence was a vast increase in Nigerian government debt which, twinned with collapsing revenues in 2020-1 because of the oil price, reversed the rosy picture described by macroeconomists in 2019. Not only has all this led to the new era of austerity, but it was predicted right from the start by groups such as Oxfam. The charity reported in 2021 that, as of 15 March that year, 85% of IMF Covid loans were tied to future austerity in the countries concerned. These “externalised losses” have now been realised, by people in Nigeria — and indeed across Africa.

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As the devastation wrought by these policies becomes clear, Africa has started fighting back. Last week, a coalition of senior African academics accused the WHO of being “colonialist” in its plans for a new pandemic treaty that could allow it to plunge Africa back into lockdown. “This is a perpetuation of classical Western imperialism coming through the backdoor,” said one academic. The coalition is seeking to challenge whether African governments should automatically accept the new pandemic treaty, as well as IHR regulation changes being promoted for discussion and voting at the World Health Assembly in May.

The group’s health advisory director, Wellington Oyibo from the University of Lagos, challenged the grounds for the new treaty. “Lockdowns affected Africans badly because these are people who earn their living from subsistent income, and yet you lock them in for several months?” he was quoted as saying. “The people are still not over the socio-economic and educational consequences of lockdowns.”

Yet with the crisis growing, the official policy menu for Nigeria’s government is very restricted. President Tinubu is negotiating further World Bank budget support of up to $1.5 billion — but this will just further the wreckonomics model that has proved itself so useless over the past five years. Meanwhile, with the postponement of elections in Senegal, and the imprisonment there of the leading opposition candidate Ousmane Sonko, political crises are growing across the continent. In such cases, governments usually look for someone to blame. The WHO might be a good start.

The scene painted by the footage is both horrifyingly perplexing and peculiarly British. The sky is overcast. No one seems to be running or screaming, or trying to confront and overpower the killers. A consolatory moment is provided by the “Angel of Woolwich”, the woman who calmly conversed with and challenged the killers before taking off to catch her bus. In the background, there is a bundle in the middle of the road. It is the body of Lee Rigby.

Michael Adebolajo grew up and went to school in Havering, where East London spills into Essex. Nevertheless, he addresses bystanders as “you people”, telling them they will “never be safe” before warning that British soldiers must leave “our lands”, meaning Iraq and Afghanistan. To his mind, he is no longer a British man born to a Nigerian-Christian family and schooled in Romford, but a member of the global Ummah, which is under existential attack from the West.

The murderers never attributed their attack to al-Qaeda, but in many ways it fit the al-Qaeda bill. It was a highly specific act of violence, targeting a member of the enemy’s armed forces. It was the kind of attack the group’s Yemen branch had directly called for in their English-language magazine less than a year beforehand. It was so discriminate that Adebolajo was careful to assure bystanders they were not his targets, even going so far as to apologise to nearby women for the bloodshed. Two years later, the al-Qaeda trained Charlie Hebdo killers would similarly — and impatiently — remind a journalist that they had only killed blasphemers; that they hadn’t harmed “civilians”. This was honour, jihadi-style.

In other ways, Lee Rigby’s murder was the kind of gruesome spectacle that al-Qaeda’s leadership would later warn against, but which Islamic State would make their hallmark. A gruesome spectacle, but a shoddy and amateurish one, too: Adebolajo and Adebowale rammed Lee Rigby with a Vauxhall Tigra before trying, and failing, to behead their victim. The rusty antique revolver they had acquired malfunctioned, and they were denied martyrdom by arriving armed police.

By contrast, the Charlie Hebdo attackers came clad in all black tactical gear, wielded Kalashnikovs and raised their fists having avenged the Prophet. They looked the business, and they went down in a hail of bullets. Adebolajo, in his Stone Island beanie and Primarni toggle jacket, did not. Adebolajo and Adebowale didn’t pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda in their attack, but perhaps notably, al-Qaeda never claimed them either.

Still, this did not stop others from imitating them. As Raffaello Pantucci notes, it served to “lower the threshold of what constitutes a terrorist attack, suddenly making the act much more accessible”. It showed other extremists that neither a cell, explosives nor serious weaponry were necessarily prerequisites to action. In the days to follow, a soldier was stabbed in the neck in Paris, while a year later another young extremist convert was apprehended en route to behead a British soldier. Brusthom Ziamani, the would-be copycat who thought Michael Adebolajo a “legend”, has since emerged as a leading and troublesome figure among imprisoned jihadis. In 2020, while he was eight months into a deradicalisation programme, he attempted to murder a prison officer.

The fact that Adebolajo and Adebowale were careful to target a soldier — and only a soldier — reveals much about the evolution of jihadism and the ideological divides within it. While mass casualty attacks are associated with jihadist terror, prior to Isis, discriminate plots were more the norm in Europe: against Jews, military personnel and alleged blasphemers. There were even bitter divides within Adebolajo and Adebowale’s networks: some believed that attacks at home were illegitimate due to a covenant of security with Britain, while others came to view the covenant as null and void since UK participation in the invasion of Iraq.

The 7/7 bombers deemed Britain a legitimate target, but it was not until Lee Rigby’s murder that jihadists were able to successfully attack again — an eight-year wait. Some observers assumed the jihadist threat was a thing of the past: Bin Laden was dead and the London Olympics came and went without a hitch. But it was the same year as the Woolwich attack that British extremists were trickling into Syria to fight — a trickle that became a flood in 2014 when Isis declared it had restored the Caliphate.

In the eight “quiet” years between attacks, Salafi-jihadist activity did not cease. The Islam that Adebolajo and Adebowale had converted to was the Islam of Omar Bakri Mohammad, Anjem Choudary and their acolytes in al-Muhajiroun. Its activity during the 2000s and early 2010s consisted of proselytising, attention-grabbing stunts, establishing European offshoots, and more proselytising. On a day-to-day basis, it also meant living according to the incredibly strict, incredibly demanding lifestyle of a Salafi-jihadist activist, which often involved cutting oneself off from friends, family, jobs and many of life’s pleasures — from football to television. It was to enter a totalitarian pact voluntarily.

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Because of his closeness to these networks, Adebolajo had flirted with the attention of security services on several occasions, but never enough to warrant intervention. In 2010, however, he was apprehended by Kenyan authorities; he was most likely on the way to join al-Shabaab in Somalia, with whom a number of Britons were already fighting at the time. Despite this, a Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee report determined MI5 could not have prevented the attack. Instead, it blamed an unnamed American company — Facebook — which had closed several of Adebowale’s accounts without informing British authorities. Five months prior to the attack, Adebowale had even graphically communicated his desire to kill a British soldier. The trouble was the offending content was picked up algorithmically and closed automatically — no human being ever laid eyes on it.

At the time, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, determined that Facebook was the “one party which could have made a difference” in preventing the murder of Lee Rigby. In some quarters, particularly among civil liberties groups, this conclusion was viewed as all too convenient for the security services, as well as paving the way for more anti-terror legislation and more government control over the internet. The drumbeat for tech companies to act on terrorist and extremist content online would grow louder the following year, as Isis flooded social media with gore and Silicon Valley could no longer refuse to act. Today, it is nongovernmental groups as much as governments leading the charge for more control over the internet.

And yet, despite the infamy of Michael Adebolajo’s image, neither he nor his accomplice live on in the annals of jihadi lore. Although I’m told security services would cast doubt on these claims, Adebolajo allegedly regrets his act and the Jihadist worldview, a fact which is of no consolation to the family of his victim. Instead, it is Lee Rigby’s name and image which lives on — while his killers, denied their martyrdom, must live out their days anonymously and forgotten, somewhere in the bowels of His Majesty’s prison estate.

I knew that the will to dominate did not exist only in whites: I saw Nigerians lording it over other Nigerians. So I understood why racial domination was practised — but not what made it possible. Or why, despite the grim facts of history, Africans (and the world in general) accorded white people more status than others.

For going on five centuries now, we’ve been living in a world that generally positions whites at the top, blacks at the bottom, and others somewhere in between. The story about how such an order came about is familiar, incorporating the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and white supremacist ideas. But what is sustaining this order today, despite consensus that racial hierarchies are morally unacceptable? Any behavioural pattern that persists while being at odds with popular opinion must be driven by something very powerful indeed.

I believe that the chief shaper of racial group dynamics today is money. And it’s a case I make in my book It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth. It is not the only thing that matters but it is the thing that matters most in a capitalist world. Thomas Piketty has traced how the distribution of wealth determines the distribution of power. It is not merely about the raw purchasing power of money; it is also about the meaning people attach to wealth and the qualities they attribute to those who have it and those who don’t. Money, and our understanding of it, shapes racial group dynamics in everything from immigration, technology and media to stereotypes, prestige and geopolitics.

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Antiracism is too middle-class

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Single European states, including Britain and Germany, have larger economies than the entire continent of Africa, home to 1.4 billion people and roughly 90% of the world’s black population. And even the most diverse European countries still have large white majorities — Britain’s, for instance, is 82% — meaning there is a strong correlation between national and racial wealth. Sweden, a country of 10 million people, generates a larger GDP than Nigeria, the largest black nation, with over 200 million inhabitants. Tiny Ireland, with its five million citizens, has a GDP of $520 billion, compared with the $411 billion of South Africa, the most industrialised black-majority nation, which has a population of 60 million.

The economic gulf is not just between black and white-majority countries, of course. Norway’s five-million-strong economy boasts a GDP of $505 billion, compared with the $461 billion of Bangladesh, home to 170 million people.

Meanwhile, the “best” passports are those from rich nations, irrespective of their nationals’ skin colour. In 2022, for instance, a United Arab Emirates passport was ranked the most powerful in the world, enabling you visa-free or visa-on-arrival travel to 176 countries. However, as most rich nations are white-majority, we live in a world in which white people get to gate-keep the world’s best living situations, but can usually travel wherever they want at the drop of a hat. You can travel to 173 countries hassle-free if you have a German, French or South Korean passport, and 171 if you have a British or Japanese one. But if you hold a Nigerian passport, you must get a visa to travel to 145 countries; if you hold a Pakistani passport, you need one to enter 154 countries.

The correlation between race and wealth is also why Western academia, the world that I inhabit, dominates global academia. Harvard University has more in its endowment fund than the Nigerian state has in foreign reserves. The total education budget of Nigeria in 2021 amounted to the equivalent of £1.2 billion; the wealthiest British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, have annual budgets exceeding £2 billion. This cash funds world-class research and attracts the very best scholarly talent: how are poorer universities supposed to compete?

Because of their credibility and prestige, Western universities attract most of the over five million students who study abroad each year. There are over 600,000 foreign students in Britain — the most popular destination after America for international study — who usually pay at least £20,000 per year in tuition fees alone. This makes UK universities ever wealthier, ever more capable of financing world-class research and ever more attractive to global scholarly talent. It is hardly surprising, then, that Western academia is at the heart of global knowledge production today. “Decolonising” the curriculum by adding some more black and brown authors to reading lists won’t change that. In fact, it might just attract even more foreign students to the UK, and entrench the domination of Western academia. How does that further racial equality?

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Wealth brings entire countries prestige, not just universities. It means whites and successful East Asians (such as the Japanese) are often stereotyped as competent, while black and brown people, associated with unsuccessful nations, are stereotyped as less competent. Wealth gives mid-sized European nations more influence in the corridors of international institutions like the UN than black or brown nations with several times their population. It is why the Western media has global influence, while the media of black-majority nations crosses few borders.

The racial order is an international order. But the UK race debate is that it tends to ignore this reality in favour of a parochial Anglo-American lens, which arrogantly assumes the race issue can be resolved in Britain and America — where only 3% of the world’s black population resides. A proportion that will only shrink as Africa’s population is set to double to 2.5 billion by 2050. Demographic realities mean it is global-scale dynamics that will shape the future of race relations, not their manifestations in particular Western societies.

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By Sohrab Ahmari

I am hardly the first person to realise that money matters. Many Brits would readily acknowledge this, but most Westerners of all skin colours do not grasp just how important wealth is when it comes to racial inequality because of their attitude to money. Western nations are affluent societies with generous welfare systems; people can afford to be less aspirational. A 2021 survey of Americans, Brits, Germans, Swedes, Italians, Spaniards and the French showed an average 28% of people in these nations consider it “important” for them personally to become rich. Brits placed the lowest value on wealth with only 19% saying it was important to them. Contrary to pop-culture portrayals of Americans as uber-materialists, only 30% prioritise wealth.

The same survey conducted among the Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans and Vietnamese showed an average of 58% consider it important to become rich, making them twice as likely as Westerners to prioritise money. Even the Asian nations that have been wealthy for decades now are more money-focused than Westerners — in Japan, 43% say it is important for them to become rich, while in Vietnam, the figure is an enormous 76% — and the same pattern is evident in Africa, the Middle East and South America. The status hierarchies people establish in their heads are built around the dimensions they consider most important to their everyday lives. Most people around the world consider wealth to be the most relevant indicator of status. And the race conflict today is, at heart, a conflict over group status.

Too many on the Right today deny the persistence of a racial hierarchy. Too many on the Left believe it can be lectured out of existence. But debating the details of colonialism, slavery and Western imperialism won’t change the status quo and its consequences for the everyday lives of people of colour. Not if money remains on the margins of the race debate.

As the most populous black state, Nigeria’s prospects are crucial to the future of global race dynamics, a reality often forgotten in the exasperatingly parochial race debate here in the Anglosphere. Black people worldwide yearn for a black nation that can compete with Western powers — a yearning embodied by the make-believe state of Wakanda in the enormously popular Black Panther movies. So, as Nigerians head to the polls tomorrow to choose their president in a highly unpredictable election, it is worth remembering that the result will have implications far beyond West Africa.

Contrary to expectations at the beginning of the campaign, the poll is now a three-way contest between two establishment figures and a popular third contender promising to upturn the status quo. Eight months ago, the odds-on favourite was the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu. A 70-year-old long-time politician, Tinubu is widely considered to be one of Nigeria’s chief “godfathers” — very wealthy political actors who engage in industrial-scale vote-buying, paying poor citizens cash to support their candidates. Tinubu openly brags about how many politicians owe him their positions, including current president Muhammadu Buhari.

His critics cite his corruption, increasingly visible ill-health, and numerous campaign gaffes as reasons he is unfit for the job. Tinubu once suggested the Nigerian army should recruit “50 million youths” to tackle the country’s staggering 33% unemployment rate (arguing that the policy would not be costly because they could be fed on locally-grown corn). In one attempt to laud the achievements of a governor from his party, he described him as having “turned a rotten situation to a bad one”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Tinubu did not agree to live one-on-one media interviews during the campaign and refused to attend presidential debates. At an event at Chatham House, here in the UK, he instructed colleagues to answer audience questions directed at him. His hands have been observed shaking in public and speculation is rife he may be suffering from Parkinson’s, a suggestion his campaign team stoutly refutes. They insist the gaffes are mere slips of the tongue, and tout his record of overseeing significant growth of Lagos’s economy during his 1999-2007 stint as governor, as proof that he is the can-do leader the nation needs.

The other establishment candidate is Atiku Abubakar, a 76-year-old former vice-president running on the platform of the opposition, the People’s Democratic Party. Atiku is likewise wealthy, considered corrupt, and part of the old guard in Nigerian politics. He is even more economically liberal than Tinubu and vows to privatise many state-held assets if elected. “In every great nation in this world, you find out that it is the private sector that is driving the economy, they provide the jobs, they provide the prosperity, and they do everything,” he stated in a 2022 interview. He admires Margaret Thatcher.

Though there are often a dozen or more candidates, Nigerian presidential elections are virtually always a de facto two-horse race between establishment candidates. Nigerian voters are therefore usually faced with weighing up the “lesser evil”. Many Nigerians are dissatisfied with this status quo, but don’t see it changing. But during this latest campaign, sometime in the second half of last year, a third contender started setting Nigerian social media alight, provoking excitement among voters seeking a new order.

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The insurgent candidate is the 61-year-old Peter Obi who, while a former state governor and thus no newbie to politics, is running on the platform of the hitherto marginal Labour Party. Once a banker and entrepreneur, Obi is wealthy, very pro-business and sees economic development as Nigeria’s chief priority. One of his main campaign slogans was “From Consumption to Production”, highlighting the need for the nation to boost its manufacturing prowess, as Asia’s leading economies have in recent decades.

However, while all three frontrunners are on the same page in terms of what Nigeria needs most — economic growth and job creation — what sets Obi apart is that he is not considered corrupt. His attitudes are evidently very different from the average Nigerian politician’s. For one, he shuns the ostentatious displays of wealth and Big Man behaviour commonly associated with the nation’s elites. Videos of him carrying his own luggage at airports excite Nigerian voters tired of arrogant politicians who consider such things beneath them, travelling with entourages of briefcase-carriers and yes-men to limit their contact with the public.

A people used to politicians striving to be as inaccessible and aloof as possible have been pleasantly surprised by a candidate who doesn’t place himself on a pedestal. Obi is known to shun patronage politics — his party has explicitly stated that it will not pay people to vote for him — which makes his promises to manage public finances prudently and honestly sound credible. His down-to-earth persona also lends an air of sincerity to his vows to make Nigeria a fairer and more meritocratic society. In the end, pretty much all politicians say the same thing — that they want to improve our lives. What matters is who we believe means it. Obi has been very successful in convincing young voters that he is genuine — which, given that 60% of Nigerians are under-25, has given him an edge.

But this is not a simple old versus young scenario. It is, at heart, a contest between those who believe Nigeria can be transformed into a fairer, more inclusive society, and those who consider such beliefs naïvely unrealistic. The fruits of economic growth, and the country’s natural resources, have long been gobbled up by the nation’s tiny but overbearing elite, while the vast majority remain ruinously poor. There are hardly any Nigerians who would not like to see the kind of fairer society Obi promises — the question is whether they believe it is possible.

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Persuading people that it is constitutes no small task in an extremely low-trust society. Just 7% of Nigerians believe “most people can be trusted”, while 93% believe “you must be very careful” in dealing with people. (In comparison, 67% of Brits believe most people can be trusted.) These low trust levels help Nigeria’s corrupt political class. Since the popular assumption is that pretty much everyone will help themselves to the till once in power, many conclude that you may as well stick with the devils you know, or at least those from your own ethnic group. There are those who like Obi’s message (and even him as a candidate) but doubt he would be able to reform Nigeria or even get elected, despite all the social media attention and the spate of voter surveys that have shown him in the lead.

One major issue sceptics raise is that Obi is from the Igbo ethnic group concentrated in the south-east of Nigeria; they say group-level antipathies between Igbos and northern Nigerians mean the latter would never vote for him in significant numbers — a problem, considering a slight majority of the country’s 93 million registered voters live in the North. His supporters counter that adults under the age of 35, who now constitute 40% of all registered voters, are far less ethnocentric than older generations, and will turn out for Obi in large numbers.

The undyingly aspirational nature of Nigerianness means that many simply refuse to give up on the idea of the nation becoming a great one. So Obi might be the right man at the right time: an overwhelming 89% of Nigerians currently believe the country is headed “in the wrong direction”. Additionally, 79% of Nigerians think the Buhari government has done a poor job when it comes to security — which now ranks at the top of Nigerian concerns, just ahead of the economy. As a result, trust in the ruling APC party is at an all-time low of 26%. The main opposition party, PDP — which governed the country from 1999 to 2015 — is likewise quite unpopular, and is seen as essentially a carbon copy of the current ruling party. Many want fundamental change from outside of the establishment.

The mood is not helped by the ongoing cash crisis. In October 2022, Nigeria’s central bank announced that redesigned naira notes would be introduced, and the existing ones phased out. The professed aim was to tackle counterfeiting and inflation, but some saw the move as designed to scupper the plans of politicians hoarding cash to buy votes in this year’s various elections. More than a few welcomed the idea, at first.

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However, since the new notes were introduced, many Nigerians have been unable to get them from ATMs; the central bank appears to be struggling to print enough to meet demand. Meanwhile, many businesses no longer accept the old notes. In an economy where 40% of the population don’t have bank accounts and conduct their everyday transactions in cash, this leaves many unable to pay for basic goods, including food — which has sparked riots across the country.

The stakes in tomorrow’s election are high, then. A win for Tinubu or Atiku would mean business-as-usual for the next four years. Economic growth might pick up from the currently sluggish 3% rate: either candidate’s pro-business policies would be an improvement on President Buhari’s statist inclinations. But the elite-dominated, nepotistic and corrupt status quo would hold, hampering the creative potential of Nigeria’s growing population.

A win for Obi, on the other hand, would be the Nigerian equivalent of Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, a feat considered impossible at the start of the campaign for reasons including the candidate’s ethnic origins. It would open a new chapter in Nigerian politics, encouraging the belief that the nation can be organised into a well-run, economically successful and fair society. A successful Nigeria would be the pride and power of not only Africa but of blackness as a whole; it would also provide a backyard role model for other African nations hoping to clean up their politics. A real-life Wakanda for the 21st century and beyond.

Consider British GQ’s next cover star, the Ealing-born Bukayo Saka. The 20-year-old English footballer has had a redemptive story since he missed the losing penalty in the Euros 2020 final last summer; he has been the brightest star in a rejuvenated Arsenal team that has a good chance of getting into the top four in the Premier League.

Along with a snazzy photo shoot, Saka recorded a video for GQ in which he lists his ten most essential items. There is an iPad, a portable music speaker, some Twix chocolate bars, a football, a PlayStation, trainers, and moisturiser: all the things you’d expect any sporty young man to be proud of possessing.

But Saka also included something else — a Bible, gifted to him by his father. “Religion is a big part of my life,” Saka says in the video. “Obviously I’m a strong believer in God.” Of course, by religion Saka means Christianity. And the use of obviously is striking: why is it obvious he would be a strong believer in God as a young person born and bred in the capital city of a western European nation? Well, it is obvious to him because of his family. Saka comes from a Nigerian family. And for many black African communities in Britain, Christianity is everything.

So Saka, one of the standard-bearers of the England national football team — which substitutes for religion in the country at large — also embodies another fascinating nexus: the relationship between a black British identity and Christianity, a religion that was introduced to anglophone west Africa by the British.

There’s a concept called the pizza effect. The original pizza was once a basic dish found in different pockets of Italy: a flat bread spread with tomato sauce; no toppings. When immigrants from Sicily and southern Italy moved to America between the late 19th and early 20th century, they introduced pizza to Americans. And these Italian-Americans, on the streets of New York and Philadelphia and Chicago, gave this basic dish a renewed colour: it became a food of multiple toppings and textures. After the First World War, pizza was reintroduced to Italy. And it became pizza: not just a flat baked bread with some tomato sauce — but a national dish of magnificent variation.

The same is true of Christianity in Britain today.

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Christianity is collapsing throughout Britain. A British Social Attitudes Survey from 2018 concluded that this decline is “one of the most important trends in postwar history”. More than half of the British public now say they do not belong to any religion, compared to 31% in 1983. But there are parts of the country where the flame of the religion is still bright.

You have to go to London, especially the inner-city, to find England’s most vigorous forms of Christianity. It is largely West African immigrants who fill the pews of decaying churches from Peckham to Woolwich, who renovate new churches in Brixton and Lewisham, and who volunteer for Christian centres and charities up and down the capital. If you want a solid sense of the sacred, a connection to Britain’s ancient Christian past, you are more likely to find it while eating jollof rice in a big tent in Kennington than eating a Yorkshire pudding in a small room in Harrogate.

This is not a utopian vision of liberal multiculturalism. London is the most cosmopolitan city in Britain. We all know that. But it’s also the most religious and socially conservative city in the country. 62% of Londoners, for instance, identify as religious, compared with 53% of the rest of the country. 25% of Londoners attend a religious service at least once a month; only 10% of people outside London do. 24% of Londoners think sex before marriage is wrong, compared to 13% of the population. London is the most homophobic city in the country: 29% of people in London think homosexuality is wrong, while 23% outside London think this.

The city is not only diverse in markers of visual difference, such as skin colour and types of dress, but also in values. There is social libertinism and social conservatism and everything squeezed in-between. Many tend to focus on diversity in terms of surfaces, rather than diversity of values. The awkward tensions of the latter are tacitly accepted, like a squeaky-clean parent knowing his kids spent the night doing drugs in their bedroom but not mentioning it at breakfast the next morning. It’s a very British sort of relationship — traversing that thin border between tolerance and hypocrisy.

In the city 56% of Christians pray regularly. Only 32% outside of it do. London is more Christian today than it was during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. According to David Goodhew, the director of ministerial practice at Cranmer Hall in Durham University, between 1979 and 2012 there was a 50% rise in the number of churches in the capital city. Many of them are built in boroughs of London with a large black population such as Southwark.

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The political scientist Eric Kaufmann points out that secularisation is “almost entirely a white British phenomenon”. When the share of white British people decreases in an area, secularisation also slows down. The number of white British people who ticked no religion in the census rose from 15.4% in 2001 to 28% in 2011. By contrast, the number of black Africans who ticked no religion in that same time span rose only by a tiny amount: from 2.3% to 2.9%.

Given it’s black Africans who are driving the rise of Christianity in London, conservatives who want to renew Christianity in Britain would do best to stop relying on public pronouncements by Justin Welby and Pope Francis. Instead, they should lobby for an open-borders immigration policy for all the African countries Britain once colonised.

Many of these communities are Christians because of the British Empire. Christian missionaries may have been a part of colonialism, but their influence extended beyond the colonial government, establishing schools and discouraging practices hitherto common in pre-colonial Nigeria — human sacrifice, slavery, twin infanticide, and polygamy.

Christian missionary schools also provided the foundation for many forms of African nationalism. Pro-independence leaders, like Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe, were educated at schools established by missionaries. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, an icon of revolutionary black African nationalism and the first leader of a black African country to gain independence from a European colonial power, was educated at a Catholic missionary school.

Meanwhile, Yoruba Christians have incorporated the God of the Old and New Testament into their own language. Whenever Yoruba people pray, for instance, they use the word Olódùmarè to refer to the God of the Bible, and this is the same name for the God of the native Yoruba religion.

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It’s unsurprising, then, that many black Africans in Britain today emphasise the importance of Christianity to their identity. In general, black British people are more than twice as likely to say religion is very important to them. Most black British believers are Christian. Yet the centrality of Christianity to black British identity is hardly spoken about. Saka treasures his music record and his football. But on Instagram, his name is not Bukayo Saka but “God’s Child”.

Christianity can accommodate tension. It is both radical and conservative: it proclaims the downtrodden will inherit the earth and it praises life-long monogamy. It incorporates the puritanical fervour of Leviticus and the ravishing sensuality of the Song of Solomon. Its central figure is both a man who was abused and spat on and crucified, like a slave, but also a figure of transcendent divinity. What can be more beautifully Christian than the fact its future in the bosom of what was once the largest empire in the world is now being sustained by communities it once colonised?

For the political and academic clerisy, the energy “reset” is like manna from heaven. It gives them a licence to impose the kind of “technocratic social engineering” that makes poor people poorer while stripping away working-class aspirations, as we already see in places like California and Germany. In Spain, 10% of all households cannot adequately heat their homes during the winter months; and in Italy, electricity bills jumped by 55% by January 2022. In the United Kingdom the number of homes that cannot pay their energy bills is set to triple by April 2022.

The new regime of expensive, often intermittent energy also threatens to make permanent the poverty of the developing world, which already suffers from a lack of cheap and reliable energy. The fossil fuels now being targeted by Western policymakers and financial firms like Blackrock are critical for industrialisation, and it is unlikely they can be replaced by wind and solar alone: fossil fuels still account for 81% of all energy supplies, and even if every country meets their climate promises, they will still account for roughly three quarters in 2040.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that in Africa there is a growing scepticism toward Western policies of “sustainability” — even though these policies, draped in the language of socially conscious “stakeholder capitalism”, pledge to address “systemic racism”. Already in 2015, for example, the president of the African Developmental Bank stated that “Africa cannot function because we have no power” and affirmed the continent’s need for “renewable and conventional” energy, including “natural gas and coal”.

Similarly, in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference last year, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari warned that the climate policies favoured by Western governments investors and aid agencies could lead to an Africa-wide energy crisis. Just last month, the president of Senegal made it clear ahead of the EU-African Union summit that Africans are not prepared to pay for Europe’s carbon levy. South Africa’s Energy Minister, meanwhile, criticised NGOs and universities that promote “climate-driven solutions” with money from European think tanks.

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And African leaders have every reason to be concerned about the dangers of expensive energy. Fuel riots have occurred in the recent past in Senegal, Malawi, South Africa, and Nigeria, while energy costs were a catalyst for the Arab Spring, when a spike in oil prices drove up the price of grain. Earlier this year in Kazakhstan, soaring energy prices nearly sparked a revolution.

Given that more than half of all Africans live in energy poverty, perhaps their politicians have every right to be worried. Even relatively advanced South Africa no longer produces adequate and reliable electricity and now faces opposition to developing its own fossil fuel and nuclear capacity. The resulting crisis — the country’s manufacturers are closing shop in the face of high electricity prices, leaving two-thirds of young adults are out of work — is threatening the stability of South Africa’s democracy.

In the rest of Africa, meanwhile, in population centres such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, energy supplies are woefully inadequate to meet daily needs. Without more reliable energy supplies, the continent will remain mired in poverty — and civil strife is bound to follow.

No doubt aware of this, some governments, such as those in Senegal and Ethiopia, have set ambitious targets for full electrification by 2025. Similar plans are underway across the continent, with the African Developmental Bank promising to help finance electrification by 2030. How likely that is to work remain unclear. It’s striking, though, that while Africa cripples itself in pursuit of eco-friendly energy, Western-backed environmental activists are protesting offshore gas exploration in South Africa’s poverty stricken Wild Coast region.

Contrast what is being recommended for the developing world with the behaviour of the United States and a tale of hypocrisy slowly comes into focus. Thanks in part to the rise of fracking, the US is slated to become the world’s largest producer of liquified natural gas. This growth in the American energy supply has coincided with falling greenhouse gas emissions, largely driven not by environmental regulations but by the replacement of coal with natural gas.

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The natural gas boom has been particularly important for those who have suffered from the loss of manufacturing, driving an industrial renaissance in economically hard-hit regions such as the Midwest as well as historically poor parts of the South. Low natural gas prices, notes the Cleveland Fed, have been critical to the manufacturing job growth now transforming large parts of the nation’s heartland. By contrast, green policies have driven high prices in states like California, harming the once thriving industrial economy and driving up the cost of basic necessities like electricity.

It seems odd, then, that President Joe Biden and most Democrats are insistent on ignoring these lessons. Biden and most of his party favour utilising the Federal Reserve and other executive departments to enforce “net zero” policies. Everything from gas pipelines to new leases for offshore oil are being cancelled, while new regulations are making it harder to build new fossil fuel plants. The green-dominated media, meanwhile, is trying to blame energy shortages on climate change and the hated fossil fuel companies.

These policies, both in the US and the rest of the world, are the product of the view that anthropogenic global warming is as an existential threat to life on Earth rather than a long-term nuisance that will have to be managed gradually via adaptation, particularly in light of China and India’s continued fossil fuel growth. To the extent the apocalyptic as opposed to pragmatic view is adopted, the policy agenda moves towards “de-growth”,  which seeks to reduce consumption, effectively lowering the living standards of the masses to “save the planet”. This may seem a small price to pay for affluent people in Europe and America, but one doubts that the governments of the developing world will be willing to tell their poor that environmental piety matters more than basic survival.

Does this mean that we’re doomed to an eco-apocalypse? Not necessarily; it is possible to gradually decarbonise the developing world without hamstringing its economies. On the nuclear front, for instance, there is currently talk of Small Modular Reactors (SMR), which are theoretically smaller and easier to build than existing reactors. But even proponents admit these technologies will take significant investments and a few decades to mature. Some suggest that lithium batteries will allow us to make renewables more viable by vastly improving grid storage technology, but these batteries require enormous amounts of rare earth minerals.

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Perhaps the most promising technology is geothermal energy. Thanks to the advances in deep drilling technology from hydraulic fracking, two pilot projects are in progress in Serbia and Canada that might allow for the heat of the deep hot biosphere to be exploited at an affordable cost.

But as the Africans recognise, in the short run we are left with a choice between a net-zero regime based on expensive solar and wind power and one relying on the only energy sources we know are cheap and reliable — fossil fuels. Coal, nuclear power and especially natural gas are here to stay; the imperatives of Greta Thunberg won’t be adopted by people in the slums of Africa’s cities or rural Chinese looking to share in their country’s prosperity. Outside of the talking shops, in the real world, net zero remains a distant prospect. But the mounting energy crisis is already here — and sacrificing the world’s poorest countries, and many in the West as well, in pursuit of a green agenda won’t make it disappear.

The turning point was the municipal elections in which the 110-year-old ruling African National Congress failed to gain a majority of the vote. The party is, despite its manifest failings, still custodian of the liberator’s mantle among many black South Africans — a recent survey showed that although 60% of ANC voters associated their party with corruption, they would nonetheless vote for it; such is the brand loyalty — but the party’s once hegemonic power is in retreat. The decline over the years is neatly in tandem with the nation’s trajectory towards a failed state. At its peak in 2004, the ANC pulled nearly 70% of the national vote. This week, it could barely pull past 46%.

The party has lost majority control of all the major metropolitan areas; across 62 municipalities, desperate, if informal, coalition negotiations on power and patronage are underway. And the collapse is being blamed on the fact that so few ANC supporters bothered to vote.

This is surely the result of catastrophic declines in public trust across all institutions of state — and particularly in the political classes during President Cyril Ramaphosa’s term. According to some under-reported polling in August, two thirds of respondents said they were willing – 46% were “very willing” — to give up elections altogether in favour of a non-elected government that could provide security, houses and jobs.

So after decades of banging on about how it suffered to bring democracy to South Africa, the ANC has succeeded in destroying both the substance and the allure of democracy for two out of three South Africans. No wonder the punters stayed in bed on polling day.

But the truth is, the ANC was never remotely fit to manage the complexity of what was once Africa’s largest and most successful modern economy and State.

President Nelson Mandela’s post-liberation administration winged it for five years on the back of public euphoria about the Rainbow Nation and the administrative sinews left by the departed apartheid state.

Then President Thabo Mbeki, his successor, sought to impose a sere, technocratic and welfarist vision on his realm, drawn directly from his experiences in Left-wing UK universities. Problem was that while he taught the newly enfranchised all about their rights as modern citizens, he somehow did not get around to talking about their duties. As a result, a boundless sense of entitlement has become an irreducible, damaging and informing fact of South African life, killing initiative and personal agency. Meanwhile, the technocrats who could give content to Mbeki’s vision were leaving state service in droves: victims of his racial affirmative policies.

After him came Jacob Zuma, former head of intelligence of the ANC’s military in exile, the army that somehow managed to wage a decades-long war during the apartheid years that few South Africans ever noticed. His cronies came into government trailing the odour of the Angolan military camps; the paranoia, secrecy, expedience, manipulation, fear, brutality, corruption and hopelessness.

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It is estimated that during his eight-year term, Zuma benignly presided over the embezzlement of between R400 billion and R1.5 trillion of public money (1 GBP = R21) by a coterie of crooks gathered around his presidency, and by others appointed to the State services under the guise of affirmative action and “cadre deployment” (yes, they still speak like that).

The major public utilities crashed, public services withered, the security and intelligence services were infiltrated, the criminal justice system was eviscerated, the tax authorities captured, local authority areas became cesspools, in some cases literally, and public health and education systems imploded. Under Zuma, the ANC went straight from liberation movement to an organised criminal conspiracy without stopping at go and certainly not at jail. South Africa became trapped somewhere between 19th-century Sicily and late 20th-century Columbia. As always, it was the poor that suffered.

Ramaphosa’s election as party leader and President in December 2017, was widely hailed by modernist forces — and particularly big business — as a turning point: after all, they had paid heavily to fund his bid. Sadly, his promised New Dawn turned out to be in every sense a False Dawn.

During his term, employment has reached the highest levels ever; flight by the high-skilled racial minorities is now proportionately equal only to the great southern European migrations to America in the previous early century; capital flight and insolvencies are at historic highs and inward investment at equivalent lows. Not one of the damaging policies introduced by Zuma and his predecessors has been reversed.

Last month, the World Bank ranked South Africa’s once excellent ports at the bottom of the 351 ports surveyed and the Universal Postal Union conveyed the warming news that the South African postal service is now officially worse than Nigeria’s.

In his nearly four years in office, Ramaphosa has failed to decisively deal with the criminal and pre-modernistic forces in his party. They struck back in the traumatic July Troubles this year where insurrectionary forces allied to the Zuma camp and possibly involving renegade elements of the State Security Agency, unleashed a wave of pillage and arson across the Zulu heartland of KwaZulu Natal.

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The State evaporated and has failed to bring a single major instigator to book, even as criminal prosecutions against Indian-descended citizens accused of killing looters proceed apace.

President Ramaphosa now enjoys the distinction of being the only South African President since the Act of Union in 1910 to preside over both a fully-fledged secessionist movement in the opposition-held Western Cape and a first-phase revolution in KwaZulu Natal.

His predecessors — Thabo Mbeki, P W Botha, John Vorster — all had the courage to split their parties to move ahead with what they saw to be reformist policies. Not the incumbent. He lost the one opportunity to save South Africa: to appeal above his party to the country and to unify all the modernist forces against the criminal, pre-modern and racist ones, most of them in his own party.

He is now offered another chance for redemption in the 50 or so undecided municipalities thrown up by the elections. Will his party align itself with the modernist elements on those councils or throw its weight behind the extremist Economic Freedom Fighters? Past form is not promising.

That form shows only excruciating anomalies: three of the most senior ministers implicated in “State Capture” during the Zuma years sat in judgment on the ethics of the party’s nominees for this year’s municipal election.

The man who was head of Zuma’s effectively private State Security Agency has popped up as prison boss and against the advice of the medical parole board, signed Zuma’s release from prison where he was banged up for refusing to answer for his sins before a state commission of inquiry into State Capture.

Zuma, meanwhile, has taken time off from another criminal case in which he is accused of corruption in a 25-year-old arms deal to hit the hustings trail in support of …. the ANC. No wonder so many South Africans believe their politics are beyond either parody or redemption.

Twenty seven years into the ANC’s divisive misrule, the political movements have solidified as never before into their racial components. The ANC is now an entirely black party: the tiny residual support from the racial minorities evaporated when Ramaphosa failed to deliver.

The EFF is unashamedly black and exclusivist: a nativist and racist organisation of provocateurs canvassing for support among the poor while wearing Gucci jeans, literally. Its support sits at an estimated 10% in these elections: a 20% improvement since 2016.

The classically liberal Democratic Alliance has made heroic attempts to break out from its strongholds in the white, Indian and coloured areas. It has failed: black support has been historically negligible and the party has seen a decline in national share in these elections from 24% to 21%.

The Inkatha Freedom Party, rooted in traditional and conservative Zulu areas, has stayed constant at about 5% of the vote, and had the unalloyed pleasure of claiming the ward in which Zuma has his mega-million state-provided home. The Freedom Front Plus, unambiguously representing conservative white, primarily Afrikaner, and Afrikaans-speaking coloured interests, has trebled its support.

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A late-comer, Action South Africa, led by a personable black former DA Mayor of Johannesburg and proclaiming its multi-racial profile, has created a stir by winning a significant share of votes in Johannesburg but made little national headway at below 3% of share. In any case, its core constituency is also primarily amongst urban minorities tired of the DA.

Thanks to the long-tail legacy of apartheid’s policy of residential segregation, many of the country’s suburbs are still largely racially defined. These are the citadels into which the minority communities retreat to enjoy their lives, ply their politics, conduct their businesses, pray, shop, school their young and, if necessary, take up arms to protect themselves when Ramaphosa’s State goes AWOL, as it did in the July Troubles.

For decades now these informal cantons have become ever more self-sufficient: they have private police, hospitals, schools and an army of fixers to mediate between them and a truly appalling bureaucracy. So-called Public-Private Partnerships control large public business and tourist spaces, property developers build public roads, private companies manage water reticulation and major road routes are maintained by private enterprise.

Recent Government policy allows for Independent Power Producers: energy self-sufficiency is now within the grasp of these localised and internally expatriated communities.

And thus the contours of a new and informal cantonal South African state is emerging after 27 years of ANC misrule: self-sufficient and defensive pockets of privilege scattered in the interior and in a coastal arc from the Mozambican border on the Indian Ocean to the Namibian border on the Atlantic. All of this new South Africa is set in a sea of rural and urban poverty presided over by a ghostlike State managed by a collapsed and indifferent bureaucracy and a squabbling and corrupt political class. The old feel-good notions of a non-racial South Africa, Archbishop Tutu’s famous Rainbow Nation, were naïve and are now dead. Cold reality rules.

This is strange if we claim to care about people everywhere rather than just those in particular places, as liberals especially claim to do. It is also paradoxical to hold today’s progressive position that it is racist for Western societies to think themselves more “advanced” while simultaneously holding them to higher standards of justice than others. Such contradictions abound because in our debates over justice, we are reluctant to admit the truth: that while Western societies are not fair, they are pretty much the fairest humanity has built so far. And fairness is the best measure of justice we have.

Societal fairness itself is difficult but not impossible to measure. When it comes to economic fairness, Europe is the most equal of all regions with the top 10% pocketing 35% of income in 2019, according to the World Inequality Database. In contrast, those figures in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa are 56%, 54% and 50% respectively; the US, at 45%, is a negative outlier in terms of income equality in the Western world.

For social mobility, OECD analysis suggest that if you’re born into a poor family in Sweden, it would take you three generations to reach the average national income; in Canada it would take four generations, in Britain five. In China, South Africa and Colombia, it would take seven, nine and 11 generations respectively. So, while you don’t want to be born poor anywhere, your chances of escaping poverty in the West are significantly higher than in most other places, bar a few notable exceptions, mostly in East Asia.

Where are you likely to be treated most fairly if you’re a woman? Sadly, you may face unfair treatment in every part of the world, but you’re least likely to experience it in the West, according to the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, which measures factors ranging from female access to political power and jobs to education levels and forced child marriages. You are also less likely to have your abilities doubted in the West, according to the latest World Values Survey. In my fatherland of Nigeria, for instance, 75% of the population believe “men make better political leaders than women”, a similar figure found in Pakistan. Over half of Russians, Turks, Indonesians and South Koreans agree. Just 8% of Germans and 12% of Australians share this bias.

There are exceptions, and countries like Rwanda vastly outperform Western nations in female political participation, women constituting 62% of Rwanda’s national legislature, compared to 34% in the UK. However, while it is not easy to be a woman anywhere, it is probably safe to say it is generally less difficult in the West.

What if you’re a sexual minority? In 2019, UCLA’s Williams Institute compiled a Global Acceptance Index, ranking countries from least to most accepting of LGBT people, and Western countries were by far the fairest. Small wonder that they dominate the list of countries deemed “safe” on the LGBTQ+ Travel Index.

Race appears to be the West’s Achilles heel when it comes to justice. While some societies like Britain are fairer than others, there’s no use dancing around the fact that there persists an informal racial hierarchy positing white people at the top, black people at the bottom and everyone else somewhere in between. While only three European nations gather data on race — Ireland, Finland and Britain — widespread discrimination against blacks and other minorities in Europe is well-documented. I think most fair-minded Brits would agree there is a significant justice gap when it comes to race in the West.

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This gap, however, has increasingly less to do with personal attitudes than with the massive wealth and resultant power disparities that have emerged between racial groups over the past 500 years, including as a result of slavery and colonialism. As I’ve written before, median white British household wealth stands at £314,000, compared to £66,000 for the median British-Bangladeshi family and £34,000 for the black African family. Similarly, a typical white American family owns eight times the wealth of a typical black American family and five times that of a Hispanic family. These disparities position the average person of colour weakly in a capitalist world where money is the key to autonomy. It is also worth mentioning that there are vast wealth differences between Britain’s ethnic minority groups, with median Indian households on average being as wealthy as their white British counterparts, for instance. In both the US and Britain, those of Indian descent now have higher incomes than their white counterparts, if not overall wealth.

And while this is far from perfect, there is ethnic economic inequality outside of the West, too, arguably more so; a study by academics at Harvard, Brown University and London Business School, concluded that “Sub-Saharan Africa and East and South Asia host the most ethnically unequal countries. In contrast, Western Europe is the region with the lowest level of ethnic inequality.”

When it comes to personal attitudes towards people of other races, Westerners are often among the most open-minded. When asked in the World Values Survey who they would not like to have as neighbours, 3% of Americans and Germans, and 4% of Australians mentioned “people of a different race”. In China it’s 18%, in Pakistan 25% and Turkey 41%. Two-in-three Vietnamese said they would object.

When it comes to respecting human rights, nowhere is this taken as seriously as in the West, as we can see from the UN’s Universal Human Rights Index. Growing up in Nigeria, I was from a young age depressingly aware that “human rights” were just words on a piece of paper to those in charge – and not much has changed since then. Since current president Muhammadu Buhari came to power in 2015, the country’s security forces have killed hundreds of Nigerian civilians, including unarmed youths protesting police brutality last year.

Whether it is Nigeria’s government brutalising its citizens, China herding Uighur Muslims into “re-education camps” or Libyan slave markets actually auctioning black people like cattle in the 21st-century, injustices elsewhere often provoke muted responses from Western progressives — certainly, nowhere near the outrage that accompanies even much lesser injustices in the West. This from the same people who profess to care about all of humanity, not just those living within their borders.

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Are there logical reasons to hold the West to higher standards of justice? Its wealth is certainly one, since it is easier to enforce the rule of law, respect human rights and create a generally more equitable society when you have the resources to do so. This year, the NHS alone has a working budget seven times the size of the entire national budget of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. Even if Nigeria’s government had angel intentions, it simply lacks the resources to build an equitable society for its 200 million citizens. And there are many countries in the world much poorer than Nigeria. To expect the same standards of justice from them that we expect of the West is completely unrealistic.

However, there are quite a few very wealthy non-Western nations, among them countries like Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, or the likes of Singapore, Japan or South Korea. Yet while these rich non-Western nations tend to provide high standards of living and are attractive in many ways, they rarely offer the level of individual freedom and societal tolerance often found in the West.

One justification for holding the West to higher standards that I often hear from my non-Western friends is that Westerners claim to be more just than others. They love hailing “Western values” and proclaiming their societies as fair and tolerant, and this warrants subjecting them to more critical scrutiny than others. There’s a logic here and it is difficult to reconcile, say, America’s claim to be the “shining city on a hill” with its criminal invasion of Iraq (supported by Britain) which ended up causing immeasurable suffering for millions. And yet we know those who invaded will never be held to account, for who can hold powerful countries to account?

However, while such actions understandably foster cynicism towards Western moral declarations, would we rather that Western nations declare, Trumpesquely, that from now on: “No more morals or values. We will simply use our military and economic power to ruthlessly pursue our interests. We no longer care what others think of us.” Would we then happily lower our assessment standards for the West because it is no longer hypocritical? In practice, a West that shed all moral pretence would deprive others of the ability to deploy the argument of hypocrisy against it, leaving the weakest nations pretty much helpless in the face of brute power. That would hardly make for a fairer world.

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While many white progressives are ashamed of their societies for its past sins, and feel it responsible for today’s global problems, many of my non-white friends acknowledge the West’s relative fairness in private, especially those who have experience of life elsewhere. However, they believe that as people of colour, we should refrain from acknowledging this publicly, because that could only weaken our position in the quest for racial justice. Wouldn’t that encourage white whataboutism? And wouldn’t we be emboldening the white supremacists who claim that Western civilization is superior to others? How is any of this in our self-interest?

These are valid fears I share, but if we want to have an honest debate about race and the West, then it cannot be built on pretending we don’t see or know certain things. Our assessment of how fair Western societies are should itself be fair, to give credit where it is due as well as criticism. It should factor in what is going on elsewhere in human civilisation. Not because of a desire to give Westerners a pat on the back so they can feel good about themselves, but because any other type of assessment is conveniently arbitrary, and arbitrary justice is no justice at all.

The mixed-race Polish-Nigerian writes in a gentle and nuanced manner about the messiness of human identity, especially in its racial and ethnic aspects. And his own life story — one foot in a relatively rich poor country (Nigeria) and another in a poorer rich country (Poland) — has given him an unusually privileged vantage point from which to observe the complexities, and complexes, of race.

Members of the political class (broadly defined) in modern democracies are increasingly called upon to be both outsiders and insiders. The 42 year-old Adekoya is a model outsider-insider, and able to act as a discerning connection point between different worlds.

He has felt the humiliation of racial abuse, particularly as a young man in Poland, and even after many years of living in western countries can still feel the pull of the traditional worldviews that still prevail in much of the developing world. Yet he is also an insider, an accomplished journalist and now academic, well-connected in three different countries.

His African roots allow him to speak about race with less circumlocution and evasion than is common in the liberal West. He can write with authority about the tendency to in-group preference, about the racism of whites and non-whites and the psychological well-spring they both share, and he understands the cultural chauvinism of parents who do not want their children to be lost to the tribe or religion.

So who better to write a book not just about race but about being mixed race? Biracial Britain: A Different Way of Looking at Race is a timely antidote to the sectarian finger-pointing and moralising about race so prevalent in our contemporary debate.

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This is mainly a showing not telling book: a series of 25 extended interviews with different people about the experience of growing up mixed race, framed by his commentaries and often wry reflections on his own biracial journey.

It is not an academic book. There are few facts and figures. There are people telling their stories. And Adekoya’s interviewees have been selected to provide the widest possible range of experiences spread across all relevant ethnic mixings and across time.

The basic numbers for this country are simple enough: the mixed race population of the UK is around 2.5% (about 1.6m) and is the fastest growing ethnic group, about 50% are white-black, 25% white-Asian and 25% intra-non-white. The future is beige: in his book, Whiteshift, Eric Kaufmann estimates that the UK will be 30% mixed race by the end of this century and 75% by 2150.

Mixed race people in the UK (at least those with one white parent) tend to be better integrated and, on average, more successful than their equivalents in the non-white ethnic group that one of their parents belongs to. But they still experience their own peculiar brand of joys and sorrows, and are now emerging more confidently as a distinct group to tell that story.

From interviews with younger mixed-race people, it is clear that the overt hostility towards, or pitying of, the older “half-castes” growing up in the 1950s, with two sets of grandparents who never speak to each other, has long gone. But dilemmas remain.

There is, for example, the pressure from society and relatives to identify more with one side than another. Adekoya even describes how some black activists follow their own version of the “one drop” rule of the racist American south: insisting that someone who is half or even one quarter black must identify as black.

Mixed-race people have more options for both belonging and rejection, and some of the interviewees admit to not feeling completely at home in either of their ethnic groups. Many have had bumpy rides of various kinds. There is the joy of discovery when finding a non-white father who had been absent when an interviewee was growing up. There are the accounts of people feeling pressured to “perform” an ethnicity that they have no real connection to. There is the disappointment of visiting an ancestral home and finding you are not accepted. There is even a pair of mixed-race twins who don’t get on because each identifies with different sides of their heritage.

Adekoya says he could rise above the racial abuse he encountered in Poland because of the Nigerian sense of superiority his father had drilled into him. “Nigerians firmly believe they are a special people endowed with a unique intelligence, resilience and creativity that predestines them for greatness. This is the gospel I was raised in and I was a firm believer.”

But this shield does not protect all black people. Indeed, in his reflections on so-called “colourism” Adekoya argues that the opposite is often the case. The curse of colourism is the tendency of black people in poorer, non-white, parts of the world to esteem lighter skin, which mixed race people with a white parent tend to benefit from, often with a guilty conscience.

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And his answer to this is controversially pragmatic. “Colourism will not be eliminated by well-meaning intellectuals telling people it is a bad thing; it will be eliminated when the white world stops being so much richer and more successful than everyone else. Then regular black and brown folk will stop looking up to it so much and start admiring their own kind. But this will only happen if their own nations become rich and successful. I do not like that this is the way it is, but this is the way it is. Wealth and success is what impresses the world today. The road to the end of white supremacy lies in economics, not sociology, history or semantics.”

This is a powerful insight and if the economic success of Africa in the past decade is replicated in the next five then we might be able to test the hypothesis. But what if Nigeria does not become as rich and successful as Denmark in the next 50 years, even as it heads towards becoming the most populous country on earth? Are black people around the world, including in the North American and European diasporas, condemned to battle a collective inferiority complex?

This is surely too pessimistic, at least for black minorities in the US and Europe. Two ethnic stereotypes have changed dramatically in Britain in my life-time. The Irish and the Indian. The Irish shift follows Adekoya’s logic: as Ireland moved from being a poor, rural country with relatively low levels of education, to being a highly educated, post-industrial one, richer than Britain, the old stereotype of the slow-witted Irish became untenable.

The Indian stereotype has also changed dramatically as British-Indians have marched into the professional middle class in their millions and yet the reality of India has not changed that much, the country has patches of great wealth and a growing middle class but it is still home to the largest number of truly poor people in the world. Indian success in the diaspora has changed the image of Indians, not the rise of the Indian economy.

Surely that success can be replicated by black minorities in rich countries too. A critical mass of successful black professionals is already emerging in many places and that looks a better pathway to generalised black confidence than a well-governed Nigeria with a booming economy, a decent welfare state and nuclear weapons.

Half-Indian/Half-Irish Sunder Katwala, the head of the British Future think tank (and the only interviewee to be identified), is an optimist on this and says that “Britain is doing much better on race than on class”. But the reason why this does not seem more apparent is because “there is now a split between academic, media and political environments and the lived experience of the rest of the country… the problem is that the race discourse is dominated by people who spend all their time on it, we don’t hear enough from people who just get on with their everyday lives and are not defined by race.”

This is not, however, a complacent book celebrating a post-racial country; it rather reflects a messy reality in which about half of ethnic minority Britons think their colour has held them back in life, while the other half think it hasn’t.

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Every mixed-raced child is a sort of gamble on the world becoming a less tribal place. And Britain’s mixed-race story is also unavoidably about the partnerships and marriages across ethnic boundaries. Adekoya observes his own parents’ difficulties with dispassionate sympathy but this is one area where a few more facts and figures might have been helpful. I wanted to know whether partnerships and marriages across ethnic lines are more fragile than those within them? And if so are they becoming more robust as society becomes more tolerant?

Adekoya does not have all the answers but, looking ahead, he sees the mixed-race identity becoming less defensive and freer to draw on multiple identities without feeling pressured to choose one. He also thinks that mixed race people have something valuable to offer in today’s atmosphere of racial polarisation.

“Growing up mixed race is a life experience that lays the groundwork for an inclusive open-minded attitude towards others… The circumstances of our mixed heritages and upbringing makes delving into the perspectives of others come somewhat naturally to us because it is what we had to do to fit in growing up.”

Barack Obama had a special talent for making different kinds of people feel comfortable around him because of his biracial life experience, says Adekoya. By the same token, Adekoya himself seems poised to become one of the most important and subtle new voices in Britain’s never-ending conversation about race.

Most of the people killed in the war were from a particular ethnic group – the Igbos – who had attempted to secede from freshly-independent Nigeria and were brutally prevented from doing so. Nigeria’s post-war leaders thus believed it in the interest of “national unity” to speak as little as possible about that particularly painful episode in the country’s history.

There is some logic in the strategy, since how do you teach a nation an aspect of its history that is inherently divisive? Years later, when I asked my British university class what they had learned at school about colonisation, “Nothing really!” was the chorused reply. “In A-level history, I learnt a bit about the British Empire, all positive stuff,” one student offered. “There was a little on colonialism in India, but nothing about Africa.” I teach a pretty mixed bunch, coming from various parts of Britain, and the suggested education gap on this subject strikes me as problematic.

The calls to “decolonise” the curriculum have returned this year, intensifying in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd and the attendant heated debate about race. But with something as consequential as British colonialism, I think the question should not be whether to teach it — yes — but rather how to teach about it.

This presents no small challenge, the problem being that Britain is inhabited both by the descendants of those who were conquered, and those who did the conquering. One’s story of victorious expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

My Nigerian secondary school teachers had it easier on this front. Everyone in the school — teacher and pupil alike — was Nigerian. We were thus all automatically united on one side of the colonial divide, the side of the colonised. This provided teachers with a clear perspective from which to teach colonial history, with an emphasis on prominent Nigerian anti-colonialists, stretching from the early 19^th-century resistors to the pro-independence leaders of the Fifties. It was obvious to us all who the heroes of the colonial story were, and who were its villains (the British of course).

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But the demographics are different in the UK; unsurprisingly, so are attitudes towards Empire. According to a 2019 YouGov poll, 32% of Britons are proud of the British Empire, 19% are ashamed of it, 37% are neither proud nor ashamed, while the rest don’t know what to think. On top of this, 33% of Brits believe former colonies are “better off” for being a part of the British Empire, compared to 17% who think them “worse-off”.

There clearly exists an expectation among some scholars demanding more education about colonialism that this would dramatically shift British public opinion against Empire. I wouldn’t be so sure.

This expectation underestimates the human desire to feel strong, the powerful psychological appeal for many, not just in Britain, in taking pride in the conquests of their ancestors. It offers a sense of collective strength they can tap into as individuals. If they, of whom I am one, could be so triumphant in the past, surely I too possess triumph in me?

The morality of taking pride in ancestral conquests involving the killing and subjugation of other human beings is questionable, but its psychological appeal is undeniable. People want to feel strong and they often grab at whatever gives them that feeling of strength. According to YouGov, as many as 50% of Dutch people feel proud of their past Empire; the French are only slightly less proud than the British of theirs, and less prone to shame about it.

This is not just a white people thing; the same YouGov survey showed that only one in five Japanese today are ashamed of their imperial past, despite its disastrous consequences. Turks enjoy emphasising their role in the powerful Ottoman Empire, with current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan even declaring modern-day Turkey a “continuation” of the Ottomans.

Hence, while I think it important to teach about British colonialism because of its consequences for present-day history and while it is difficult for me, the son of a Nigerian father, to view colonialism and Empire positively or even neutrally, I understand why some (white) Britons feel differently. However, what complicates matters for me somewhat is that some Africans who actually experienced British colonialism had mixed feelings about it, a theme rarely explored in current debate.

I emphasise that British colonialism is what I am referring to. No one was ambivalent about the barbaric rule of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold II, whose savagery cost some 10 million lives, as documented in Adam Hochschild’s heart-wrenching King Leopold’s Ghost. I cried reading that book, and experienced intense feelings of animus towards white people, even though my own mother, being Polish, was white.

But in a country like Nigeria, Britain’s largest African colony, feelings towards colonialism were more complicated. In his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom, Obafemi Awolowo, considered one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers for his role in the independence struggle, offered a frank assessment of the challenges in mobilising his compatriots against British rule at the time. “Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,” Awolowo wrote.

According to this, while Nigeria’s educated elites wanted Britain out as fast as possible so they could start running their country, many regular Nigerians seemed to sense a fairness in the British exercise of power that they were not so sure of in their own leaders. Awolowo did not put this down to what was called “colonial brainwashing” but said that he felt many Nigerians had “good reasons” to think this way.

Of course, because British colonialism was hypocritically justified as stemming from concern (bless their good hearts) for the supposedly “savage” conditions of life in pre-colonial Africa, African anti-colonialists had little strategic choice but to construct a counter-narrative strongly negating this depiction, one portraying Africans in a positive light. This led to what Nigerian historian Toyin Falola described as the “simple but seductive thesis that Africa used to live in peace and innocence until its contact with Europeans”. And so the one-sided, sweeping colonialist narrative was countered with a one-sided, sweeping anti-colonialist narrative. But this did not mean that regular folk on the ground lost all memory of the past.

Obviously, as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s famous 1958 book, Things Fall Apart, brilliantly portrayed, the disruption colonialism brought to the lives of everyday Nigerians was massive, and in my view, ultimately indefensible. Imagine foreigners come to your homeland, kill some of you, and tell the rest everything you ever believed is rubbish. Your religion is rubbish, your traditions are rubbish, your values are rubbish, the way you organise your entire economy and life is wrong.

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The assault on African ideas was so severe that the continent is still trying to recover its identity; still trying to figure out an idea for modern Africanness that would not be an imitation of Westernness or so focussed on resisting Eurocentrism it ends up defining Africans in opposition to Europeans, thus ultimately being Eurocentric itself. Post-colonial Africa is still searching for an identity that explains who Africans are, not who they are not.

Yet in an interview a few years after independence, the same Achebe who had highlighted colonialism’s disruptive nature stated: “I am not one of those who would say Africa has gained nothing at all during the colonial period…this is ridiculous – we have gained a lot. But unfortunately, when two cultures meet . . . what happens is that some of the worst elements of the old are retained and some of the worst of the new are added.”

Intellectuals such as Achebe clearly recognised the identity crisis colonialism triggered. They also knew about British atrocities such as the looting and destruction of the ancient Benin Kingdom in southern Nigeria, among others. Yet on the other hand, Achebe believed that Africa benefited from the introduction of Western education, technology and medicine, as well as liberal European ideals such as “democracy” and “equality”, which had not necessarily been popular beforehand.

It is, however, important to emphasise that even between British colonies, there were significant differences in the actual practice of colonialism. It was significantly more brutal in Kenya than in Nigeria, for instance, with the former witnessing bloody events such as the Mau Mau Uprising in which thousands of Kenyans were slaughtered as late as the mid-20th century.

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I know some fear that if we start allowing for nuances in our assessments of colonialism, then we are opening the door for white people to shed any guilt whatsoever over the entire affair. That even more Britons will start asserting, humiliatingly for us, that colonialism left our ancestors “better off”. That saying anything “positive” about it is tantamount to justifying it.

I understand this line of reasoning, but I ultimately refuse to live my life in fear of what some people may say or think. That is the quintessential post-colonial complex: living dominated by anxieties over how white people see us. Instead we should liberate ourselves from the shackles of these historical complexes that yes, were thrust upon us, but that only we can shake off ourselves; those complexes that limit what we feel we can say about ourselves once white people are listening. Discussing colonialism frankly is a sign of strength, not weakness.

So for British teachers wondering how to teach the subject, it is important to cite various perspectives, including, crucially, the perspectives of the colonised; not in a wholly arbitrary manner seeking to buttress this or that grand narrative, but in a way revealing the complexities and contradictions of Britain’s colonial encounter with Africa.

This does not mean truth-seeking can be an excuse for insensitivity. The reality is that colonialism is an inherently emotive subject for millions of black and brown people in this country. We need more frank and open debate about it, definitely, but that debate should always serve the ultimate purpose of helping build this nation rather than tearing it apart.

While a black Brit may have personally experienced racism, chances are the Nigerian in Nigeria hasn’t. Yet both clearly seem to have shared something unifying in recent weeks, and I have wondered what exactly is at play here, beyond the ubiquitous and increasingly indefinite concept of ‘racism’. A discernible majority of the black opinion I have engaged points to the key role of another, slightly more specific, R-word: Respect.

The Nigerian who has never travelled abroad and the black Brit are united by a shared sense of global disrespect for the black race. The video of a white policeman casually snuffing the life out of George Floyd was a particularly humiliating reminder of that disrespect. Hence the outpouring of global support for the Black Lives Matter Movement from black people who otherwise face very different struggles in their everyday lives.

This feeling of disrespect has been articulated by Alicia Garza, the activist co-founder of BLM: “Black Lives Matter is not just concerned with what happens in policing. The disregard, disrespect, and lack of dignity for black life transcends through the fabric of our society.” Meanwhile, a recent CNN survey showed that 49% of black Britons have experienced disrespectful treatment from the police, compared to 26% of whites.

How literally we should be interpreting subjective evaluations of ‘respectful treatment’ might be an issue for debate, but what ultimately matters for race relations is that these feelings are out there. Public opinion on any issue hinges on popular perceptions. What the poll also revealed was that black Britons are significantly more likely to see racism as a major problem in Britain than other ethnic minorities.

On issues ranging from police treatment to minority chances of success, “the results are striking; it is often the case that black people are considerably more dissatisfied with race relations than other ethnic minorities”, said Chris Hopkins of Savanta ComRes who co-conducted the survey. This appears reflective of a feeling among many blacks that there persists an unspoken racial hierarchy which positions white people at the top, black people at the bottom and everyone else somewhere in between.

But is this feeling backed up by reality?

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Whether it is Libyans selling black Africans into slavery, which is happening right now, Chinese people contemptuously discriminating against blacks in China, or Indians doing same in India, a general low regard for black people across the world does seem to be a constant. In fact, the reason we focus on racism in the West and not elsewhere is because western societies are the most responsive to black opinion. As a general rule, the Chinese, Indians and Arabs don’t seem to care very much whether we consider them racist or not. Their societies are openly assertive of their felt superiority.

So we know about the negative perceptions of black people created by slavery and colonialism, but what exactly is driving this hierarchy today? “White supremacist propaganda”, according to the BLM narrative. Western movies and media contain overt and covert messages propagating black inferiority. These are internalised by white people and others, including black people, thus sustaining global belief in black inferiority. Hence, the ongoing campaign to pull movies and TV shows deemed racist from the sites of Netflix et al.

However, even if we accept a racial hierarchy does exist, I think this particular approach is steeped in an excessive tendency to elevate the symbolic above the material when it comes to race. A belief that it is enough to stop white people from saying certain things for black dignity to become a given.

The “white-supremacist messaging drives global disrespect for black people and black self-hate” argument was technically plausible in the 20^th-century, when Western entertainment and media were essentially the only game in town. But since the beginning of this century, we’ve lived in a world where people have access to multiple sources of information, can follow who they want on social media and one where Nigerians watch more Nollywood movies than Hollywood movies. Yet, white people are still welcomed with open arms everywhere while black people are often not. So what gives?

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It is surprising to see radical Leftists so focused on white-supremacy ideology as the great explainer of racism, when Marx himself clearly argued it is the material which determines the ideological, rather than the other way around. We live in a capitalist world, hence, our values are shaped by capitalism’s values, both at conscious and subconscious levels. What does capitalism value most? Wealth and success. So these are what impress most of the world today.

It is why even intellectuals who love bashing capitalism make sure to emphasise they are “best-selling” authors on their social-media profiles. It is why most people adopt an instinctively respectful tone in the presence of the significantly successful. They listen to their words attentively, like they expect to hear something worth knowing. Because, like it not, the world has bought into the idea of success being an indicator of specialness.

As it works on an individual level, so it does on a group level. White and predominantly-white nations remain the richest and most successful nations in the world, while black ones remain the poorest and least successful. The rest of the world is somewhere in between. It is no coincidence the world’s informal racial hierarchy faithfully reflects its economic hierarchy.

Yes, the global economic status quo was arrived at often brutally and almost always unfairly. But no matter how many times we tell the story of slavery and colonialism, it will not change the material reality on the ground. The gargantuan wealth gap between the white and black races is by far the most influential factor shaping racial dynamics today. The combined GDP of 1.2 billion-strong Africa, where 90% of the black race lives, is smaller than that of 66 million-strong Britain. Such a disproportionate wealth and power gap is not conducive to balanced race relations.

It makes too many black destinies dependent on white action and white goodwill. It creates a reality in which the world regularly sees on its TV screens large numbers of black Africans risking their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, desperate to get into Europe. Because their own governments have failed them so badly, they see no opportunities for a better life back home. Surely, no one believes such realities don’t diminish global regard for blackness? Moral arguments are important, but given our experience of human nature, the surest and most realistic route to black people getting the global respect we so strongly desire, is by us becoming collectively wealthier and stronger.

Nigerian scholar and historian Toyin Falola characterised contemporary black-white relations thus: “If Europeans regarded Africans as the ‘primitive Other’, the colonial experience enabled Africans to construct themselves as a terrorised race, raped and exploited by the patriarchal, powerful ‘white Other’.”

This reactive construct of Africanness resembles very much the construct of global blackness offered by the BLM school of thought. The problem with this approach is that it appears more interested in portraying the present vulnerability of the black collective as a moral virtue rather than focusing on eliminating that vulnerability. It obsesses over the appeal and power of whiteness, instead of trying to figure out how to make blackness more appealing and powerful.

Suggested reading

Minority women can think for themselves

By Katharine Birbalsingh

This construct may inspire the world’s sympathy, but it will not win its respect. Perpetual sympathy without respect means being viewed as a perpetual victim. I, for one, do not wish to be so viewed, and I suspect there are other black people who don’t either. The achievement of black strength and resultant respect can come from a consciously determined focus on black economic advancement within the diaspora populations and, crucially, in Africa. The Jewish story is a great example of collective vulnerability transformed into collective strength in the space of a generation. Powerless to stop their systematic slaughter during World War Two, Jewish leaders learnt the lesson that strength is the best guarantor of safety.

Today, the world doesn’t need to be told that the Jewish diaspora, backed up by the strong state of Israel, shouldn’t be pushed around. It is good to aim for a more morally fair environment, but wise to ensure that even if others are failed by their morals, you would not make an easy victim. Some of the greatest 20^th-century black thinkers, such as Marcus Garvey and W.E.B Du Bois, recognised this need for black strength, hence their emphasis on the need for the emergence of powerful black nations.

I realise most black Britons were born here and have never even been to Africa, but the reality is that blackness will always be associated with Africa, the black ancestral homeland, just the way whiteness will always be associated with Europe. Black destiny and African destiny are inseparable. There are already great cultural collaborations between black Britain and African artistes: Nigerian afrobeat stars Fela Kuti and Wizkid are household names in black Britain. It is time for more economic bridge-building by actively seeking to boost business ties between black Britain and the African continent.

It was the first Black Pound Day this weekend, a planned monthly event encouraging people to popularise and patronise black-owned businesses in Britain. The brainchild of Swiss, a member of So Solid Crew, it is a much needed positive mobilisation of agency towards boosting black economic strength. With Britain seeking new trade relationships, this is a perfect moment to mobilise entrepreneurs to actively seek business opportunities in Africa while encouraging British consumers to buy Made in Africa products — whether that’s Ethiopian coffee, Kenyan roses or South African wine.

It is only if we consciously strive to harness and multiply our collective resources that a globally stronger black position can be achieved. One where no black person has to “ask” for equality or justice. One where black dignity is a given. The road to black respect lies in economics, not in sociology or history. And it is a road that must pass through Africa, the heart of the black race.

Such fine and righteous words. So there was fury the following year when this leader in his seventies flew to London for treatment of an ear infection. This was “a tragic blot” on Nigeria’s image, thundered Dr Osahon Enabulele, a former head of its medical association. The new president, he added, should have used his minor ailment to focus people on the urgent need for domestic health reform.

But Buhari was not listening. He went off on several more trips and, by the end of his first term last year, had spent at least 170 days in Britain on health grounds.

Buhari is far from the only African leader to display such lack of faith in his own nation. Robert Mugabe died last year aged 95 in a Singaporean hospital, having so wrecked Zimbabwe and its medical system that life expectancy plummeted by 26 years at one point. “It is very symbolic the former president who presided over the system for three decades can’t trust the health system,” said one doctor after his death. Other physicians complained of carrying out surgery without even putting on protective gloves.

Meles Zenawi ruled Ethiopia for 21 years, suckering Western admirers who overlooked his savage repression as they fell for his talk of development — yet this wily despot died in a Belgian hospital. Omar Bongo ran Gabon for 42 years, then died in Barcelona having plundered his country’s wealth obscenely while leaving his tiny 2.2m population trapped in poverty.

Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled and ripped off Angola for almost as long, travelled to the same Catalan city for treatment. Algeria’s former president went to a Swiss hospital after running his nation for 20 years, then suffering a stroke. Benin’s president went to France for surgery. Two Zambian leaders died abroad while receiving medical attention.

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Can poorer nations survive Covid-19?

By Dan Knowles

I could keep going with this list of shame — and these are just the leaders. All are surrounded by teams of aides and layers of acolytes, many showing similar hypocrisy as they fail nations filled with impoverished citizens then flit abroad to foreign clinics when falling ill. Almost one in six of the world’s population lives in Africa — yet according to the Brookings Institution think tank, the continent accounts for just 1% of global health spending. Now coronavirus has arrived, with 10,000 confirmed cases and 500 dead so far — which is terrifying, given the creaking state of public services and crowded living conditions in many places.

Yet if there is one glimmer of hope in these torrid times, perhaps the virus might force a few more African leaders to face up to the awful state of their health services. For suddenly many of the continent’s self-serving elites must stay at home if sick. More than half of Africa’s international airports have either closed or limited flights. Lockdowns are being imposed.

Even if the leaders could escape, there are restrictions on movement in many richer nations, while private medical services and doctors are being pressed into action on the pandemic frontline. And there are strong private facilities in some places. But if they or their families become infected, these rich and powerful plutocrats may have to confront the horror of seeking treatment alongside their fellow citizens in local hospitals, relying for salvation on medics who have complained for so long of being forsaken.

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The WHO has failed us again

By Ian Birrell

In Nigeria — which identified its first case in February and where a key presidential aide has already been infected — borders have been closed, international airports shut down and private jets grounded. The first fatality was an oil executive in his late sixties who had just returned from medical treatment in Britain.

“It’s going to be a lesson for those who think they can neglect the health system,” said Francis Faduyile, head of the Nigerian Medical Association. “The highest of the government officials, some of them will be infected, and they’ll have no option but to get local treatment.”

When Buhari flew off in 2018 on his fifth health tourism trip, he left behind a strike by healthcare workers. They were angered by the failure to spend adequate funds on medical facilities in Africa’s most populous nation. “There has long been medical tourism because our hospitals are grossly underfunded,” said a union official.

And it is not just politicians who have fled the system: almost half of Nigeria’s registered doctors have reportedly moved abroad to find better-paid or less stressful work. Many have moved to Britain. They leave behind a land with low life expectancy, high infant mortality and dire shortages of skilled staff to treat suffering patients.

Despite the massive oil wealth — much of it stolen by those elites who fly abroad when they fall ill — a baby born in Nigeria is likely to live more than three decades fewer than one born in Britain. One study published three years ago by Bangladeshi and Nigerian public health experts concluded that many of the nation’s citizens were dying from preventable conditions. Among them, they highlighted the worst tuberculosis rate in Africa, with almost half a million cases annually. Yet even basic things such as gloves, masks and paracetamol are often missing from frontline services. Only five laboratories could test for coronavirus in this nation of 190m people.

As I write there have been six recorded deaths and 254 registered cases, although as with many countries this will be a fraction of the real number. “This crisis has exposed in the worst possible way the evident weaknesses of our health system,” said Femi Gbajabiamila, speaker of the House of Representatives. “After this is over and moving forward, we must do everything in our power to ensure that we will never again come upon a moment such as this, as ill-equipped as we are now.”

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All eyes on the Swedish coronavirus experiment

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Many countries are in a much worse state than Nigeria, where its thriving technology hub is springing into action to plug some deficiencies. Africa has about one doctor per capita for every 16 per head in Europe. Kenya has 130 ventilators for 50 million people. Compare this with Wales, which has more than three times as many for its three million citizens, and just bought another 1,035 to cope with this crisis.

Yet the east African country is better prepared than Sierra Leone — still recovering from the ebola epidemic that killed so many medical workers six years ago — which has one ventilator for 7.5 million people. Or the conflict-torn Central African Republic, which has three for a population of five million. Almost 20 countries have warned the World Health Organisation that they have no intensive care beds for their most severe cases.

African nations are often used to battling infectious diseases. Nigeria’s rapid reaction to ebola six years ago demonstrated an exemplary public health response, with effective screening, tracking and isolation. Populations are also comparatively young, so less likely to die from this disease. Yet there will still be horrible numbers of fatalities; the economic pain could be even more intense than in richer nations, with vital remittances already falling; and it may prove even harder to dampen down pandemic in the continent’s packed cities.

Already the aid industry is gearing up to beg for more funds, although the decrepit state of many African health services offers grotesque proof of persistent failure. The former aid secretary, Rory Stewart, pointed out Britain has pumped £4.5bn into Malawi over half a century yet the country became poorer. Now we discover it is so badly corroded by corruption and bad governance that it has only about 25 intensive care beds in public hospitals that cater to 17 million people.

We hand about £100m a year to Uganda — which is run by a repressive kleptocracy and deceived donors over refugee numbers to obtain more funds — yet reportedly it has just 55 emergency beds for its 43 million citizens.

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China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

These numbers indicate pitiful health systems, even before the virus strikes to expose their deficiencies, and despite the noble efforts of many local health teams. Two weeks ago the pop star Bobi Wine, who has bravely challenged Yoweri Museveni’s festering regime in Uganda, sent me a bouncy new song called ‘Corona Virus Alert’ that aims to spread a message of prevention, social distancing and hand washing. In an interview with a news agency, he argued that Africa’s leaders needed to build better health systems to serve all society instead of spending so much on weapons and silencing their critics.

“For a long time we have been calling out the government of Uganda, like many governments on the African continent that have neglected health care systems,” he said.

“This is the time for them to remember that a functional health care system is not only a benefit for the poor but also the rich, because right now, as we stand, they can’t travel abroad for medical care. They have to face the same ailing medical care to deal with them. And this should be a message to them.”

Bob Wine is right, like many other activists making similar points in other parts of the continent. So dare we hope that amid the fears and tears of this vile pandemic, some of Africa’s most venal politicians and grubbiest elites might finally be forced to accept the devastating consequences of their selfish actions? Or will they just waltz away again once their dance with this deadly virus has ended?

Once a fishing village, over the years, thousands of shacks have been built in Makoko on land reclaimed from the bay by filling it with rubbish. People live in them, crowded six to a room. There is no running water, so hundreds of people make a living hauling in plastic containers filled from boreholes on the mainland. Children are bathed outside in buckets. Electricity is provided by generators, which gives the air the tinny taste of diesel. The alleyways reek of human shit.

The Lagos State government has been trying to get rid of Makoko for years. They send in bulldozers to tear down the shacks and clear the land for developers. But it never stays cleared for long. The slum grows out into the bay, new shacks built with wood are floated onto the water. People keep coming, drawn to the urban jungle by the hope – however slim – of making it big.

Nobody knows how many people live there, but it could be as many as 250,000. Sixty years ago, that was the entire population of Lagos. Now it’s a sprawling, filthy, unnavigable megacity of perhaps 17 million. People overwhelm its every space. They make their homes where they can: beneath underpasses; in derelict buildings; anywhere without the thuggish security guards the rich hire to keep them out.

Africa is the world’s youngest continent. Between the Sahara and South Africa, in most countries, a majority of the population are children. In only a few countries is the median age higher than 20. This is not because people die young –for the most part, they don’t any more. It is the result of an enormous population boom.

In 1960, the entire population of sub-Saharan Africa was around 230 million people. Today, it is roughly 1 billion. According to the United Nations, by the middle of this century, it could well reach 2 billion. In 50 years or so, more than half of the world’s entire population growth will be in Africa. Two fifths of the world’s population will live on the continent. A couple of generations ago, sub-Saharan Africa had no cities with populations bigger than 1 million people. Today it has dozens.

Obviously population projections are just that: projections. But if they are even halfway right, then surely the the 22nd century will be Africa’s. Nowhere else on the planet is so young or so alive. Not a single European Union country has a fertility rate that is higher than the replacement rate; of the rich world club, the OECD, only three countries, Israel, Turkey and Mexico do.

In the West, our countries continue to grow because life expectancy is going up, and thanks to immigration. Eventually, since we all must die, they will start shrinking. By the end of the century, African babies will be a majority of those born. Africa could even be the only continent with a growing population.

\So what does this mean? The more optimistic business people I meet at conferences like to talk happily of a ‘demographic dividend’ that will make them lots of money. Lots of Africans means a growing market after all; Africa will have something the rest of the world will lack: youth. Well, perhaps. But the trouble is that Africa is not getting richer – at least not fast. Just 10% of the world’s population now lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of $1.90, down from 35% in 1990. But Africa is the exception. Over that same period, the number of extremely poor on the continent went up by almost 50million.

So what we have is a huge, poor, young population. And they are not the fly-bitten, ignorant victims of famine we in the West grew up seeing on our televisions. They are urbanised, increasingly speak English and French, addicted to their mobile phones. And they are ambitious.

I met one Nigerian in Lagos who earned perhaps $10 a day running a streetside photocopier stall and he spent half of that on a night class in economics. In Kenyan slums, people ask me for my opinion on how Brexit is going. On a ferry on Lake Tanganyika, 1,000km from the nearest international airport, a young ginger (the root) trader asked me if I could help him get business books so that he could learn to be a tycoon.

But if it has no means of being realised, is this ambition really a boon? Young Africans know that they are getting a raw deal. They are cynical about politics and angry.

Western governments fear that this huge, poor, continent is a bomb waiting to explode underneath Europe. Thousands, of frustrated young men are already making the journey westwards – in rickety boats from Libya. But what if millions did?

Further reading

Western aid undermines African democracy

By Ian Birrell

In the 1990s and early 2000s, politicians talked about Arica in patronising terms, fueled by a vague post-colonial guilt. “Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world”, said Tony Blair in 2004. Today, European leaders are more hard-nosed. Colonialism was generations ago, argues Emmanuel Macron. Instead of clawing over the past (or, like previous French presidents, trying to resurrect it), he is instead obsessed with making sure that Africa’s problems do not spread to Europe.

But it is not just the consequences for the rich in Europe that should concern us. In the 1960s, the American sociologist, Paul R. Ehrlich predicted that a “population bomb” in Asia would lead to mass starvation. He got it hopelessly wrong, and such Malthusianism has gone out of fashion. Famines, we realise now, are mostly caused by politics – not food shortages – and as a result they are now less common.

Further reading

Why the population bomb is not going to explode

By Fred Pearce

But has that fostered complacency? Africa today is actually less self-sufficient in food than ever before. That is despite some fairly impressive improvements in agricultural yields. There are just too many people, and, perversely, for such a huge continent, not enough fertile land. The shortage is fueling violent conflict between farmers and nomadic herders from Nigeria’s Middle Belt through to Kenya’s northern rangelands.

During my travels across Africa over the past three years, I have begun to wonder if things might not get much worse before they get better. To make a fairly gross generalisation, in most African countries, politics is still more about how to share the existing wealth between an elite than it is about how to grow it for everybody.

To make sure that they get as much space at the trough as possible, politicians will stop at nothing, whipping up ethnic tension and division; stealing, bribing and threatening their way into office. In places where there is not a strong state, what persists instead is what the academic Alex de Waal calls “political entrepreneurship”. Politicians are essentially day traders, arbitraging between violence and money to gain power.

Last year, covering the Kenyan election, I arrived (by car) at a village in the Rift Valley where the president, Uhuru Kenyatta, was hosting a rally. The population could not have been more than a few thousands, and yet there were no less than four helicopters involved in shuttling Mr Kenyatta, his deputy and other dignitaries to the site. Renting a helicopter costs around $2,000 an hour in Kenya, so just in transport costs that rally probably cost as much as the entire village makes in a week.

It is obscene, but unfortunately, it seems to work: Mr Kenyatta did well in the Rift Valley. It is not that Kenyan voters are dupes. They know politicians are crooks. But then everyone is a crook, so they vote hoping that at the very least, maybe their crook will get in and sprinkle down some of the goodies.

Where are the factories, the call centres, the big firms which could actually give jobs and hope to the frustrated young people? Urbanisation ought to provide hope and industrialisation but it is not doing enough: most African cities are like smaller versions of Lagos.

People live in dysfunctional slums, where the only jobs are servicing the whims of elite. They work extremely hard just to survive. Water is carried; electricity is absent; food is cooked over open fires; disease is kept in check largely by cheap antibiotics. Meanwhile, the African rich opt out. They cope with potholes by driving Land Cruisers. When they get sick, they fly to Europe. Their children are educated at the best schools in the West. 

If you were a young African, would you put up with that? Or would you revolt? And what happens then? At some point in the next few decades we are going to find out.

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