What About Africa? Dictators And Rare Earths - A Continent Whose Only Value Is In The Ground

Africa is a continent ruled by corrupt dictatorships on all points of the compass, undeveloped, tribal, and backward.  Civil wars are common - Angola, Somalia, Yemen, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and most of the Sahel are fighting one war or another. Ethiopia and Eritrea have fought over the same patch of scratchy, useless land or decades. The Congo has been a bloody battleground for years ever since the Rwandan Hutus took residence in the east and fought the government for the region's valuable mineral wealth. 

If there is no civil conflict it is because dictators have ruled with an iron hand, suppressing any opposition with a combination of brute force,  sadistic secret police, and lavish financial incentives for supporters in the army and police.

Those countries like Ghana which have been notably free from both dictatorships and endemic corruption, have hardly budged from a simple agricultural society barely able to feed itself.  South Africa after apartheid - an era during which industry, commerce, and finance thrived and enabled the country to be close to the developed nations of Europe - has fallen into a crime-ridden, corrupt, tribally nasty place. 

American liberal administrations have bent over backward to find and support any sign of progress in Africa.  Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State bought the empty promises of a President of Mali that he would hold free and fair elections and poured millions of development money into the country. She was  surprised when he won with ninety-five percent of the vote, and then was toppled in a violent coup by a disaffected army, leaving the country open to insurrection, violence, and Islamization. 

The Biden Administration was no different.  Desperate to show his black constituents that he had not forgotten their homeland, he poured hundreds of millions of dollars in aid into the continent with no concern for how it was spent.  'Africans are good, honest, admirable, trustworthy people', he famously said when promoting his Foreign Aid bill, 'and we are confident that every cent of our financial support will be put to good use'. 

Not surprisingly every last cent of that largesse went into offshore bank accounts, mansions and presidential palaces, and investment in the far more lucrative drug, emerald, human trafficking trades. 

A senior official in the Biden Administration was quoted as saying:

The American black is heir to the forest's environmental wisdom, a being, thanks to his intimacy with the world around him, is more sentient, naturally intelligent, and more emotionally prosperous than anyone of European descent.  While the white kings, queens, and emperors were raping the world in a vicious attempt to colonize brown and black people, the African forest-dweller maintained his dignity and honor.  We will repay the African for his heroism.

African Big Men, Presidents-For-Life, imperial rulers all reacted with delight.  More no-strings-attached money would be coming soon, their Aruba holdings would triple, and groundbreaking for their third homes in Biarritz and Cannes would begin. 

'Basket case', said Donald Trump when approached by a Congressman worried about Africa now that USAID had disappeared and the continent would be without United States support.  The President went on to lecture the supplicant on how foreign aid had been nothing more than an entitlement to corruption. 'Just like the slums in DC', he went on. 'A bonanza, a license to spend like a drunken lottery winner in a whore house.  Not a dime from me'. 

The President's words were leaked to the press, and the Left cried foul - another example of the racist, arrogant, white supremacy of Donald Trump - but Trump was unmoved. 'Worse than a basket case', he replied. 'A dump with oil'. 

This of course enraged his opponents even more, and the moribund Black Lives Matter movement came to life.  LaShonda Evans, the only one of the organization's leaders not jailed for misuse of funds and fraud, and in hopes of revitalizing the black power resurgence took to the airwaves.  She was unbowed in her attacks on the president as a racist bigot, a white supremacist, an arrogant neo-colonialist, and a man intent on re-enslaving 'the motherlode', Africa. 

'Bullshit', said the President. 

Now, it would be unfair to say that the American president did not care about Africa.  He did, just not for those ruling the continent or the people living within it (they would have to wake up and die right, demand justice, democracy, and a free society).  He wanted what was under the ground - the trillions of dollars worth of oil, gas, minerals and rare earths that the Chinese were already cornering.  

The Chinese made deals without 'conditionalities'. Give us your neodymium and we will rebuild your ports, roads, and critical infrastructure.  No promises to reform the justice system, to encourage a free press, or open the books.  Just load up our trucks, and we'll be on our way. 

'That's how to do it', said Trump, echoing the Machiavellian approach to foreign policy that characterized his second term.  The days of moral exceptionalism were dead and gone, decisions were made on the basis of American interests, and by so doing the United States joined the Putin-Xi club, both of whom had only similar interests in mind. 

'Capitalist, war-mongering dictator!' shouted the Left; but they had gotten one thing right. Trump was indeed a resolute capitalist who favored capital over labor.  Rare earths over a population barely able to read, let alone produce.  It was no different in America where capitalists cheered the AI, robotic revolution - the final burial of the fairytale legends of Gompers, Lafollette, and Brandeis, unionists, labor organizers, rent strikers.  The world was all about investment, markets, innovation, and production - all of which could be handled without the inefficiency of human work. 

'The most immoral president ever', wrote a columnist in the liberal press.  

'They got the spelling wrong', said Trump, smiling. 'That would be amoral not immoral'.  The man knew his philosophical exegesis all right, and cited his conservative, free-market, competitive, Darwinian domestic policies and his Machiavellian foreign ones.  'There's no room for morality in governance. Morality is for church'. 

Historians understood this seemingly arrogant propositions.  The American Neo-Cons, that cabal of arch-conservative advisors to George Bush insisted on American exceptionalism - that foreign policy must be based on moral principles embodied in the American constitution.  Machiavelli was just an afterthought.  The perilous times of today demanded sound moral principles and their evangelism.  Democracy was of a higher order of being and the world should know and adopt it. 

Nonsense, said Trump. 'Idiots always spoil the party'.  The whole race-gender-ethnicity, diversity-equity-inclusivity, identity charade was nothing more than inverted exceptionalism - a secular faith-based program with no historical, philosophical, or rational basis. 

America's Africa policy is a self-interested, Machiavellian one.  There is only one thing important in Africa, and that is under the ground, and while the President wishes the people of continent good luck in their fight to establish democracy, that is their affair.  As in all politics, the ruled are complicit in the deeds of the ruling. 

'What about us?', shouted LaShonda Evans rudely in her audience with the President.  'What about us black folk?' 

The President smiled, asked Ms. Evans if she would like a cup of tea, listened to her harangue, enjoying every minute of her fiery elocution ('they're good at that') and politely ushering her out the door.