AFRICANS, ARE YOU LEARNING FROM THE FATE OF VENEZUELA AND IRAN?
(An essay on political realism.)
By Ozodi Osuji
For some reason, Africans overindulge in political idealism, political sentimentalism, and talk nonsense about how European imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism are impoverishing Africans. What they say is, of course, empirical and true, but they say it as if they want to make Europeans feel guilt and, out of guilt, change their ways and stop exploiting Africans.
Where in nature is it written that Europeans should not go to any part of the world and get what they need to live on?
The very natural resources that Africans accuse Europeans of taking from Africa do not belong to Africans; they belong to nature, and nature belongs to whoever can take from it what it has.
It took millions of years for nature to form fossil fuels in the ground, and that was before human beings formed. The human beings who now live where oil or any other mineral is found were not living there in the past.
Most Africans who today live in any particular part of Africa have not lived there for ten thousand years; that is, they are recent visitors to what they call their countries and were not there when nature was forming minerals under the ground.
Those minerals belong to nature, and any human being who has the science, technology, and power to take them. Other people can also use power to knock them out of the land and take those natural resources.
You do not make people feel guilty for taking what belongs to nature that you call your land, which is not your land. The entire land on planet Earth belongs to all human beings, animals, and plants.
It is nonsensical to say that the land you find yourself living on is your land; it belongs to nature, and you are only a temporary occupant of that land, not its owner.
Political realism understands that to those who have power, military and political, the things of this world belong.
On the other hand, political sentimentalism talks as if making people feel guilty for doing what makes them live well would make them give their wealth to the poor and bring the poor to living at the level of the rich. This is total childishness.
Power rules the world; power ruled it yesterday, today, and will rule it tomorrow. As we talk, the most powerful country on planet earth, the USA, decided it wants to control the oil reserve in Venezuela and Iran; it simply sent its military, and they kidnapped President Maduro.
Maduro, like most third-world leaders, was a big mouth and talked big without having the military to match his childish talk. He lacked the bravery to fight the Americans. The next in line to learn the lesson of power politics was Iran (Cuba and Nigeria are in the rear mirror).
The crazy clerics who hijacked Iran in 1979 and held the Iranian people hostage talked about what they were going to do to what they called the evil empire of America. Liberal Americans condoned them, left them alone, and then the pendulum swung to the right, and America elected a man who has no sentimentalism, who does not have a sense of guilt, and does not feel remorse for his and his people’s so-called past wrongs. In fact, he is proud of their past behaviors and regrets that they did not kill off all Natives and Africans after using them as slaves to spare the people from the eyesore of seeing poor black folks all over the place.
The man has no moral qualms about anything and you can stand on your head and talk your neocolonialism razzmatazz and that is not going to make him feel sympathy for you; in fact, the more you talk the more he wants you dead, for he does not believe that you are a human being, after all you are unable to rule your country well.
What are African leaders but thieves in government? White European conservatives do not listen to the nonsensical talk of the wrong they supposedly did to make Africa poor.
Do you have what they want? If yes, they will come to take it. If you do not want them to come take it, then develop your country, industrialize Africa, have a powerful military, and use force to stop their force.
But as long as Africa remains corruption’s haven and its leaders only know how to talk anti colonialism rant, as if they were the only colonialized people on earth, all Europeans at one time or another were ruled by other people, well, as long as Africans are only Mister Loud Mouths, Europeans will swoop in and take from the Congo Rare Earth minerals, copper and whatever else it has; they will come take oil from Nigeria, Angola and whatever else Africa has that they desire to run their industries.
Iranian Muslim clerics called Americans evil; the wonder is why Americans did not knock them off long ago (Iranian students took 52 US Embassy staff hostage for over one year in 1979). America could have, in the past, swooped in and knocked out the clerics and imposed another Mohammed Mossadegh as the prime minister of Iran, as it did in 1953.
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has been making noise, calling America negative names. In the meantime, his Country, developed by white folks, has run down and joined other African countries in their preferred fourth world status. Unemployment is off the roof. Crime is pervasive, and life has reverted to what Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan, 1651) described as “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Mr. Ramaphosa is out there excoriating the USA, unaware that little Israel’s commandos can fly in and kidnap him and take him to Tel Aviv and try him as a common criminal, as they are doing to Maduro in New York City.
What is South Africa going to do about it if it has no military power to protect its people? Talk about International law? The West made those laws and can unmake them when it suits them!
Africans are a pathetic people; they refuse to do the right thing, develop their continent, and are economically and militarily powerful. In the past, they allowed their people to be sold to Arabs and white men. In the present, all they do is try to make other people feel guilty for using available labor to do work, and when that labor is no longer needed, they are discarded.
Artificial intelligence and robots will soon be used to do farm work and other menial work, and no one would want Africans in the West to come to do the menial labor they were used to doing in the past.
What exactly is the matter with Africans? Why can’t they become realistic and do what develops their continent and makes it strong?
The world is now moving towards political realism; it is bye-bye to political idealism, and, as such, Africans may even be removed from Africa, and white folks come and live on the land. After all, the land belongs to nature, not to Africans.
Wait and see if white folks will not take over the lands of Africa and drown Africans in the oceans, use them to feed fish, who cares?
If you cannot govern your continent right, why should you be allowed to live? The time for sentimentalism is over, my friends; if all African so-called scholars can do is write infantile stuff about how Europe and America exploit Africa, they are dunces.
Where is it written in nature, not as a mere social construct, that Europeans should not exploit Africans? Did God say so?
Where is evidence that God exists? If God does not exist, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky said in The Brothers Karamazov, all behavior is permitted.
Note
In several books, I tried to show Africans how to govern themselves and live in the world of social realism; I preached the gospel of transforming Africa from its primitive cultures to embracing the scientific culture and the scientific methodological approach to phenomena. Instead of dealing with reality, Africans crawled back to the primitive world that made it easy for a handful of Europeans to defeat and rule them. If Africa is not modernized in the next thirty years, I believe that it will be recolonized, and that would serve it right.
Ozodi Osuji
March 8, 2026
1 (541) 636-6682
Leave a comment