Ikenna Emewu
World War I ended and ushered in a new world order that engendered unity among the nations. To ensure such calamity doesn’t beset humanity again, the League of Nations was born with some organs like the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) since 1919. The same WWI birthed the socialist/communist system that never existed beyond academic theories, as the Bolshevik Revolution incepted in Russia to give rise to the never earlier known Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) Just at its formation days, in 1921 in Shanghai, another seed of communism/socialism was sown with the Communist Party of China (CPC). After years of struggle with the Kuomingtan Party (Nationalist Party), CPC took over the leadership of China through the Peoples Revolution of October 1, 1949. Those changes have on their own tremendously changed the world.
The years between the WWI and World War II created opportunities during the Great Depression for the rise of an economic power and later political power, that bestraddle the world till today. When the WWII came, Hitler’s Nazism swept through with an destruction so shocking that the world went through a reset. The champion of evil had routed and brought the strongest civilization order or bloc, Europe, flat on its tummy and in tatters. Only one country was strong enough to bail the cat, the United States of America, a liaison territory and outpost of Europe. US rallied the world to its side as the fulcrum in economy and world political leadership. Since then, the world has changed most through the creation of the United Nations since 1945. It sired many agencies including the Bretton Woods Institutions that own and manage the world economy. As you read this, the IMF, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (World Bank) IFC and the IFAD completely own the world economy and decide who gets rich or poor. It is a world that belongs to the US alone, and it has fully managed it to the best of its personal benefits.
US the liaison territory of the crumbled Europe did its best for her motherland continent. And you know that all the 45 US presidents are all children of European migrants that founded the new world, including Barack Obama, whose white mother’s roots must be in Europe, and the present Donald Trump whose grandfather migrated to US from Germany in about 1884. UN created the IBR for the sole aim of the reconstruction of Europe from its ruins wrought by Hitler. It was the protest of the original South American state members who asked what their stake was since they needed no war ruin reconstruction that led to the addition of the word ‘and Development’. The institutions have served Europe and US best and most and used at the same time to subvert the interest of the rest to the benefit of the original owners.
In 1948, precisely, December 10, the UN took a bold and influential step, enacting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which laid the foundation for the creation of the second generation rights and rights bodies, the Economic and Social Rights (ECOSOC Rights). The birth of the state of Israel in 1948 was one of the initial steps to the enshrinement of human and political rights.
Flowing from there, the post Stalin days of USSR in the mid 1950s brought the progressive leadership of Nikita Khrushchev who made it a duty to blackmail, cajole and taunt Europe to start rethinking colonisation of Africa and parts of Asia. The decolonisation of the world was part of the benefits of opposition and bipolar world brought to the global stage at the UN by socialism/communism. They helped give wind to the sails of the hothead freedom fighters in Africa and Asia that had started agitating against Europe. In essence, the WWII had great impetus to the existence of the post war nation states in the world today. There are quite few colonial territories that had independence before the WWII.
Economically, since US used her strength to help out the world by staking its dollar as international transaction legal tender and the managing institutions as the international organs of its local economy, the US has owned the world economy till date. Any conclusion to the contrary is mere farce. Tapping into the entire global wealth and the bumper proceeds, US doesn’t want to lose its vice grip of manipulating the world and has done that so well to crush, grind, bully, destroy and poison any nation that came close to tampering with it. One of the ways of safeguarding that global estate at her feet have surfaced in making sure their economic mode of capitalism is the only ideology and its political shenanigan of democracy, no matter how terribly fraught in the inane is the only acceptable way. USSR tasted the sour pill after all its political ideology allies in East Europe were converted and eventually, Mikhail Gorbachev did the last job to dethrone socialism/capitalism through his Perestroika and Glasnost that helped foist a one-size-fits-all single order on the whole world.
While the crushing of the USSR was in the card, the plot to inadvertently raise another superpower in the East was in the works. In 1976, Mao Zedong, China’s maximum leader burnt out. Two years later, a scion of the West in nurture with the blood of the East in his veins by nature, Deng Xiaoping, took the driver’s seat in China and threw open the gates for fresh air.
Europe and US swooped on China to ‘convert’ them with enticing and juicy economic incentives using the Bretton Woods rules and players. At last China, would not be easily converted, rather opting to grow its own way. It was in middle October 2016, just few weeks before the US elected Donald Trump that I started seeing reason to support him. I attended the CPC Meeting With the World where it invited close to 80 political parties from all continents of the world where many of the experts and resource persons sounded the note of warning that Globalization was rearing to take a hit that would reconfigure the memory and function of the existing world order.
There in Chongqing, China’s most populous city to the west, at the summit, I saw reason to wish that Trump won. Why? Because I dreamed to see a jolt that would startle Africa out of its complacent slumber of waiting for the world to feed and cater to her through a gamut of deceits and robberies called assistances. They have kept Africa comatose in addition to the most supine and loathsome leadership piloted by mediocres. Africa’s leadership is manned by a clan of characters bereft of ideology or self-worth who feel ok living beggarly and rag-tag. It emanated from a rogue generation of gun-totting brigands who were in hurry to wrest power from the dignified Africans that wrestled with the colonial masters and pulled us from their slavery. Gun possessors, after training to kill, seized political power instead. They knew only the benefits of power and how to get it from the holders by force and not how to wisely use it. They ran riot in almost all African countries and entrenched kakistocracy that has pervaded in diverse manifestations. That is what Nigeria still suffers, together with others in the hands of people that have used forceful power to retain power.
Emewu, journalist, is Executive Director of Afri-China Media Centre, Lagos