Transcription
The World Bank just told Nigeria to open its petrol market back up to foreign imports. Nigeria finally has a refinery, Africa's largest, built by a Nigerian, supplying Nigeria's fuel for the first time in decades, sending jet fuel to Europe during a global energy crisis. And the World Bank's response is to tell Nigeria to let foreign importers back in to compete with it. They like to call it restoring competition. But let's call it what it actually is.
You see, the moment that Africa starts winning, the West finds a way to change the rules. Where was the World Bank when Shell was poisoning the Niger Delta? Between 1976 and 2001, there were over 6,800 oil spills in Nigeria's Niger Delta. European oil companies contaminated groundwater at levels 900 times above WHO safety limits. A 2023 report described it as an environmental genocide. Oil spills in the Delta are connected to 16,000 neonatal deaths every year. Life expectancy dropped to just 41 years.
The World Bank issued no emergency reports, imposed no conditions on European governments. They didn't say a word. But the moment a Nigerian builds a refinery that threatens European import dominance, they publish a report. Then they quietly take it down a couple days after Dangote pushes back because they knew exactly what they were doing and then they got caught.
The president of the World Bank has always been an American. The managing director of the IMF has always been European. A British citizen's vote in the IMF is worth 23 times more than a Nigerian's vote. These are not neutral institutions. They were designed under colonialism and they remain colonial in character. Their conditions are reserved exclusively for Africa. For the nations that watched Thomas Sankara get assassinated for rejecting the IMF, that watched Patrice Lumumba get murdered, for wanting to keep Congo's wealth in Congo's hands. The consequences of saying no have never been economic. They have always been existential.
Every nation has a sovereign right to determine what it does with its own natural resources. No institution controlled by nations that didn't just colonize Africa, but systematically genocided its people, looted its resources, and built entire economies on African blood and labor have any moral authority over a single grain of African soil. The IMF and the World Bank are not Africa's partners. They are Africa's obstacles. And it's long past time that African nations treat them that way. And if you didn't know, now you know.