BY LEKAN SOTE
While attempting to predict that the United States of America will soon lose its supremacy over the rest of the global village to China, a friend traced the story of how the domination of the world passed from one civilization to another through history.
He claimed that after the Phoenicians, Egypt became the next leader of the world, after which the Greeks took over. Romans became the leading civilisation before yielding to Great Britain. In the 19th Century Germany, under Otto Von Bismarck, briefly led the world before yielding to America.
In 1884-1885 the world powers met in Berlin to carve up Africa among themselves, as you would barbecue after a hunting expedition. They allocated parts of Africa to themselves without consulting the Africans.
And, with subterfuge, gunboat diplomacy, trade, and religion, the countries of the Old World, which included Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, subdued Africa. The use of religion was the most interesting.
The missionaries combined intelligence gathering with their missionary work. While they filed their reports back home, they replaced the concepts of the local religions with those of Christianity.
This was how Christians took away the Roman gods, Jupiters, Juno, Neptune, Apollo, Mars, Specta and others, and replaced them with the trinity of God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as prescribed by Christians.
Toward the middle of the 20th Century the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics briefly emerged as the world’s economic power, but soon yielded its supremacy back to America, which has been running a unipolar world after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The Soviet Union was the first to send a man, Yuri Gagarin, to space. That caused American President, John F. Kennedy, to mandate American scientists to get a man to land on the moon before the Soviets. In 1969, American astronaut, Neil Armstrong, stepped out of the Apollo XI spaceship onto the moon with the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
But the Second World War between the Axis Powers and the Allied Forces from 1939 to 1945 was the defining moment when America ended its Isolationist Policy to throw its weight around the world with careless abandon.
That’s when what international relations scholars referred to as the New World Order commenced, I and the West, led by America, established the Bretton Woods institutions and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation military bogey to cow the rest of the world..
A guest on the eponymous Charlie Rose TV talk show explained that America became the superpower of the world because, after the Second World War, America had half of the world’s Gross Domestic Product, 80 percent of the world’s money with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the most formidable military power.
All that is about to change. China, with the distant second largest economy of the world, and probably also a distant fourth largest military in the world, is contesting supremacy over the whole world with America.
One could say that Asians are taking over Britain, with Rishi Sunak, of Indian origin as Prime Minister of Britain, First Minister of Scotland, openly gay Prime Minister of Ireland and Mayor of London are Pakistani.
“But the optics is that China is the most visible in granting loans to Nigeria and other African countries, while the leader of the West and custodian of the values of democracy and free market economics is found wanting in that department”
These days, citizens of the peripheral nations are wondering aloud why Presidents of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund must always be American or West European members of the European Union.
Observers now think the Ukrainian-Russian War is probably a proxy war, fought by Russia on behalf of China, against America, the current world superpower, whose influence is waning really fast.
China is fighting the supremacy war by means other than amassing a military arsenal. Maybe it learnt from the experience of the Soviet Union that amassed arms to the detriment of its need for bread. American President Donald Reagan saw the weakness and played on it.
Rather than employ the typical Western tactic of subverting weaker governments around the world, especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia, China embarked on a charm offensive enabled by loans with generous terms.
A report earlier in 2023 claimed that Nigeria’s foreign debt increased from $1.58 billion in 2015, when President Muhammadu Buhari assumed responsibility for the economy of Nigeria, to a dizzying $4.85 billion by end of September 2022.
You may be amazed to know that whereas America was nowhere in the pack of lenders to Nigeria, China, with $4.29 billion, which is about 83.57 per cent of the total loan portfolio, is the biggest creditor. It is followed by France, Japan, India and Germany, in that order.
But, of course, out of the $13.46 billion that Nigeria owes the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, America should have contributed a part. So, as you can see, Nigeria indirectly will owe America (and itself, as a subscriber to the two multilateral agencies).
But the optics is that China is the most visible in granting loans to Nigeria and other African countries, while the leader of the West and custodian of the values of democracy and free market economics is found wanting in that department.
And now, trade. In 2021, the volume of America’s trade with the African Continent, with more than 1.2 billion inhabitants, was a paltry $64 billion, whereas China traded as much as $261 billion with Africa.
And Russia, if you like to know, has replaced America as the number one arms supplier to Africa. Also, China has entered into the Western hemisphere to replace America as the biggest trading partner of resource-rich Brazil.
The Chinese Yuan, and no longer the American dollar, is the preferred currency for trading in Russia these days. After America and its allies slammed economic sanctions against Russia in 2014 and 2022 over the Ukrainian-Russian War, Russia made the following announcement:
“We are in favour of using the Chinese Yuan for settlements between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America,” the economic South or the Third World or peripheral nations or poorest regions of the world.
And if Russia is able to convince the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries-Plus to adopt the Russian Ruble as its currency of trade, that would be a lethal blow to the economy and civilisation of America.
You were probably taught in your high school economics class that a wise nation would accumulate any number of hard currencies as foreign reserves, at the ready for at least six months of importation.
You probably never asked in what currency America, which simply prints its dollars at a whim, keeps its foreign reserves. The answer is in the aphorism that says only the victor gets to write history after a war.
A report indicates that Japan, a traditional trading partner of America, is appearing to prefer to buy Russian oil rather than obtain the commodity from America as it used to do. Times are really changing.
China is taking advantage of its relatively cheaper labour force (when compared to labour in America), to attract makers of the world’s biggest multinationals to manufacture their international brands, like Apple products, electronics appliances and other Fast Moving Consumer Goods.
That times are changing is in the Hausa aphorism, “Sarki ngoma, samoni ngoma,” or ten kings means ten reigns.
