Without Africa, France Would Be a Third World Country
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The title of this article was attributed to the late French President from 1995 to 2007, Jacques Chirac.
The reasoning behind this statement isn’t at out of place and it has been powerfully reinforced in the last few weeks.
For those who aren’t up to date on world affairs, there was a military coup in Niger Republic and its fall out on the global stage has really been quite extraordinary.
The United States of America and France have been piling the pressure on the recently elected Nigerian (not to be mistaken with Niger) president to deploy his troops and remove those who dared to kick out their stooge.
But Niger really shouldn’t matter in the scheme of things, right, given that it is one of the poorest countries in the world?
Well somehow, it does.
And this is due to vast quantities of mineral resources buried underneath its soil.
Folks, we are talking about Uranium, here.
Uranium is responsible for keeping the lights on, wherever a nuclear power plant exists.
And Niger’s Uranium is responsible for a third of France’s power supply, a fact which becomes utterly unpalatable when you learn that a tiny percentage (20) of the Nigerien population has access to electricity.
And yet, this is nothing compared the stranglehold which France has on West and Central Africa.
But I have written about this subject matter far too many times on this platform.
What’s of great importance here is what the colonized are doing about the profoundly unequal relationship which exists between them and their former colonial masters.
The wave of coups which we have seen across the Sahel in the last few years speak powerfully to the anti-French feeling, right now.
The likes of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Mauritania are light years behind their English speaking neighbours.
While Kwame Nkrumah had the great sense to create a national currency in 1961 and breakaway from Britain’s economic control, you have the extremely embarrassing situation of having fourteen former French…