Essential The Africa the Media Doesn't Tell You About
- Thread starter TommyHilltrigga
- Start date
loyola llothta
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Red Shield
Global Domination
loyola llothta
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Amazon’s Drive Into Africa
in World — by Dr Binoy Kampmark— 25/08/2021
Since 2004, Amazon has been building a foothold on the African continent. In Cape Town, it already employs thousands in a global call centre and a range of data hubs. Its South African career portal is a busy place, with the vast majority of advertised jobs located in Cape Town. In April, as part of its aggrandising drive into the continent, the company announced that it would be opening its African headquarters as part of a new, multipurpose development.
link:
Amazon’s Drive Into Africa| Countercurrents
in World — by Dr Binoy Kampmark— 25/08/2021
Since 2004, Amazon has been building a foothold on the African continent. In Cape Town, it already employs thousands in a global call centre and a range of data hubs. Its South African career portal is a busy place, with the vast majority of advertised jobs located in Cape Town. In April, as part of its aggrandising drive into the continent, the company announced that it would be opening its African headquarters as part of a new, multipurpose development.
link:
Amazon’s Drive Into Africa| Countercurrents
loyola llothta
☭☭☭
25 August 2021
Algeria and Morocco Cut Diplomatic Ties and Heighten Tensions in North Africa
By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
Algeria and Morocco broke diplomatic ties this Tuesday due to new disagreements over the Western Sahara issue and accusations of espionage. The decision came from Algeria, which historically supports the Polisario Front, a paramilitary organization that fights the Moroccan government and seeks the independence of Western Sahara. Now it remains to be seen which country will mediate the bilateral dialogue in order to ease frictions.
link:
Algeria and Morocco cut diplomatic ties and heighten tensions in North Africa
loyola llothta
☭☭☭
loyola llothta
☭☭☭
France and the U.S. are backing these coups all over the Sahel to get China out the paint and control their mines — bauxite and iron mines in Guinea's case — while using the people's dissatisfaction with their governments as a pretext. A China-backed consortium had recently struck an iron ore deal with Guinea but they might have to go back to getting their iron from Australia after this.
Also connected to this: in the 2000s, China struck a minerals-for-infrastructure deal with DRC worth nine billion dollars but it was renegotiated to a six-billion-dollar deal in 2009 after pressure from the U.S. and it's being renegotiated again, there was also a deal given to China Three Gorges Corporation to build a dam in DRC but it was renegotiated last month and given to Australia's Fortescue Metals Group which is also in Guinea.
Red Shield
Global Domination
cold game....
but yeah if I'm China you have to know the west wasn't gonna give up africa without pulling some shyt
The US is turning oil-rich Nigeria into a proxy for its Africa wars
TJ COLES·SEPTEMBER 13, 2021
US Army trainers drill Nigerian soldiers in Jaji between Jan. 15 and Feb. 22, 2018
Under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent.
Last month, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times. It might as well have been written by the Pentagon. Buhari promoted Brand Nigeria, auctioning the country’s military services to Western powers, telling readers that Nigeria would lead Africa’s “war on terror” in exchange for foreign infrastructure investment. “Though some believe the war on terror [WOT] winds down with the US departure from Afghanistan,” he says, “the threat it was supposed to address burns fiercely on my continent.”
With Boko Haram and Islamic State operating in and near Nigeria, pushing a WOT narrative is easy. But counterterror means imperial intervention. So, why is the Pentagon really interested in Nigeria, a country with a GDP of around $430 billion – some $300 billion less than the Pentagon’s annual budget – a population with a 40 percent absolute poverty rate, and an infant mortality rate of 74 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to 5.6 per 1,000 in the US?
A US Naval Postgraduate School doctoral thesis from over a decade ago offers a plausible explanation: the Gulf of Guinea, formed in part by Nigeria’s coastline, “has large deposits of hydrocarbons and other natural resources.” It added: “There is now a stiff international competition among industrialized nations including the United States, some European countries, China, Japan, and India.”
Since then, the US has been quietly transforming Nigeria’s police and military into a neo-colonial force that can support missions led by the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). Buhari’s offer makes US involvement in Nigeria appear as if Nigeria is asking for help, when in fact the stage is already set for AFRICOM.
The Pentagon’s broader aim is to stop China and Russia from gaining a foothold in the continent. In the meantime, it aims to crush any and all opposition groups that disrupt energy supplies so that oil giants can continue exploiting Nigeria’s resources.
A brief history of a complex country
It’s important to get an idea of Nigeria’s ethnic and regional complexities. The country’s 206 million people, nearly half of whom are Muslim and nearly half Christian, live north of the equator in West Africa. Their country has 36 states, seven of which are coastal. The country borders Cameroon in the east, Benin in the west, Chad in the northeast, and Niger in the north and northwest.
A US Strategic Studies Institute report from the mid-‘90s describes Nigeria as “an artificial state created according to colonial exigencies rather than ethnic coherence.” Its fragility explains the country’s susceptibility to ethnic, religious, and class warfare. The majority of Nigerian Muslims are Sunni, but Islam in the country spans the spectrum, from Sufism to Salafism. The Christian population is distributed among the Protestant majority as well as Anglicans, Baptists, Evangelicals, Catholics, Methodists, and Roman Catholics. Most of Nigeria’s Muslims live in the north in 12 states whose laws are based on sharia.
Nigeria boasts hundreds of languages and ethnicities, the largest groups being the Hausa (who make up 30 percent of the population), Yoruba (15.5), Igbo (a.k.a., Ibo 15.2), and Fulani (6 percent). There are, of course, exceptions, but in general the Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri peoples tend to be Muslim and the Igbo, Ijaw, and Ogoni Christian. Islam and Christianity tend to be mixed among the Yoruba. During the late-19th century “Scramble for Africa,” the British colonized the region, Christianizing the south and leaving in place the Islamic political structures in the north both for convenience and as a useful divide and rule technique.
Black gold, British rule
Drawing up “contracts” for energy companies, the Foreign Office (FO) created a monopoly for Anglo-Persian oil (later BP) and particularly for Shell. Prospecting contracts were awarded by the FO in the late-1930s, but it was as late as 1956 that financially viable amounts of black gold were struck. Most of the country’s oil is in the southern, Niger Delta region populated by the Ijaw and Ogoni peoples, hence there is little militant Islam in Nigeria’s illicit oil sector. Shell operations began in Ogoniland in 1958.
Nigeria gained slow and painful independence from Britain in 1960. Seven years later, armed Igbo fought a war of secession in the oil-rich south to try to form their own country, the Republic of Biafra. Under a One Nigeria policy, the British supported the central regime of General Yakubu Gowon during the Biafra War (1967-70). Fighting and blockade led to three million deaths. Biafra failed to secede.
The UK Labour government’s Commonwealth Minister, George Thomas, explained at the time: “The sole immediate British interest in Nigeria is that the Nigerian economy should be brought back to a condition in which our substantial trade and investment in the country can be further developed, and particularly so we can regain access to important oil installations.”
As the British Empire declined, the US gradually pursued the same policy in Nigeria. At first, the US considered supporting Biafra.
The Kennedy administration initiated $170 million in economic and military spending in Nigeria under a plan that continued until 1966, into the Johnson administration. William Haven North, who served as the Director for Central and West African Affairs for the US Agency of International Development (USAID) said: “The issue of supporting Biafra was also tied up with the question of oil interests; the major part of the oil reserves in Nigeria were in the Eastern Region with substantial American oil company investments.” In 1978, the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet began the regular exercises in the Gulf of Guinea that continue to the present.
Indigenous activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was arrested on phony charges and executed by a Nigerian military functioning as a private army for the Shell oil company
Enter Uncle Sam
In 1990, the Nigeria-dominated Economic Community of West African States (ECO) established a military wing, the so-called Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). The George H.W. Bush administration contributed $100 million. The succeeding Clinton White House said that for so-called peace-keeping operations in other African countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, “Nigeria provided most of the ‘muscle’.” At this point, the seeds were sown for Nigeria’s use as a delegate for US wars in Africa.
By the dawn of the new millennium, the 3rd Special Forces Group (Army Command) was training Nigerian battalions to assist United Nations support missions. The Nigerian military enjoyed tens of millions of dollars-worth of US weapons.
Meanwhile, indigenous activists suffering under oil spills and environmental destruction established the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Nine of this group’s leaders, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were later arrested on trumped up charges and executed by the national military that had been funded by Shell to act as its own private army.
The murders sparked international outrage and activists successfully pressured the US to terminate military aid. General Sani Abacha, under whose dictatorship the Ogoni Nine were hanged, established a Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) to fight both activists and gangs. The MNJTF was later centered in Chad and used as a base from which to fight Boko Haram.
In 1999, Nigeria ended its military rule, at least on paper. By the mid-2000s, Human Rights Watch was wrote that, under the façade of parliamentary democracy, “the conduct of many public officials and government institutions is so pervasively marked by violence and corruption as to more resemble criminal activity than democratic governance.”
With the Ogoni, Ijaw, and other Niger Delta peoples crushed with force, some turned to violence. Following lobbying by Shell, Nigeria’s old colonial master, the UK, began spending taxpayer money on military operations to counter armed groups: £12 million between 2001 and 2014, when Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) co-authored their report. CAAT documents the UK exportation of nearly £500m-worth of weapons to Nigeria in that period, including missiles and grenades. It cites increased UK arms exports as a direct reason for the failure of the southern ceasefire. UK “security contractors” including Control Risks, Erinys, Executive Outcomes, and Saladin Security were embedded with mobile police units to crush protestors.
Nigeria and the “war on terror”
Western propaganda paid less attention to Shell’s systemic violence against the Ogoni and other peoples, focusing instead on the more headline-grabbing resistance, such as high-profile ransom kidnappings and pipeline disruption. State oppression in the drier, less fertile north, meanwhile, fed the narrative pushed by Islamic groups: that Western culture is toxic.
Founded in 2002 and led by Mohammed Yusuf who was later executed by the state, Boko Haram is officially called the Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad (Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād). It emerged in the northeastern city, Maidugari, close to Chad and Cameroon, where it set up semi-autonomous communities. Religious graduates who studied in Sudan attempted to form similar communes but were attacked by the police. In 2009, Boko Haram members allegedly fired at a police station in Bauchi. The government response was to trigger civil war.
The MNJTF mentioned above, is described as “notorious” in a British House of Commons Library report. It was reactivated, this time to fight the Islamists. The report also notes how the Nigerian Armed Forces terrorized the civilian population with raids, arrests, and indiscriminate shelling.
The UK ramped up its training of Nigeria’s military while the US used Chad as a base for its “war on terror” operations: the Pan-Sahel Initiative (covering Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) and the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (which included Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and Tunisia). AFRICOM’s initial operations in Nigeria involved maritime training and integrating the country’s forces with those of other African nations to foster pan-African military alliances.
In its early years, AFRICOM paid little attention to Boko Haram. But this changed as the profile of attacks got bigger.
In 2011, Boko Haram launched a formal insurgency. A report published that year by the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence outlined Boko Haram’s roots and the reasons for its popularity. They included “a feeling of alienation from the wealthier, Christian, oil-producing, southern Nigeria, pervasive poverty, rampant government corruption, heavy-handed security measures, and the belief that relations with the West are a corrupting influence.” It added that “[t]hese grievances have led to sympathy among the local Muslim population despite Boko Haram’s violent tactics.”
These grievances were met with the kind of violence that further fuels grievances.
TJ COLES·SEPTEMBER 13, 2021
US Army trainers drill Nigerian soldiers in Jaji between Jan. 15 and Feb. 22, 2018
Under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent.
Last month, Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times. It might as well have been written by the Pentagon. Buhari promoted Brand Nigeria, auctioning the country’s military services to Western powers, telling readers that Nigeria would lead Africa’s “war on terror” in exchange for foreign infrastructure investment. “Though some believe the war on terror [WOT] winds down with the US departure from Afghanistan,” he says, “the threat it was supposed to address burns fiercely on my continent.”
With Boko Haram and Islamic State operating in and near Nigeria, pushing a WOT narrative is easy. But counterterror means imperial intervention. So, why is the Pentagon really interested in Nigeria, a country with a GDP of around $430 billion – some $300 billion less than the Pentagon’s annual budget – a population with a 40 percent absolute poverty rate, and an infant mortality rate of 74 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared to 5.6 per 1,000 in the US?
A US Naval Postgraduate School doctoral thesis from over a decade ago offers a plausible explanation: the Gulf of Guinea, formed in part by Nigeria’s coastline, “has large deposits of hydrocarbons and other natural resources.” It added: “There is now a stiff international competition among industrialized nations including the United States, some European countries, China, Japan, and India.”
Since then, the US has been quietly transforming Nigeria’s police and military into a neo-colonial force that can support missions led by the US Africa Command (AFRICOM). Buhari’s offer makes US involvement in Nigeria appear as if Nigeria is asking for help, when in fact the stage is already set for AFRICOM.
The Pentagon’s broader aim is to stop China and Russia from gaining a foothold in the continent. In the meantime, it aims to crush any and all opposition groups that disrupt energy supplies so that oil giants can continue exploiting Nigeria’s resources.
A brief history of a complex country
It’s important to get an idea of Nigeria’s ethnic and regional complexities. The country’s 206 million people, nearly half of whom are Muslim and nearly half Christian, live north of the equator in West Africa. Their country has 36 states, seven of which are coastal. The country borders Cameroon in the east, Benin in the west, Chad in the northeast, and Niger in the north and northwest.
A US Strategic Studies Institute report from the mid-‘90s describes Nigeria as “an artificial state created according to colonial exigencies rather than ethnic coherence.” Its fragility explains the country’s susceptibility to ethnic, religious, and class warfare. The majority of Nigerian Muslims are Sunni, but Islam in the country spans the spectrum, from Sufism to Salafism. The Christian population is distributed among the Protestant majority as well as Anglicans, Baptists, Evangelicals, Catholics, Methodists, and Roman Catholics. Most of Nigeria’s Muslims live in the north in 12 states whose laws are based on sharia.
Nigeria boasts hundreds of languages and ethnicities, the largest groups being the Hausa (who make up 30 percent of the population), Yoruba (15.5), Igbo (a.k.a., Ibo 15.2), and Fulani (6 percent). There are, of course, exceptions, but in general the Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri peoples tend to be Muslim and the Igbo, Ijaw, and Ogoni Christian. Islam and Christianity tend to be mixed among the Yoruba. During the late-19th century “Scramble for Africa,” the British colonized the region, Christianizing the south and leaving in place the Islamic political structures in the north both for convenience and as a useful divide and rule technique.
Black gold, British rule
Drawing up “contracts” for energy companies, the Foreign Office (FO) created a monopoly for Anglo-Persian oil (later BP) and particularly for Shell. Prospecting contracts were awarded by the FO in the late-1930s, but it was as late as 1956 that financially viable amounts of black gold were struck. Most of the country’s oil is in the southern, Niger Delta region populated by the Ijaw and Ogoni peoples, hence there is little militant Islam in Nigeria’s illicit oil sector. Shell operations began in Ogoniland in 1958.
Nigeria gained slow and painful independence from Britain in 1960. Seven years later, armed Igbo fought a war of secession in the oil-rich south to try to form their own country, the Republic of Biafra. Under a One Nigeria policy, the British supported the central regime of General Yakubu Gowon during the Biafra War (1967-70). Fighting and blockade led to three million deaths. Biafra failed to secede.
The UK Labour government’s Commonwealth Minister, George Thomas, explained at the time: “The sole immediate British interest in Nigeria is that the Nigerian economy should be brought back to a condition in which our substantial trade and investment in the country can be further developed, and particularly so we can regain access to important oil installations.”
As the British Empire declined, the US gradually pursued the same policy in Nigeria. At first, the US considered supporting Biafra.
The Kennedy administration initiated $170 million in economic and military spending in Nigeria under a plan that continued until 1966, into the Johnson administration. William Haven North, who served as the Director for Central and West African Affairs for the US Agency of International Development (USAID) said: “The issue of supporting Biafra was also tied up with the question of oil interests; the major part of the oil reserves in Nigeria were in the Eastern Region with substantial American oil company investments.” In 1978, the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet began the regular exercises in the Gulf of Guinea that continue to the present.
Indigenous activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was arrested on phony charges and executed by a Nigerian military functioning as a private army for the Shell oil company
Enter Uncle Sam
In 1990, the Nigeria-dominated Economic Community of West African States (ECO) established a military wing, the so-called Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). The George H.W. Bush administration contributed $100 million. The succeeding Clinton White House said that for so-called peace-keeping operations in other African countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, “Nigeria provided most of the ‘muscle’.” At this point, the seeds were sown for Nigeria’s use as a delegate for US wars in Africa.
By the dawn of the new millennium, the 3rd Special Forces Group (Army Command) was training Nigerian battalions to assist United Nations support missions. The Nigerian military enjoyed tens of millions of dollars-worth of US weapons.
Meanwhile, indigenous activists suffering under oil spills and environmental destruction established the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. Nine of this group’s leaders, including Ken Saro-Wiwa, were later arrested on trumped up charges and executed by the national military that had been funded by Shell to act as its own private army.
The murders sparked international outrage and activists successfully pressured the US to terminate military aid. General Sani Abacha, under whose dictatorship the Ogoni Nine were hanged, established a Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) to fight both activists and gangs. The MNJTF was later centered in Chad and used as a base from which to fight Boko Haram.
In 1999, Nigeria ended its military rule, at least on paper. By the mid-2000s, Human Rights Watch was wrote that, under the façade of parliamentary democracy, “the conduct of many public officials and government institutions is so pervasively marked by violence and corruption as to more resemble criminal activity than democratic governance.”
With the Ogoni, Ijaw, and other Niger Delta peoples crushed with force, some turned to violence. Following lobbying by Shell, Nigeria’s old colonial master, the UK, began spending taxpayer money on military operations to counter armed groups: £12 million between 2001 and 2014, when Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) co-authored their report. CAAT documents the UK exportation of nearly £500m-worth of weapons to Nigeria in that period, including missiles and grenades. It cites increased UK arms exports as a direct reason for the failure of the southern ceasefire. UK “security contractors” including Control Risks, Erinys, Executive Outcomes, and Saladin Security were embedded with mobile police units to crush protestors.
Nigeria and the “war on terror”
Western propaganda paid less attention to Shell’s systemic violence against the Ogoni and other peoples, focusing instead on the more headline-grabbing resistance, such as high-profile ransom kidnappings and pipeline disruption. State oppression in the drier, less fertile north, meanwhile, fed the narrative pushed by Islamic groups: that Western culture is toxic.
Founded in 2002 and led by Mohammed Yusuf who was later executed by the state, Boko Haram is officially called the Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad (Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād). It emerged in the northeastern city, Maidugari, close to Chad and Cameroon, where it set up semi-autonomous communities. Religious graduates who studied in Sudan attempted to form similar communes but were attacked by the police. In 2009, Boko Haram members allegedly fired at a police station in Bauchi. The government response was to trigger civil war.
The MNJTF mentioned above, is described as “notorious” in a British House of Commons Library report. It was reactivated, this time to fight the Islamists. The report also notes how the Nigerian Armed Forces terrorized the civilian population with raids, arrests, and indiscriminate shelling.
The UK ramped up its training of Nigeria’s military while the US used Chad as a base for its “war on terror” operations: the Pan-Sahel Initiative (covering Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger) and the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership (which included Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, and Tunisia). AFRICOM’s initial operations in Nigeria involved maritime training and integrating the country’s forces with those of other African nations to foster pan-African military alliances.
In its early years, AFRICOM paid little attention to Boko Haram. But this changed as the profile of attacks got bigger.
In 2011, Boko Haram launched a formal insurgency. A report published that year by the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence outlined Boko Haram’s roots and the reasons for its popularity. They included “a feeling of alienation from the wealthier, Christian, oil-producing, southern Nigeria, pervasive poverty, rampant government corruption, heavy-handed security measures, and the belief that relations with the West are a corrupting influence.” It added that “[t]hese grievances have led to sympathy among the local Muslim population despite Boko Haram’s violent tactics.”
These grievances were met with the kind of violence that further fuels grievances.
The US escalates involvement
In the context of the “war on terror,” the Pentagon saw Boko Haram as an opportunity to train Nigeria’s military and employ it for its objectives. The primary US goal was ensuring that the oil-rich regions did not fall into enemy hands.
The Congressional Research Service noted that by the time AFRICOM was founded in the late-2000s, Africa “supplie[d] the United States with roughly the same amount of crude oil as the Middle East.” An Armed Services Committee report in 2011 noted: “Nigeria’s oil rich Niger Delta is a major source of oil for the United States outside of the Middle East.” The US Energy Information Administration states: “Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa. It holds the largest natural gas reserves on the continent and was the world’s fifth–largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.” The country has 37 billion barrels of proven crude, second only to Libya, which was bombed to pieces by the US and NATO in 2011.
Nigeria’s forces summarily executed Boko Haram’s leader Yusuf in 2009. A thesis published by the US Naval Postgraduate School notes that in addition to the assassination, “security forces killing or displacing thousands of Nigerian Muslims, is credited with swelling [Boko Haram BH]’s ranks.”
Yusuf’s deputy, Abubakar Shekau, took over and escalated a suicide bombing campaign. The Navy thesis also notes that “the actions of BH, along with other militant groups such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), have reduced the country’s oil production, displacing Nigeria from 5th to 8th on the list of America’s largest foreign oil suppliers.”
In 2013, the states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe imposed emergency powers. The Pentagon announced a $45 million-dollar budget to counter Boko Haram by training troops in Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. One of the consequences is that Nigeria has been transformed from a peripheral US interest to a proxy force. Years of war, mostly in the north and border regions, have led to 2.1 million internally displaced people. The World Food Program calculates that 3.4 million face hunger and that 300,000 children are malnourished.
Building a Sparta state
In June 2014, it was reported that a 650-person unit, the Nigerian Army’s 143rd Battalion, was set up on the ground and trained by US Special Forces from the California Army National Guard’s Special Operations Detachment-US Northern Command and Company A, 5th Battalion 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne). By then the Nigerian Army was active in 30 out of the country’s 36 states.
Chief of the US Army Africa’s Security Cooperation Division, Colonel John D. Ruffing, said: “It is not peacekeeping … It is every bit of what we call ‘decisive action,’ meaning those soldiers will go in harm’s way to conduct counterinsurgency operations.” One US soldier said: “This is a classic Special Forces mission—training an indigenous force in a remote area in an austere environment to face a very real threat.”
In 2015, Boko Haram’s leader Shekau reportedly pledged allegiance to Islamic State, rebranding the organization IS West African Province (ISWAP). A Congressional Research Service report notes that ISWAP “has surpassed Boko Haram in size and capacity, and now ranks among IS’s most active affiliates.”
It’s not as if strategists don’t understand that violence doesn’t work. They understand that violence escalates violence which can then be used as pretexts for more violence. A US Council on Foreign Relations article from 2020 notes: “the last two years have been deadlier than any other period for Nigerian soldiers since the Boko Haram insurgency began.”
As the war against Boko Haram waged on, Niger Delta gangs in the south threatened to resume attacks on oil infrastructure. US “aid” expanded to include training the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) across the country. In November 2016, 66 officers graduated from the Fingerprint Analysis and Forensics training program, an initiative run by the US Embassy in collaboration with the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement and Atlanta Police Department.
In March 2017, 28 Nigerian officers graduated from courses offered by the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs division, led by US police from Prince William County, Virginia. The program also provided “equipment, training, mentoring, and capacity-building support to various Nigerian law enforcement and justice sector institutions.”
U.S. Army soldiers deployed to Nigeria Army’s School of infantry trained more than 200 Nigerian soldiers in 2018
Expanding AFRICOM’s role
In what the US State Department calls a “whole of government” approach, military operations continued as police training expanded. In early-2018, 12 US Army soldiers, led by Captain Stephen Gouthro, trained 200 Nigerians at the Nigerian Army’s School of Infantry. Facilitated by the US Army Africa, eight Security Assistance and Training Management Organization soldiers and four 1st Brigade Combat Team soldiers shared “ground-combat tactics” with the Nigerian Army’s 26th Infantry Battalion.
In July this year, US Army Special Forces trained 25 officers of the Nigerian Navy Special Boat Service as part of JCET: a five-week Joint Combined Exchange Training program. The Acting US Consulate Political and Economic Chief, Merrica Heaton, says that the training is designed to help the Nigerian military stop crime in the Gulf of Guinea and “counter violent extremists in the Northeast and enforce the rule of law throughout the region.”
As observers seemingly spotted the top-secret US stealth drone—Northrop Grumman’s RQ-180—over the Philippines, the Department of Defense sold nearly $500 million-worth of propeller planes to Nigeria, marking what the US Embassy and Consulate describes as “an historic level of cooperation … between the U.S. and Nigerian militaries.” AFRICOM recently confirmed that the inauguration of twelve A-29 Super Tucanos into the Nigerian Air Force will serve a “critical role in furthering regional security and stability.”
The Pentagon allocated $36.1 million to the US Army Corps of Engineers to renovated Kainji Air Base, which will host the Super Tucanos. In addition to training simulator and small arms storage units, the Base includes “aircraft sunshades, a new airfield hot cargo pad, perimeter and security fencing, airfield lights, and various airfield apron, parking, hangar, and entry control point enhancements.”
“Gray zone” warfare against China
Having left operations to Special Forces, AFRICOM is now tasked with overseeing an expanding footprint in Nigeria. But in addition to preventing oil supply disruptions, the US seeks to counter Russian but particularly Chinese involvement. According to the US state-run outlet, Voice of America (VOA), the China National Offshore Oil Corporation began investing in Nigeria’s state oil sector in 2005.
A 2007 US Army War College thesis expressed concern that, following “donations” of Chinese military equipment to Nigeria, China had helped the government to drill hundreds of boreholes in a goodwill gesture to provide clean drinking water. The US acted to tarnish China’s image. As part of what is now called the “whole of government” approach, the US 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, networked with Nigerian civilians, private industry, and aid agencies. The US Army War College implies that this was to psychologically counter China’s influence.
Nigeria signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China in 2018 to integrate into China’s global infrastructure and investment project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). More recently, the VOA has said that China took advantage of Nigeria’s crime- and terror-related oil instability, investing billions of dollars in oil to stabilize supply lines.
From the US military perspective, this so-called “political warfare” creates what they famously call a “gray zone” of conflict in which areas traditionally thought of as economic and civilian are weaponized. Analyst Kaley Scholl of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisitions writes that in one war game, the 91st Civil Affairs Battalion coordinated with the 3rd Special Forces Group to uncover “a Chinese conglomerate active in Nigeria who announced a deep-water port being constructed in one month as part of China’s BRI.” In the war game, US PSYOPs beat back the Chinese.
Scholl claims that “Chinese gray zone operations are eroding the US’s legitimacy and challenging the liberal rules-based world order.” In reality, US imperial aggression and wars by proxy erode whatever legitimacy Pentagon planners think they have.
But such analysts seem to forget that both the US and China are armed with nuclear weapons and possess the intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering them. The Pentagon might consider Nigeria to be just another pawn in the new cold war chess game. However, any escalation of tensions in flashpoints, like Taiwan, could unintentionally trigger nuclear catastrophe. This appears to be a risk the Pentagon is willing to take to enforce “full spectrum dominance.”
The US is turning oil-rich Nigeria into a proxy for its Africa wars
In the context of the “war on terror,” the Pentagon saw Boko Haram as an opportunity to train Nigeria’s military and employ it for its objectives. The primary US goal was ensuring that the oil-rich regions did not fall into enemy hands.
The Congressional Research Service noted that by the time AFRICOM was founded in the late-2000s, Africa “supplie[d] the United States with roughly the same amount of crude oil as the Middle East.” An Armed Services Committee report in 2011 noted: “Nigeria’s oil rich Niger Delta is a major source of oil for the United States outside of the Middle East.” The US Energy Information Administration states: “Nigeria is the largest oil producer in Africa. It holds the largest natural gas reserves on the continent and was the world’s fifth–largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.” The country has 37 billion barrels of proven crude, second only to Libya, which was bombed to pieces by the US and NATO in 2011.
Nigeria’s forces summarily executed Boko Haram’s leader Yusuf in 2009. A thesis published by the US Naval Postgraduate School notes that in addition to the assassination, “security forces killing or displacing thousands of Nigerian Muslims, is credited with swelling [Boko Haram BH]’s ranks.”
Yusuf’s deputy, Abubakar Shekau, took over and escalated a suicide bombing campaign. The Navy thesis also notes that “the actions of BH, along with other militant groups such as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), have reduced the country’s oil production, displacing Nigeria from 5th to 8th on the list of America’s largest foreign oil suppliers.”
In 2013, the states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe imposed emergency powers. The Pentagon announced a $45 million-dollar budget to counter Boko Haram by training troops in Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria. One of the consequences is that Nigeria has been transformed from a peripheral US interest to a proxy force. Years of war, mostly in the north and border regions, have led to 2.1 million internally displaced people. The World Food Program calculates that 3.4 million face hunger and that 300,000 children are malnourished.
Building a Sparta state
In June 2014, it was reported that a 650-person unit, the Nigerian Army’s 143rd Battalion, was set up on the ground and trained by US Special Forces from the California Army National Guard’s Special Operations Detachment-US Northern Command and Company A, 5th Battalion 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne). By then the Nigerian Army was active in 30 out of the country’s 36 states.
Chief of the US Army Africa’s Security Cooperation Division, Colonel John D. Ruffing, said: “It is not peacekeeping … It is every bit of what we call ‘decisive action,’ meaning those soldiers will go in harm’s way to conduct counterinsurgency operations.” One US soldier said: “This is a classic Special Forces mission—training an indigenous force in a remote area in an austere environment to face a very real threat.”
In 2015, Boko Haram’s leader Shekau reportedly pledged allegiance to Islamic State, rebranding the organization IS West African Province (ISWAP). A Congressional Research Service report notes that ISWAP “has surpassed Boko Haram in size and capacity, and now ranks among IS’s most active affiliates.”
It’s not as if strategists don’t understand that violence doesn’t work. They understand that violence escalates violence which can then be used as pretexts for more violence. A US Council on Foreign Relations article from 2020 notes: “the last two years have been deadlier than any other period for Nigerian soldiers since the Boko Haram insurgency began.”
As the war against Boko Haram waged on, Niger Delta gangs in the south threatened to resume attacks on oil infrastructure. US “aid” expanded to include training the Nigerian Police Force (NPF) across the country. In November 2016, 66 officers graduated from the Fingerprint Analysis and Forensics training program, an initiative run by the US Embassy in collaboration with the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement and Atlanta Police Department.
In March 2017, 28 Nigerian officers graduated from courses offered by the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs division, led by US police from Prince William County, Virginia. The program also provided “equipment, training, mentoring, and capacity-building support to various Nigerian law enforcement and justice sector institutions.”
U.S. Army soldiers deployed to Nigeria Army’s School of infantry trained more than 200 Nigerian soldiers in 2018
Expanding AFRICOM’s role
In what the US State Department calls a “whole of government” approach, military operations continued as police training expanded. In early-2018, 12 US Army soldiers, led by Captain Stephen Gouthro, trained 200 Nigerians at the Nigerian Army’s School of Infantry. Facilitated by the US Army Africa, eight Security Assistance and Training Management Organization soldiers and four 1st Brigade Combat Team soldiers shared “ground-combat tactics” with the Nigerian Army’s 26th Infantry Battalion.
In July this year, US Army Special Forces trained 25 officers of the Nigerian Navy Special Boat Service as part of JCET: a five-week Joint Combined Exchange Training program. The Acting US Consulate Political and Economic Chief, Merrica Heaton, says that the training is designed to help the Nigerian military stop crime in the Gulf of Guinea and “counter violent extremists in the Northeast and enforce the rule of law throughout the region.”
As observers seemingly spotted the top-secret US stealth drone—Northrop Grumman’s RQ-180—over the Philippines, the Department of Defense sold nearly $500 million-worth of propeller planes to Nigeria, marking what the US Embassy and Consulate describes as “an historic level of cooperation … between the U.S. and Nigerian militaries.” AFRICOM recently confirmed that the inauguration of twelve A-29 Super Tucanos into the Nigerian Air Force will serve a “critical role in furthering regional security and stability.”
The Pentagon allocated $36.1 million to the US Army Corps of Engineers to renovated Kainji Air Base, which will host the Super Tucanos. In addition to training simulator and small arms storage units, the Base includes “aircraft sunshades, a new airfield hot cargo pad, perimeter and security fencing, airfield lights, and various airfield apron, parking, hangar, and entry control point enhancements.”
“Gray zone” warfare against China
Having left operations to Special Forces, AFRICOM is now tasked with overseeing an expanding footprint in Nigeria. But in addition to preventing oil supply disruptions, the US seeks to counter Russian but particularly Chinese involvement. According to the US state-run outlet, Voice of America (VOA), the China National Offshore Oil Corporation began investing in Nigeria’s state oil sector in 2005.
A 2007 US Army War College thesis expressed concern that, following “donations” of Chinese military equipment to Nigeria, China had helped the government to drill hundreds of boreholes in a goodwill gesture to provide clean drinking water. The US acted to tarnish China’s image. As part of what is now called the “whole of government” approach, the US 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, US Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command, networked with Nigerian civilians, private industry, and aid agencies. The US Army War College implies that this was to psychologically counter China’s influence.
Nigeria signed a Memorandum of Understanding with China in 2018 to integrate into China’s global infrastructure and investment project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). More recently, the VOA has said that China took advantage of Nigeria’s crime- and terror-related oil instability, investing billions of dollars in oil to stabilize supply lines.
From the US military perspective, this so-called “political warfare” creates what they famously call a “gray zone” of conflict in which areas traditionally thought of as economic and civilian are weaponized. Analyst Kaley Scholl of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisitions writes that in one war game, the 91st Civil Affairs Battalion coordinated with the 3rd Special Forces Group to uncover “a Chinese conglomerate active in Nigeria who announced a deep-water port being constructed in one month as part of China’s BRI.” In the war game, US PSYOPs beat back the Chinese.
Scholl claims that “Chinese gray zone operations are eroding the US’s legitimacy and challenging the liberal rules-based world order.” In reality, US imperial aggression and wars by proxy erode whatever legitimacy Pentagon planners think they have.
But such analysts seem to forget that both the US and China are armed with nuclear weapons and possess the intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering them. The Pentagon might consider Nigeria to be just another pawn in the new cold war chess game. However, any escalation of tensions in flashpoints, like Taiwan, could unintentionally trigger nuclear catastrophe. This appears to be a risk the Pentagon is willing to take to enforce “full spectrum dominance.”
The US is turning oil-rich Nigeria into a proxy for its Africa wars
Thousands take to streets as indefinite strike hits South Africa’s engineering sector
The strike is being led by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. The refusal by employers to address the demands for a wage hike is being seen as a betrayal by the workers who had foregone last year’s wage hike to cushion the industry during the COVID-induced lockdown
October 06, 2021
NUMSA workers stage a protest as part of the engineering workers' strike in South Africa. Photo: PanAfricanism Today.
The first day of the indefinite strike in South Africa’s engineering sector on Tuesday, October 5, saw workers in red T-shirts hit the streets in thousands demanding a wage hike. Marches and rallies were witnessed in Kaserne, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and Western Cape.
In Johannesburg, thousands marched to the office of the Metals Engineering and Industries Bargaining Council (MEIBC), where the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) delivered a memorandum to all the employer associations in the sector. Representing 155,000 of the estimated total 300,000 workers in the sector, NUMSA is leading the strike, which is also supported by other unions.
The memorandum states that the National Employers Association of South Africa (NEASA), Consolidated Employers Organisation (CEO) and South African Engineers and Founders Association (SAEFA) “refuse to make any offer that can settle this round of negotiations in the interests of their workers who are NUMSA members. Their main target is to bring back apartheid wages where super exploitation of Black and African labor becomes the order of the day.”
It criticizes the “backward and union bashing stance led, in particular, by right-wing conservative employer associations, of which the leading detachment is NEASA, CEO and SAEFA.”
The only employers’ association in the sector that had made an offer before the beginning of the strike was the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA), which has in the past signed agreements with NUMSA.
However, “undermined by this backward group of employer associations”, SEIFSA has “adopted an opportunistic stance refusing to make a meaningful offer that can resolve this round of negotiations. This is the reason that NUMSA resolved to serve all employer associations with a notice for an indefinite strike,” the memorandum adds.
Workers feel betrayed
NUMSA has been demanding an 8% wage hike for all workers in the sector for the first year of the agreement and Consumer Price Index (CPI) + 2% improvement for the next two years. “If CPI + 2% falls below 6%, employers must offer 6% or re-open negotiations. This will settle negotiations,” said NUMSA secretary Irvin Jim in a press statement on September 28.
“However, SEIFSA, on behalf of employers, made a proposal of a three-year agreement of only 4.4% increase for the first year. They have also offered CPI + 0.5% for the second year, and CPI + 1% for the third year. We have rejected this offer from SEIFSA. We regard it as an insult, especially given the fact that workers in the engineering sector did not get an increase last year,” he said.
NUMSA’s national spokesperson, Phakamile Hlubi Majola, explained that in 2020, when the wage negotiations in the engineering sector were supposed to begin, the employers “asked us to sign a stand still agreement.” Workers agreed and forewent the expected wage hike in order to cushion the industry reeling under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“So the workers have made huge sacrifices,” she said. “These bosses benefited from the fact that workers did not take a hike last year. And we were expecting that they would (now) give back to the workers and their families but they are refusing to. Workers feel betrayed.”
However, with the beginning of the strike, “SEIFSA has been very eager to meet with us because the strike has had an impact. They want to negotiate,” Majola told Peoples Dispatch. “We hope that when we meet, they will actually give us a meaningful offer. [However] even if we are meeting with employers, we are still on strike until an agreement is in place.”
Derailing centralized collective bargaining
NUMSA has also made it clear in the memorandum that any agreement has to be centralized and binding on all employers in the sector. To thwart such an agreement, some companies are making “unilateral offers” at the level of plants, “while negotiations at the central level were underway,” the union pointed out.
“If any company has an offer to make, it must persuade other companies through its employer associations so that such an offer is made at a centralized bargaining level,” NUMSA’s memorandum states.
It adds that “If conservative employer associations such as NEASA, CEO and SAEFA refuse to sign a settlement agreement that can end the current strike, our message to all reasonable employers is that they must leave their associations and join SEIFSA in their numbers as an association of employers that has consistently negotiated and signed agreements in the past in the best interest of collective bargaining.”
Other demands
Other demands listed in the memorandum include an amendment of Sick Benefit to include 10 days of paternity leave, five days of Family Responsibility Leave, and R1000 (USD 66.67) Underground Allowance for engineers who work below the ground, like miners. The union further demands either 100% of the transportation cost to work for those employees who will need to travel at odd hours when public transport is not available, or an across-the-board travel allowance of R1000.
NUMSA has also called for the expansion of the Provident Fund to include “insured benefits like a funeral cover for all family members, not just an employee” and for “the dropping/cutting of the Youth Wage Subsidy to Employers as it is only benefiting the bosses who are greedy and not creating any additional jobs for our youth as these subsidies to employers intended to do.“
Reiterating that the industrial action will continue till these demands are met, Majola added that from Wednesday onwards, “members will stay home and not report to work, although they may picket the workplaces.”
Thousands take to streets as indefinite strike hits South Africa’s engineering sector
The strike is being led by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa. The refusal by employers to address the demands for a wage hike is being seen as a betrayal by the workers who had foregone last year’s wage hike to cushion the industry during the COVID-induced lockdown
October 06, 2021
NUMSA workers stage a protest as part of the engineering workers' strike in South Africa. Photo: PanAfricanism Today.
The first day of the indefinite strike in South Africa’s engineering sector on Tuesday, October 5, saw workers in red T-shirts hit the streets in thousands demanding a wage hike. Marches and rallies were witnessed in Kaserne, Northern Cape, Eastern Cape and Western Cape.
In Johannesburg, thousands marched to the office of the Metals Engineering and Industries Bargaining Council (MEIBC), where the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) delivered a memorandum to all the employer associations in the sector. Representing 155,000 of the estimated total 300,000 workers in the sector, NUMSA is leading the strike, which is also supported by other unions.
The memorandum states that the National Employers Association of South Africa (NEASA), Consolidated Employers Organisation (CEO) and South African Engineers and Founders Association (SAEFA) “refuse to make any offer that can settle this round of negotiations in the interests of their workers who are NUMSA members. Their main target is to bring back apartheid wages where super exploitation of Black and African labor becomes the order of the day.”
It criticizes the “backward and union bashing stance led, in particular, by right-wing conservative employer associations, of which the leading detachment is NEASA, CEO and SAEFA.”
The only employers’ association in the sector that had made an offer before the beginning of the strike was the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA), which has in the past signed agreements with NUMSA.
However, “undermined by this backward group of employer associations”, SEIFSA has “adopted an opportunistic stance refusing to make a meaningful offer that can resolve this round of negotiations. This is the reason that NUMSA resolved to serve all employer associations with a notice for an indefinite strike,” the memorandum adds.
Workers feel betrayed
NUMSA has been demanding an 8% wage hike for all workers in the sector for the first year of the agreement and Consumer Price Index (CPI) + 2% improvement for the next two years. “If CPI + 2% falls below 6%, employers must offer 6% or re-open negotiations. This will settle negotiations,” said NUMSA secretary Irvin Jim in a press statement on September 28.
“However, SEIFSA, on behalf of employers, made a proposal of a three-year agreement of only 4.4% increase for the first year. They have also offered CPI + 0.5% for the second year, and CPI + 1% for the third year. We have rejected this offer from SEIFSA. We regard it as an insult, especially given the fact that workers in the engineering sector did not get an increase last year,” he said.
NUMSA’s national spokesperson, Phakamile Hlubi Majola, explained that in 2020, when the wage negotiations in the engineering sector were supposed to begin, the employers “asked us to sign a stand still agreement.” Workers agreed and forewent the expected wage hike in order to cushion the industry reeling under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“So the workers have made huge sacrifices,” she said. “These bosses benefited from the fact that workers did not take a hike last year. And we were expecting that they would (now) give back to the workers and their families but they are refusing to. Workers feel betrayed.”
However, with the beginning of the strike, “SEIFSA has been very eager to meet with us because the strike has had an impact. They want to negotiate,” Majola told Peoples Dispatch. “We hope that when we meet, they will actually give us a meaningful offer. [However] even if we are meeting with employers, we are still on strike until an agreement is in place.”
Derailing centralized collective bargaining
NUMSA has also made it clear in the memorandum that any agreement has to be centralized and binding on all employers in the sector. To thwart such an agreement, some companies are making “unilateral offers” at the level of plants, “while negotiations at the central level were underway,” the union pointed out.
“If any company has an offer to make, it must persuade other companies through its employer associations so that such an offer is made at a centralized bargaining level,” NUMSA’s memorandum states.
It adds that “If conservative employer associations such as NEASA, CEO and SAEFA refuse to sign a settlement agreement that can end the current strike, our message to all reasonable employers is that they must leave their associations and join SEIFSA in their numbers as an association of employers that has consistently negotiated and signed agreements in the past in the best interest of collective bargaining.”
Other demands
Other demands listed in the memorandum include an amendment of Sick Benefit to include 10 days of paternity leave, five days of Family Responsibility Leave, and R1000 (USD 66.67) Underground Allowance for engineers who work below the ground, like miners. The union further demands either 100% of the transportation cost to work for those employees who will need to travel at odd hours when public transport is not available, or an across-the-board travel allowance of R1000.
NUMSA has also called for the expansion of the Provident Fund to include “insured benefits like a funeral cover for all family members, not just an employee” and for “the dropping/cutting of the Youth Wage Subsidy to Employers as it is only benefiting the bosses who are greedy and not creating any additional jobs for our youth as these subsidies to employers intended to do.“
Reiterating that the industrial action will continue till these demands are met, Majola added that from Wednesday onwards, “members will stay home and not report to work, although they may picket the workplaces.”
Thousands take to streets as indefinite strike hits South Africa’s engineering sector
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This is a good vid as it relate President Kenyatta and pandora papers that got release it worth the watch the black woman in the vid jerotich seii was really going in 
Pandora's Papers Saga
Pandora's Papers Saga
Net-zero Emissions: Defunding Gas Projects Unhelpful to Developing Countries, Says Osinbajo
October 9, 2021 12:45 pm
Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has said the plan to defund gas projects in the run up to the global Net-Zero emissions target will be unhelpful to developing countries such as Nigeria.
Osinbajo’s spokesman, Laolu Akande, in a statement on Saturday in Abuja, said the vice-president made presentations at different meetings in London.
The vice-president attended a high-level United Nations event on the Energy Transition plan in Africa with special focus on Nigeria ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) summit.
Osinbajo cautioned that “limiting the development of gas projects, posed dire challenges”.
The vice-president said that in its commitment to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the federal government was making efforts to use large shares of clean energy sources.
Osinbajo’s first meeting was a closed-door session with COP26 President-Designate, Mr Alok Sharma, a cabinet rank British Minister and the Chair of the UK Government’s COP26 Energy Transition Council (ETC) at Whitehall.
The discussions with Sharma centred on issues regarding the 2050 global Net-Zero emissions target and the need for the international community to align on the key elements of a just and equitable transition for all.
The vice-president also had an interaction with the academic community at Imperial College followed by meetings of the Global Energy Alliance and presentations on Nigeria Energy Transition Plan and Nigeria’s Integrated Energy Plan.
Osinbajo said at Imperial College that Africa as a continent was home to the world’s youngest fastest growing population.
“In order to create jobs and enable climate-smart industrialisation, the scale and quality of electricity services must increase significantly,’’ he said.
According to him, scaling up in the Nigerian context is based on clean energy, a reflection of the federal government’s commitment to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
“This means building sustainability into our economic planning, and so our Economic Sustainability Plan includes a plan to provide five million homes with cleaner energy through its decentralised solar power programme.
“This means an estimated 25 million Nigerians would have access to solar power.
“The first phase of this plan is already underway, and we think that this sort of programme will very quickly ramp up our progress towards net-zero emissions,” he said.
Osinbajo said, however, that the moves to defund gas projects would not help the whole enterprise, which required gas, especially on putting it on the grid.
“Limiting the development of gas projects poses dire challenges for African nations, while making an insignificant dent in global emissions.
“Energy demand in Nigeria and across Africa is set to rise, as indeed it must, to deliver the industrialisation, jobs and economy-wide progress people deserve,” he stated.
Osinbajo said Nigeria had already made a commitment to have 30 per cent of its electricity supply from renewables by 2030.
He said that natural gas was being used for industry, fertiliser manufacturing and cooking, which were more difficult to transition than power generation.
The vice-president said that Nigeria was committed to all of its national determined contributions under the Paris Agreement and had updated its commitments in our new Energy Transition Plan.
“So, for baseline Business as Usual (BAU) projections, estimated BAU 2030 emissions are now at 453 Metric tonnes of carbon dioxide Equivalent (MTCO2e), increasing 31 per cent from a 2018 baseline of 347 MTCO2e.
“We are committed to the process and strongly believe the process has to be strong, fair, just and supported not just for Nigeria, but for most African countries and for many developing countries who have the same concerns that we have,” Osinbajo said.
According to him, the ultimate goal of the global energy transition should be to achieve reliable net-zero-energy systems to power prosperous, inclusive economies.
“Efforts are already underway in my country and in countries across the continent, to include large shares of clean energy sources to fuel that growth.
“Renewables are the fastest growing segment of energy today and will certainly be a key economic driver well into the future,” he said.
The vice-president disclosed that Nigeria was about the first African country that had developed an energy transition plan that sought to demonstrate its commitment to the global net-zero emissions.
He said that such a plan must be equitable, inclusive and just with a planet and people approach to the transition.
“As a practical matter that means transition plans that take into account the different realities of various economies and accommodate various pathways to net-zero by 2050,” he said.
The Minister of State for Environment, Mrs Sharon Ikeazor; Special Adviser to the President on Economic Matters, Ambassador Adeyemi Dipeolu; and Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the UK, Ambassador Sarafa Ishola, accompanied the vice-president to the meetings.
The Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sustainable Energy for All (SE forAll), Mrs Damilola Ogunbiyi, among others, were also at the meetings. (NAN)
Net-zero Emissions: Defunding Gas Projects Unhelpful to Developing Countries, Says Osinbajo
October 9, 2021 12:45 pm
Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo has said the plan to defund gas projects in the run up to the global Net-Zero emissions target will be unhelpful to developing countries such as Nigeria.
Osinbajo’s spokesman, Laolu Akande, in a statement on Saturday in Abuja, said the vice-president made presentations at different meetings in London.
The vice-president attended a high-level United Nations event on the Energy Transition plan in Africa with special focus on Nigeria ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) summit.
Osinbajo cautioned that “limiting the development of gas projects, posed dire challenges”.
The vice-president said that in its commitment to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the federal government was making efforts to use large shares of clean energy sources.
Osinbajo’s first meeting was a closed-door session with COP26 President-Designate, Mr Alok Sharma, a cabinet rank British Minister and the Chair of the UK Government’s COP26 Energy Transition Council (ETC) at Whitehall.
The discussions with Sharma centred on issues regarding the 2050 global Net-Zero emissions target and the need for the international community to align on the key elements of a just and equitable transition for all.
The vice-president also had an interaction with the academic community at Imperial College followed by meetings of the Global Energy Alliance and presentations on Nigeria Energy Transition Plan and Nigeria’s Integrated Energy Plan.
Osinbajo said at Imperial College that Africa as a continent was home to the world’s youngest fastest growing population.
“In order to create jobs and enable climate-smart industrialisation, the scale and quality of electricity services must increase significantly,’’ he said.
According to him, scaling up in the Nigerian context is based on clean energy, a reflection of the federal government’s commitment to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
“This means building sustainability into our economic planning, and so our Economic Sustainability Plan includes a plan to provide five million homes with cleaner energy through its decentralised solar power programme.
“This means an estimated 25 million Nigerians would have access to solar power.
“The first phase of this plan is already underway, and we think that this sort of programme will very quickly ramp up our progress towards net-zero emissions,” he said.
Osinbajo said, however, that the moves to defund gas projects would not help the whole enterprise, which required gas, especially on putting it on the grid.
“Limiting the development of gas projects poses dire challenges for African nations, while making an insignificant dent in global emissions.
“Energy demand in Nigeria and across Africa is set to rise, as indeed it must, to deliver the industrialisation, jobs and economy-wide progress people deserve,” he stated.
Osinbajo said Nigeria had already made a commitment to have 30 per cent of its electricity supply from renewables by 2030.
He said that natural gas was being used for industry, fertiliser manufacturing and cooking, which were more difficult to transition than power generation.
The vice-president said that Nigeria was committed to all of its national determined contributions under the Paris Agreement and had updated its commitments in our new Energy Transition Plan.
“So, for baseline Business as Usual (BAU) projections, estimated BAU 2030 emissions are now at 453 Metric tonnes of carbon dioxide Equivalent (MTCO2e), increasing 31 per cent from a 2018 baseline of 347 MTCO2e.
“We are committed to the process and strongly believe the process has to be strong, fair, just and supported not just for Nigeria, but for most African countries and for many developing countries who have the same concerns that we have,” Osinbajo said.
According to him, the ultimate goal of the global energy transition should be to achieve reliable net-zero-energy systems to power prosperous, inclusive economies.
“Efforts are already underway in my country and in countries across the continent, to include large shares of clean energy sources to fuel that growth.
“Renewables are the fastest growing segment of energy today and will certainly be a key economic driver well into the future,” he said.
The vice-president disclosed that Nigeria was about the first African country that had developed an energy transition plan that sought to demonstrate its commitment to the global net-zero emissions.
He said that such a plan must be equitable, inclusive and just with a planet and people approach to the transition.
“As a practical matter that means transition plans that take into account the different realities of various economies and accommodate various pathways to net-zero by 2050,” he said.
The Minister of State for Environment, Mrs Sharon Ikeazor; Special Adviser to the President on Economic Matters, Ambassador Adeyemi Dipeolu; and Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the UK, Ambassador Sarafa Ishola, accompanied the vice-president to the meetings.
The Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sustainable Energy for All (SE forAll), Mrs Damilola Ogunbiyi, among others, were also at the meetings. (NAN)
Net-zero Emissions: Defunding Gas Projects Unhelpful to Developing Countries, Says Osinbajo
Why banning financing for fossil fuel projects in Africa isn’t a climate solution
October 14, 2021 8.14am EDT
Benjamin Attia
Morgan Bazilian
The majority of the Congolese population doesn’t have access to electricity. Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images
Today’s global energy inequities are staggering.
Video gamers in California consume more electricity than entire nations. The average Tanzanian used only one-sixth the electricity consumed by a typical American refrigerator in 2014.
Globally, the top 10% of countries consume 20 times more energy than the bottom 10%. And 1.1 billion sub-Saharan Africans share the same amount of power generation capacity as Germany’s 83 million people. At least half have no access to electricity at all.
These stark energy inequalities are fueling thorny debates around financing Africa’s energy future as world leaders and their negotiators prepare for COP26, the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.
One increasingly common theme from wealthy countries – including those responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions over time – is a vow that they will cease public funding for all (or nearly all) fossil fuel projects in less developed countries, even as they continue financing, and in many cases heavily subsidizing, fossil fuels in their own.
It is generally easier for countries that offer overseas development finance for energy projects to make low-carbon rules for others, rather than for themselves. For example, China, Japan and South Korea – some of the world’s highest coal-consuming nations – have each recently pledged to stop funding coal projects overseas and increase investments in renewables. But they have made no equivalent commitments at home.
The U.S. Treasury and the United Kingdom’s development finance institution, CDC Group, have taken a more nuanced approach. They are limiting all coal and oil-based power generation projects and leaving a narrow window available for natural gas projects in poor countries that pass a rigorous screening process. This is roughly similar to the approach of the World Bank.
As experienced clean energy policy researchers, we believe the blunt exclusion of all nonrenewable energy projects from development finance is an inequitable and ineffective climate strategy that gaslights over 1 billion Africans.
Tiny climate gains, major development losses
Focusing on limiting the emissions of the world’s poorest countries while emissions continue to rise in industrialized countries is clearly misdirected in our view. Given stark inequalities in energy use and emissions, this could instead entrench poverty and widen inequality induced by worsening climate change, while simultaneously accomplishing very little to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
Together, the U.S., U.K., European Union, Japan and Russia have almost the same population – 1.1 billion people – as sub-Saharan Africa, but 35 times more gas-fired power plants in operation or under development, and 52 times more coal plants.
When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, sub-Saharan Africa is collectively responsible for barely half a percent of all global emissions over time, while the U.S., U.K., E.U., Japan and Russia are responsible for more than 100 times that amount, or about 57%.
The upper bound for Africa’s future growth in power sector emissions is also negligible. If the region’s electricity demand hypothetically tripled tomorrow, rather than doubling by 2040 as the International Energy Agency recently forecast, and if only natural gas was used to meet the new demand, annual global emissions would increase by only 0.62%, according to one estimate. That’s equivalent to the state of Louisiana’s annual emissions today.
What’s more, the share of renewable power in many sub-Saharan African national grids is already higher than for nearly all the big greenhouse gas emitters. In at least six countries – Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique and Uganda – renewables make up more than 50% of their annual generation. In 2018, hydropower, geothermal, solar and wind made up about 20% of the continent’s total power generated.
Most of the region will find renewable power to be the fastest and cheapest way to expand their generation capacity, but some areas may still need to rely on some fossil fuels in various sectors of the economy as they develop.
It has been clear for decades that the world needs to rapidly and aggressively cut its greenhouse gas emissions to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Many regions in Africa, including the Sahel and Mozambique, are already facing the effects of climate change, including worsening droughts, food insecurity and severe storms. Adapting to climate change and building resilience requires the very energy, economic development and infrastructure currently lacking in some of the most affected regions and those least prepared to adapt.
Climate colonialism and legacies of colonization
Other experts agree that this direction of climate policy is not just ineffective, it’s rooted in the historic inequities of colonialism.
The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines climate colonialism as the “deepening or expansion of foreign domination through climate initiatives that exploits poorer nations’ resources or otherwise compromises their sovereignty.”
Colonialism’s legacy is a contributing factor to a wide range of issues, from conflict to corruption, and to the poor state of electricity access across much of Africa today.
While industrializing nations in the 1900s were building electricity grids through massive public spending campaigns, like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States and the Electricity Supply Act of 1926 in the U.K., most of Africa was being actively pilfered of its rich natural resources. Much of the infrastructure built in colonial Africa during that time was built only to facilitate resource extraction operations, such as mined commodities, oil, timber, rubber, tea, coffee and spices.
In 1992, a coalition of low-income nations successfully advocated for the U.N.‘s climate mitigation pathways to include their right to development, and a “common but differentiated responsibility” to address the dual problems of development and climate change. This language has long been the basis of equity considerations in climate policy, including in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which expects deeper emissions cuts from developed countries based on their “respective capabilities”.
A transition from what?
Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo recently described “energy transition” as “a curious term” when applied universally, given the energy shortfalls in countries like Nigeria. He has argued for an energy transition in which Africa can develop quickly and grow. Increasing electricity in industrializing regions of sub-Saharan Africa would first power income-generating activities and public services, both drivers of economic growth.
Equitable and effective climate negotiations will require nuanced policy considerations that balance the priorities of alleviating energy poverty with urgent climate change mitigation and adaptation. A just energy transition would leave African governments to make and implement policies and deliver on their own national climate commitments under the Paris Agreement rather than shouldering the West’s.
Why banning financing for fossil fuel projects in Africa isn’t a climate solution
October 14, 2021 8.14am EDT
Benjamin Attia
Morgan Bazilian
The majority of the Congolese population doesn’t have access to electricity. Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images
Today’s global energy inequities are staggering.
Video gamers in California consume more electricity than entire nations. The average Tanzanian used only one-sixth the electricity consumed by a typical American refrigerator in 2014.
Globally, the top 10% of countries consume 20 times more energy than the bottom 10%. And 1.1 billion sub-Saharan Africans share the same amount of power generation capacity as Germany’s 83 million people. At least half have no access to electricity at all.
These stark energy inequalities are fueling thorny debates around financing Africa’s energy future as world leaders and their negotiators prepare for COP26, the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.
One increasingly common theme from wealthy countries – including those responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions over time – is a vow that they will cease public funding for all (or nearly all) fossil fuel projects in less developed countries, even as they continue financing, and in many cases heavily subsidizing, fossil fuels in their own.
It is generally easier for countries that offer overseas development finance for energy projects to make low-carbon rules for others, rather than for themselves. For example, China, Japan and South Korea – some of the world’s highest coal-consuming nations – have each recently pledged to stop funding coal projects overseas and increase investments in renewables. But they have made no equivalent commitments at home.
The U.S. Treasury and the United Kingdom’s development finance institution, CDC Group, have taken a more nuanced approach. They are limiting all coal and oil-based power generation projects and leaving a narrow window available for natural gas projects in poor countries that pass a rigorous screening process. This is roughly similar to the approach of the World Bank.
As experienced clean energy policy researchers, we believe the blunt exclusion of all nonrenewable energy projects from development finance is an inequitable and ineffective climate strategy that gaslights over 1 billion Africans.
Tiny climate gains, major development losses
Focusing on limiting the emissions of the world’s poorest countries while emissions continue to rise in industrialized countries is clearly misdirected in our view. Given stark inequalities in energy use and emissions, this could instead entrench poverty and widen inequality induced by worsening climate change, while simultaneously accomplishing very little to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
Together, the U.S., U.K., European Union, Japan and Russia have almost the same population – 1.1 billion people – as sub-Saharan Africa, but 35 times more gas-fired power plants in operation or under development, and 52 times more coal plants.
When it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, sub-Saharan Africa is collectively responsible for barely half a percent of all global emissions over time, while the U.S., U.K., E.U., Japan and Russia are responsible for more than 100 times that amount, or about 57%.
The upper bound for Africa’s future growth in power sector emissions is also negligible. If the region’s electricity demand hypothetically tripled tomorrow, rather than doubling by 2040 as the International Energy Agency recently forecast, and if only natural gas was used to meet the new demand, annual global emissions would increase by only 0.62%, according to one estimate. That’s equivalent to the state of Louisiana’s annual emissions today.
What’s more, the share of renewable power in many sub-Saharan African national grids is already higher than for nearly all the big greenhouse gas emitters. In at least six countries – Kenya, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique and Uganda – renewables make up more than 50% of their annual generation. In 2018, hydropower, geothermal, solar and wind made up about 20% of the continent’s total power generated.
Most of the region will find renewable power to be the fastest and cheapest way to expand their generation capacity, but some areas may still need to rely on some fossil fuels in various sectors of the economy as they develop.
It has been clear for decades that the world needs to rapidly and aggressively cut its greenhouse gas emissions to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Many regions in Africa, including the Sahel and Mozambique, are already facing the effects of climate change, including worsening droughts, food insecurity and severe storms. Adapting to climate change and building resilience requires the very energy, economic development and infrastructure currently lacking in some of the most affected regions and those least prepared to adapt.
Climate colonialism and legacies of colonization
Other experts agree that this direction of climate policy is not just ineffective, it’s rooted in the historic inequities of colonialism.
The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines climate colonialism as the “deepening or expansion of foreign domination through climate initiatives that exploits poorer nations’ resources or otherwise compromises their sovereignty.”
Colonialism’s legacy is a contributing factor to a wide range of issues, from conflict to corruption, and to the poor state of electricity access across much of Africa today.
While industrializing nations in the 1900s were building electricity grids through massive public spending campaigns, like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States and the Electricity Supply Act of 1926 in the U.K., most of Africa was being actively pilfered of its rich natural resources. Much of the infrastructure built in colonial Africa during that time was built only to facilitate resource extraction operations, such as mined commodities, oil, timber, rubber, tea, coffee and spices.
In 1992, a coalition of low-income nations successfully advocated for the U.N.‘s climate mitigation pathways to include their right to development, and a “common but differentiated responsibility” to address the dual problems of development and climate change. This language has long been the basis of equity considerations in climate policy, including in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which expects deeper emissions cuts from developed countries based on their “respective capabilities”.
A transition from what?
Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo recently described “energy transition” as “a curious term” when applied universally, given the energy shortfalls in countries like Nigeria. He has argued for an energy transition in which Africa can develop quickly and grow. Increasing electricity in industrializing regions of sub-Saharan Africa would first power income-generating activities and public services, both drivers of economic growth.
Equitable and effective climate negotiations will require nuanced policy considerations that balance the priorities of alleviating energy poverty with urgent climate change mitigation and adaptation. A just energy transition would leave African governments to make and implement policies and deliver on their own national climate commitments under the Paris Agreement rather than shouldering the West’s.
Why banning financing for fossil fuel projects in Africa isn’t a climate solution