The old people thing isn't really relevant.
The reason Nigeria's life expectancy is so low is because of our terrible infant mortality. The rate at which our babies and children die truly is horrific. Especially up north and in rural areas of the south. My NYSC year scarred me for life. It's the reason I'm a far left extremist.
A child dying at 5 has far more effect on average life expectancy statistics than an adult dying at 60 instead of 80. And most of our population is children.
*Southern Nigeria.
The north was only unprofitable early on. Once the rail lines got built, it became super profitable. The problem was the distance and isolation. The British didn't want to spend any money connecting the north to the coast. So they amalgamated us and forced us to pay for our own exploitation.
Not that we should be judging any part of the country by how much money our enemies can extract from it. We should develop the north because they're our people and all of us benefit when the country is evenly developed. The same also applies to our neighbouring countries.
Also don't let anyone ever tell you that we can't run our own affairs well. Sounds like internalised racism to me. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.
Nigeria is a lot more important than the Sahel nations. More than all of them combined, in fact. We have 3x the population, all the resources we need to be a Russia-style sanction-proof industrial powerhouse. We have access to the Atlantic coast so we're a major naval threat. We also have far more cultural and economic clout. If Nigeria industrialises and goes full anti-imperialist, the rest of West Africa will follow us and Western Europe will be fucked. During colonial times, Nigeria was second only to India in terms of profitability. The colonizers will happily kill tens of millions of us before they let us leave. We are far more important than we realize.
Also the government generally doesn't run large industries anymore. We concession them out to private industries to run, while keeping public ownership and a share of the profits. There's no reason to think that nationalized Shell assets would mismanaged. As if it's even possible to do worse than what Shell has already done.
We can't let these people destroy our ancestral land then run away with a giant bag of money. They should leave with nothing. Wipe out the shareholders!
Shell is selling off it's onshore business only. They'll still be operating offshore, where they can profit without having to face the people.
Ideally we should seize all their assets as compensation and wipe out the shareholders. But the government is beholden to big corporations because capitalism. Also Britain and the US would likely attack us and bring Freedom™ if we touch their oil assets. The Nigerian military isn't set up to defend us from an invasion by our actual enemies. They're only good for internal repression.
Back in the 1920s, the commies agreed that the only way to defeat the western capitalists was to take away their third world slaves. That's what the Chinese revolution, the Korean and Vietnam wars were all about. It's why the Soviets, Chinese and Cubans armed African revolutionaries during the era of decolonisation.
A whole century later, China is still following the plan.
Bill Gates 3.0. Thomas Edison 4.0.
It's a feature of capitalism to steal the work of millions and funnel the profits to a tiny group of people.
Their restaurants are dingy Their food is shit. They haven't updated their menu in decades. And they served me rotten chicken the last time I ate there like 10 years ago.
They're a typical big company with terrible service. So they can maximise the profits they send to their shareholders in London.
Also their parent company is UAC. Aka the actual company who shot our ancestors with maxim guns and colonized Nigeria. Lugard was the head of their private army. So fuck them! I hope they go bankrupt.
Okay, that's fair. I would have preferred a factory to produce the HIV drugs, cos building capacity is always better than handouts. But PEPFAR saved a lot of lives.
Democracy is not about choosing leaders. It's about choosing policy.
North Koreans have universal healthcare, paid vacations and maternity leave. They have a powerful military to scare off the colonisers, but they don't fight dumb wars. Their cops aren't armed and don't beat people to death. And Kim is legitimately popular, Koreans aren't stupid or brainwashed.
In the US, healthcare and paid time off aren't even on the ballot. None of the things people actually want are an option. You get to choose between Biden and Trump. Or Hillary and Trump. Alien or Predator. But you can't have paid time off just because you just had a baby, that would be ridiculous.
30 years after it collapsed, the Soviet Union is still ahead of the US in terms of concrete projects. The Warri-Itakpe rail line is working and Ajaokuta is about to start functioning. What have the Americans ever delivered other than word salad projects and debt traps?
Blanket ban on western media. Then we create our own.
Anyone who loves being disinformed and spied on that much can use a VPN. But our people should be nudged towards home grown media, including social media.
Communism never works. We should sell the tigers to those American weirdos on Netflix.
Material conditions determine culture, not the other way around. The reason these people are like this is because they're dirt poor and they're living in a warzone. Northern Nigeria is one of the poorest places in the world. There's parts of it that are on the same level as Afghanistan.
The solution is to end the fighting, educate the people and make them less poor. Wealthier and educated people are a lot more difficult to fuck with. That's why you can't try this type of nonsense with teenage girls in Lagos.
China used to be poor as shit. Especially the inland areas. The rate at which they've developed themselves is insane, bordering on miraculous. That means there are large numbers who were born as rural peasants, but are now living in a sci-fi world. There's all sorts of now common things like elevators and escalators that they could never have dreamed of growing up. Some older people can adapt quickly, and some can't.
It's the same reason there's so many videos of Chinese people in cars doing crazy things, like u-turns on the freeway. Most of us grew up watching our parents drive, watching movies with cars in them. So even if you can't drive, you still understand the general principle. But in China you might grow up in some remote hamlet where rich guy rides a bicycle to the farm. Then all of a sudden, you're in your 50s, the economy is great, there's new highways everywhere and you can afford a brand new car. But you don't really understand how highways work...
"Syrian mercenaries" sounds like coloniser-speak for ISIS terrorists.
China, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos. And Libya before The Good Guys™ bombed it.
Every one needs to learn what the word comprador means. It's a very useful word that needs to be brought back into common usage.
Proportional representation.
That's exactly the reason. US interest rates are high so everyone else has to be higher. US treasuries, stock and bonds are the safest place to keep your money because they can just print more money rather than default on their debt. The only reason to keep money in a third world currency like the Naira is if we offer much higher interest rates.
The US is running crazy deficits every year. But at the same time they protect themselves from inflation with high interest rates. That pulls dollars into the US from the global south, strengthening the dollar and weakening other currencies. The US is basically exporting the inflation their money printing causes to poorer countries.
That's the reason so many countries are rushing to de-dollarize their trade before the Americans bankrupt them.
You can download Killing Hope for free from the CIA's website.
It's like they're laughing at us.
It wasn't a famine because there was no shortage of food. Ireland continued to export food, including massive amounts of high quality wheat even during the height of the hunger. It was the breadbasket of the UK.
Irish people starved because the capitalist system Britain imposed on them meant that they couldn't afford the food they themselves were growing. The money they earned was exported out of Ireland because everything was owned by absentee elites in England.
They were deliberately starved. When you design a system to starve people, and you prevent them from changing it, you're deliberately starving them.
Edit: Here's a good podcast summarizing what Britain did. If any of it sounds familiar, it's because Britain did more or less the same shit in all their colonies. The history of Ireland is the history of Nigeria.
They deliberately caused famines in pretty much every single country they colonized. Hunger is the fastest, most efficient way to genocide people. The Israelis learnt from the best.
Britain's human rights record is worse than Nazi Germany's. They killed more people in India alone than the Nazis did total.
One could argue that it's worth controlling the economy to prevent oligarchy, mass poverty and child prostitution.
The Soviet economy punched way above its weight in terms of quality of life for regular people. And the human cost of losing it was terrible.
During the economic crises of the late 1990s, Russian teachers were paid in bottle of vodka instead of rubles
Damnthatsinteresting