With the UN and other interests already interfering in Africa’s energy development, Joe Biden announced at the US-Africa Business Forum a plan for American taxpayers to shell out at least $8 billion to shut down effective coal fired energy plants in South Africa so they can be replaced with far less effective and far less efficient green-energy alternatives.
In other words, the goal of climate change cultists is to use $8 billion of America’s money to diminish South African infrastructure.
On Oct. 17, the head of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), U.S. Marine Corps General Michael Langley visited Morocco. Langley met with senior Moroccan military leaders, including Inspector General of the Moroccan Armed Forces Belkhir El Farouk.
Since 2004, AFRICOM has held its “largest and premier annual exercise,” African Lion, partly on Moroccan soil. This past June, 10 countries participated in the African Lion 2022, with observers from Israel (for the first time) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Langley’s visit is part of a broader U.S. push onto the African continent, which we documented in our dossier No. 42 (July 2021), “Defending Our Sovereignty: U.S. Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity,” a joint publication with The Socialist Movement of Ghana’s Research Group.
In that text, we wrote that the two important principles of Pan-Africanism are political unity and territorial sovereignty and argued that the “enduring presence of foreign military bases not only symbolises the lack of unity and sovereignty; it also equally enforces the fragmentation and subordination of the continent’s peoples and governments.”
In August, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield travelled to Ghana, Uganda and Cape Verde. “We’re not asking Africans to make any choices between the United States and Russia,” she said ahead of her visit, but, she added, “for me, that choice would be simple.”
That choice is nonetheless being impelled by the U.S. Congress as it deliberates the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, a bill that would sanction African states if they do business with Russia (and could possibly extend to China in the future).
To understand this unfolding situation, our friends at No Cold War have prepared their briefing No. 5, “NATO Claims Africa as Its ‘Southern Neighbourhood,’” which looks at how NATO has begun to develop a proprietary view of Africa and how the U.S. government considers Africa to be a frontline in its Global Monroe Doctrine. That briefing can be downloaded here.
President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy John Kerry is asking the world’s poorest to cut back on oil and other fossil fuels for the sake of the planet.
Kerry, whose family’s private jet has reportedly emitted more than 300 metric tons of carbon since Biden took office, recently encouraged the Democratic Republic of Congo to withdraw from auctioning off certain blocks of oil and gas to protect rainforests.
“We know it’s urgent. I spoke yesterday with the Deputy Prime Minister and I will speak this afternoon with the President, but it is his decision,” Kerry said on Tuesday.
According to Reuters, the U.S. claims that opening up the land in question could unleash environmental ruin by releasing large amounts of heat-trapping gas into the air.
“We have clearly described our interest in protecting the forests,” Kerry added. “We have asked for some blocks to be removed from the auction.”
The Congo is one of the poorest nations in the world. It is riddled with poverty and corruption. Its government says that it needs to tap into the country’s abundant natural resources for its people and economy. Congolese environmental minister Eve Bazaiba was emphatic that children would starve if the Congo wasn’t allowed to auction off the oil blocks.
“The Woman King,” a new “historical action epic” starring Viola Davis, has been treated to laudatory reviews by the corporate press. It has been called “indelible and truly inspiring” in an ABC News review which features the subhead “Black women only — no white saviors need apply.” The Daily Beast labeled it “an absolute blast of a cinematic experience,” praising its “thick layers of history.”
Set in 1823 in the West African kingdom of Dahomey (modern Benin), the movie pits the innocent Dahomans, protected by the elite all-female Agojie army, against the evil Oyo Empire, which operates as a brutal arm of the European slave trade and wishes to force Dahomey into providing slaves. Dahomey is portrayed as a kingdom that only wishes for peace and autonomy, whose king, Ghezo (John Boyega), is looking for alternatives to the awful trade in which his tribe has been reluctantly forced to participate. Besides manfully defending the citizens and king of Dahomey, the Agojie, under their leader Nanisca (Davis), are also proponents of ending the slave trade and replacing it with the cultivation of palm oil.
Throughout the film, Dahomey is presented as a small, put-upon kingdom that only seeks harmony and desires the destruction of the evil trade in human bodies — led by greedy Europeans — which plagued the region. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “The Woman King” is an “incredible true story” about “this amazing group of female soldiers who caused such an act of resistance that slavery paused for a time.”
The problem? Almost none of this is true.
THE UNITED STATES played an unacknowledged role in the 2017 bombing of an internally displaced persons’ camp in Nigeria that killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children.
A surveillance plane circled above the Rann IDP camp, which housed 43,000 people and was controlled by the Nigerian military, before a jet arrived and bombed the area where people draw water from a borehole, survivors of the attack said. The jet then circled and dropped another bomb on the tents of displaced civilians sheltering there.
The Nigerian air force expressed regret for carrying out the airstrike, which also killed nine aid workers and seriously wounded more than 120 people. But the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document obtained exclusively by The Intercept.
Evidence suggests that the U.S. launched a near unprecedented internal investigation of the attack because it secretly provided intelligence or other support to the Nigerian armed forces, a contribution hinted at by Nigerian military officials at the time. The U.S. inquiry, the existence of which has not been previously reported, was ordered by the top American general overseeing troops in Africa and was specifically designed to avoid questions of wrongdoing or recommendations for disciplinary action, according to the document.
Conducted as part of a long-running counterinsurgency campaign against the terrorist group Boko Haram, the January 17, 2017, attack on the camp, located in Rann, Nigeria, near the Cameroonian and Chadian borders, also destroyed at least 35 structures, including shelters for war victims who had been forced from their homes.
Uganda began its national ID program in 2014, giving the cards a 10-year lifespan before they reach expiration. Under plans recently announced by the nation’s government, when cards start expiring in 2024, Uganda will begin to harvest the DNA of its citizens for use in the revamped national ID program, though it isn’t clear exactly how the government plans to extract the DNA from its citizens.
In addition to information on Ugandan’s DNA profiles, the updated ID cards will feature biometric data and fingerprints, as well as information gathered from the eyes of Ugandan citizens using scan technology. All this, the government says, will help speed up the identity verification process at government offices and administrative centers, as well as assist law enforcement in their investigations. The cards are also digitized, giving the government instant access to citizens’ information via a massive national catalog.
A Liberian immigrant living in Philadelphia has been arrested by federal authorities and charged with fraudulently hiding his background as a high-ranking member of a rebel group — he called himself “Dragon Master” — that is accused of committing atrocities during a Liberian civil war.
Laye Sekou Camara, of Southwest Philadelphia, is accused of lying about his background in 2011 to obtain a visa to enter the United States and then later to obtain a green card.
Camara then allegedly used the green card to falsely characterize his background on a Pennsylvania identification application in 2017, according to a criminal complaint submitted to Magistrate Judge Richard A. Lloret and publicly filed last week. Camara is charged with the use of an immigration document obtained by fraud.
In news accounts dating back to 2003, during and shortly after the conflict known as the Second Liberian Civil War, prosecutors say Camera is identified as a brigadier general with the rebel faction known as Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, or LURD. Liberia’s first civil war was fought for most of the 1990s and left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.
U.S. authorities have led the charge in recent years to bring Liberian war criminals to justice — particularly in Philadelphia, where thousands of refugees fleeing the conflict were relocated in the 1990s and 2000s.
The Wall Street Journal has an article out titled “U.S. Aims to Thwart China’s Plan for Atlantic Base in Africa“, subtitled “An American delegation wants to convince Equatorial Guinea against giving Beijing a launchpad in waters the U.S. considers its backyard.”
The article quotes the former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy saying “We’d really, really not like to see a Chinese facility” on the Atlantic, and discusses “American concern about China’s global expansionism and its pursuit of a permanent military presence on waters the U.S. considers home turf.”
The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi has discussed the irony of WSJ yelling about China’s “global expansionism” over a potential military base in Equatorial Guinea without applying that label to the US, when the US has hundreds of times the number of foreign military bases as China. Antiwar’s Daniel Larison wrote an article back in December eviscerating the ridiculous claim that a military base some six thousand nautical miles from the US coastline could be reasonably framed as any kind of threat to the American people.
But what really jumps out is the insane way the US political/media class routinely talks about virtually every location on this planet as though it is a territory of the United States.
The Wall Street Journal referring to the entire Atlantic Ocean as “America’s backyard” and “waters the U.S. considers home turf” follows a recent controversy over the US president proclaiming that “Everything south of the Mexican border is America’s front yard.” This provoked many references to the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”, a nineteenth-century imperialist assertion that Latin America is off limits to any power apart from the United States, effectively declaring the entire Western Hemisphere the property of Washington, DC.
It also follows another incident in which Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked on the ongoing tensions around Ukraine that it is in America’s interest to support “our eastern flank countries”, which might come as a surprise to those who were taught in school that America’s eastern flank was not Eastern Europe but the eastern coastline of the United States.
The World Health Organization has deployed a rapid response task force to South Sudan to investigate a mysterious illness that has left at least 89 people dead.
The ministry of health in South Sudan has reported fast-spreading illness in the northern town of Fangak, in the Jonglei state, which local scientists haven’t been able to identify.
The region was recently hit with severe flooding — with health officials tasked with gathering samples to help identify the deadly disease.
Local health officials in Fangak said initial samples from the sick returned negative results for cholera.
Sheila Baya, a spokesperson for the WHO, spoke to the BBC, saying the team of scientists had to reach Fangak via helicopter due to the flooding.
She added that the group is waiting for transport to return them to the capital, Juba, on Wednesday.
She said: “We decided to send a rapid response team to go and do risk assessment and investigation.
“That is when they will be able to collect samples from the sick people — but provisionally the figure that we got was that there were 89 deaths.”
According to a shocking new report that was released on Tuesday, Eighty-three ‘humanitarian’ aid workers, including several that were employed by the World Health Organization (WHO), committed horrific sex abuse and exploitation while they were stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo during the country’s 2018-2020 Ebola outbreak.
The report was compiled by an independent commission that looked into the allegations after the Thompson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian uncovered over 50 accusations of sexual abuse by aid workers that had been submitted last year.
After investigating for months, the commission uncovered that AT LEAST 21 of the 83 offenders were employed by the WHO and had routinely demanded sex in exchange for, or to keep their jobs.
Hellbound and Down 
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