By Toyin Falola
The Armageddon is coming
With a wave of travail and a wind of trouble.
Armageddon is coming!
The travails of hunger dice it.
Propagated by the impulsiveness of the mind
Here in Nigeria and there in the world at large.
Historians had warned us.
Who came before us and
The horn bearers of today of the doom that is yet to come.
Avoidable, excusable, and escapable
If only we tarry from the soiling convictions of terror, corruption,
And all the vices accommodated by the human mind.
Armageddon is coming,
So, let’s brace up and chin up.
When will it arrive?
In words, on February 5
In action, only Olodumare can tell.
I am exercising my full rights as a senior scholar with an emeritus status to create a preface to the forthcoming Inaugural Lecture, titled “Armageddon?” by Professor Adetola Odutola Odukoya, the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Lagos, on February 5, 2025. This prologue may be disconnected from the contents of the Inaugural Lecture, which is all well and good, as its omissions and inadequacies may provide the background for a worthy epilogue.
The history of Africa in general and Nigeria in particular has undergone different phases of historical transformation. However, intellectual obscurity and epistemological underestimations have plagued this deep history. When the continent was exposed to international communities and global interfaces, the received orthodoxy clouded the international perception of the continent and, as such, ushered in an overbearing hegemony empowered by misinformation and disempowerment of Africans. Remedying this situation and the clouded judgement of African intellectual prowess and history, many scholars, including me, had expanded scholarly warfare and intellectual battles to bring Africa back to the fore of global knowledge. I would like to assume that Professor Odukoya has been recruited into this warfare.
Although the facts are bare, the international politics of knowledge would not resist counting the intellectual prowess of the continent. We know that the African history and path are rich and full of valuable global information. The colonial powers could not close their eyes to the reach deposit of gold in the Gold Coast (Ghana), and the Elmina Castle became a trading post for the Portuguese. The architectural and ingenuous peculiarity of the pyramids of Giza in Egypt was built between 2589 and 2566 BC. The economic prosperity of Mansa Musa and his kingdom made him one of the wealthiest men who ever lived on earth and maybe the richest. His mere generous act of dashing out gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca caused gold to crash throughout history in the early 14th century.
The ingenious cultural and architectural remnants from early 500 BCE to 300 BCE from arts from the Nok culture, Igbo-Ukwu, Ife, and others at the period when Ancient Greece and other European cultures were also developing and thriving. The continent is reputed for its unique culture, military prowess, administrative and governance excellence, arts, medical mastery, and transformative knowledge. The continent lost control of itself after the different phases of intrusions and interruptions to the smooth-sailing African world and development by foreign influence and international hegemony.
By the time most countries realised independence, the emerging leaders had lost touch with the administrative and cultural finesse that were the hallmark of African heritage. It was like starting a continent anew with leaders devoid of the African spirit of governance and the enthronement of corruption, selfishness, and politicised values. Omase o!
Since the 1960s, the boats of African nations have been rocked and plagued by diseases, corruption, low life expectancy, poverty, wars, underdevelopment, terrorism, crimes of different degrees, malnutrition, conflicts of various scales, droughts, backwardness, significant drawbacks in their transformation progression.
Now, the continent struggles for survival, and the countries with their institutions cannot hold their subjects still and maintain a peaceful and satisfying citizenry. Today, Sudan, South Sudan, DR Congo, Central African Republic, and Somalia are the least peaceful countries in the world as of 2022. Different levels of conflicts, terrorism, and extremist attacks in Nigeria, Kenya, and other parts of the continent plague the continent. The Nigerian Northern and Southeastern parts have long lost what it feels like not to anticipate possible attacks and terrors of fear.
Since the gaining of independence, the African democracy, or rightly put, the efficient running of governmental institutions, has been ruined by uncertainty, foreign political manipulations, and dissident military interference that come with a high magnitude of violence and unrest, claiming the lives of patriots and nationalists. The reoccurrence of the military interruption of democratic progression has affected its growth. The coups and military intervention in the 2020s in Mali, Guinea, Chad, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Niger, and others have witnessed disruptive interventions. Unfortunately, the leadership of the ECOWAS and the African Union have not been able to put a decisive end to these issues or control the reoccurrence rate.
Africa houses some of the poorest individuals and societies in the world as a result of long periods of resource mismanagement, corruption, red-tapism, and foreign exploitation. The economies are weakening, and the young, energetic demography that represents the continent’s future is fleeing to greener pastures elsewhere. If the hope is gone, there is a fear of the future.
The leaders of African nations are not oblivious to their subjects’ troubles, even if they are one of them; they are aware that deterioration is eating deep into the cores of the nations. However, many times, the sources of the problems are not what they seem to be. We must go deep into history and discover the issues’ core.
Two critical sources of our troubles are external domination and internal crises. The latter is a repercussion of the former. If we fail to strategise about controlling these sources, the continent may be doomed—an Armageddon.
The African space’s external domination is political and economic, amounting to the high weight of influence and determination of the African prospect. Imperialism and Capitalism are two types of political and economic respective influences external forces have had on African countries.
European imperialism has taken different phases throughout history: mercantile imperialism, monopolist imperialism, free trade imperialism, and multilateral imperialism. The European powers establish dominions across the world, either expressly or constructively. In contemporary Africa, the political decisions and fate of the African nations. Europeans’ economic domination of the continent is evident in the strategic capitalist encroachments.
African economic dependency and subjection to neocolonialism have distracted the attention of the countries for prosperous development. Many African resources are controlled by European multinational corporations that make Africans sign exploitative MOUs and contracts that favour foreign interests. When the African nations try to increase the hands at the table on which they play, the international community reacts with hatred and disdain.
More unfortunately, the rate of debt dependency of the African society has crippled the African nations from achieving true independence. Through debt politics, former colonial governments, the World Bank, and the IMF, as well as other European countries, control the countries through cultural adjustment programs and loan conditions.
Under the pretext of counterterrorism and interventions, the colonial powers have maintained contemporary influence on the military powers in countries like Chad, Niger, and Mali. European powers have also adopted the habit of fostering support for African political leaders or plotting to remove them from power to expand their imperial and capitalist influence on such countries.
Many African agricultural lands are controlled, leased, or sold to European multinational agribusinesses in countries like Mozambique and Ethiopia. The Chinese and European exploitation of the DR Congo’s copper and cobalt mining industries is significant to propagating technological advancement and supplies worldwide. The influences and controls are numerous; education, legal institutions, trade imbalance and market control, social and psychological footprints, and other manners of influence have subjected the continent and its people to foreign dominations.
These compounded dominations have lined up the doomsday in our nations. We are heavily distracted, our core values are jettisoned, and conditions cripple aspirations. The African leaders have, therefore, lost their will for self-determination and forgotten the values of independence. These distractions have made several vices grow under their watch without the willpower to combat them.
Unfortunately, the young who represent the hope of the nations have been seduced away by the green grasses of the European colds. So, foreign influences now hide our past, mystify our presence, and steal our future.
The doomsday comes—Armageddon reaches us. While we dazzle under the imperialism and capitalism of both the West and East, we lose touch with our reality and let our problems overpower us. I fear that we might not have seen the worst of the days: As we deepen our subjection to this control, we become weaker and unable to withstand adversaries in exerting our dreams.
If no action is taken, if the leaders do not fight to gain the will powers of their nation, these problems will catch up on us and could destroy us because we do not see them. The continent dives deep into domination and can not raise its head against its problem; if we go deeper, we could lose control, and Armageddon catches us.
I cannot wait to listen to this Inaugural Lecture. Is the Armageddon arriving in February?