Zango, Haruna Tijjani

Yeah right. Always looking for the good and bad guys. Insufferable lots.

Don’t even get me started on the rigged financial system that is being enforced by the world powers you mentioned. Do you know how many economies were destroyed, lives lost, and hope shattered because of policies made at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and number 10 Downing Street? Most of those lives were in 3rd world countries. I understand the urge to explain everything from the spiritual lens and all but let’s not ignore the reality people lived through and are still living through.

Please preach the gospel you were called to preach. But stop using the pulpit to rewrite history. You told your congregation that England's civilization began with the message of the cross, and that America got its buildings and infrastructure from its revivals. Here is what you left out. England had been Christian for more than a thousand years before its industrial boom. Ethiopia was Christian centuries before England. Faith alone does not explain the wealth. One can even argue that it had little to zero role in it. In 1860, cotton made up more than 60% of American exports. Four million enslaved people picked it. On paper, those people were worth more than all the North's railroads and factories combined. When Britain abolished slavery in 1833, it paid £20 million in compensation. The money went to the slave owners, not the enslaved, and it was about 40% of government spending that year. Britain only finished paying off the loan in 2015. And the revivals? In 1845, Southern Baptists broke away from northern Baptists over slavery. Their own convention apologized for it 150 years later. 12.5 million Africans were forced onto slave ships. Nearly 2 million died before they reached land. They had names. Their blood is in those buildings. People trust you. When you get history wrong from the pulpit, they go home believing it. Teaching the truth takes nothing away from the gospel. But you cannot stand on the graves of millions and give all the credit to revival. Do better.

Study geopolitics long enough and you stop looking for the good guys. Every actor on the board is protecting something it owns. Countries, sponsors, companies, all of them moving to keep what they have. No country wants you better off because it cares about you. Nobody stops a war out of concern for innocent civilians. When they use that language, listen for what they want. War is an industry with shareholders. Global military spending hit a record $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh straight annual increase. The hundred largest arms companies booked $679 billion in 2024, the highest figure SIPRI has ever recorded, up 26 percent in a decade. A Czech firm, Czechoslovak Group, grew its arms revenue by 193 percent in one year making artillery shells for Ukraine. Your ally's help is somebody's order book. Insecurity has suppliers. A ragtag militia does not stumble onto AK-47s and anti-tank missiles in the bush. Every rifle left a factory with a serial number on it. Somebody shipped it. Somebody signed an end-user certificate swearing it was bound for a legitimate army, and SIPRI found export certification practices deeply inconsistent, which is the polite way of saying the paperwork is a formality. The guns often come from closer to home than you think. Conflict Armament Research examined weapons seized from jihadist groups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger between 2015 and 2023. At least one fifth had been diverted from the state custody of eight North and West African countries. They came out of government armouries. And after Libya collapsed in 2011, weapons looted from Gaddafi's stockpiles turned up with armed groups in Mali, Niger, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, the Central African Republic and Syria. A war Africa did not start is still killing Africans fifteen years later. We have had years of financial sanctions on terror organisations, and the weapons keep arriving. The money never touches the banks anyone is watching. Artisanal mines in JNIM's areas produce up to 725 kilograms of gold a year, worth roughly $34 million, moving out through the UAE, Turkey and Switzerland. Between 2017 and 2023 the group carried out 845 of the 1,100 recorded kidnappings across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. In Youwarou district in Mali, cattle theft alone brought in $739,200 in 2021. Gold, ransoms, livestock, fuel, cigarettes. Cash that walks across a border and never becomes a wire transfer. Geopolitics deserves serious attention from anyone who wants their country back. That means dropping the emotional defence when our favourites get caught. They did it to protect their interests. Their rivals do the same. Morality is what states say. Interest is what they do. Stop reading the press release. Follow the money instead.

Democracy is free and fair elections. I wonder why African leaders turn to vote buying instead when they can just be like their overlords.

So I just stumbled on a CIA Ibadan project dated 1961 that features a certain Nobel laureate. Ever heard of a body called ‘the Congress for Cultural Freedom’ or ‘Farfield Foundation’? This one will be long.