‘The New Lebensraum’
The Chinese are really thinking strategically. Always have been. What they are doing today, in plain sight, is based on what they know, based on their strategic analysis, of what the world will look like in 50 to 100 years’ time.
They are already creating their version of our globe in 50 year time. They are clear in their minds what they want, and they are steadily working towards it diligently like ants.
‘Lebensraum’
They have been expanding around the world with their ‘aid’ to various countries and regions. Whoever bothered to stretch their hands for aid have the hands clasped by the Chinese government.
In the Chinese Think Tanks and Institutes of Policy and Strategic Studies, researchers are working day and night to decipher what the future holds, based on the reality of today.
The first thing they realised is that China is short on space. Yes. Physical space. This may sound odd considering the fact that China has a land area of 9.596 million square kilometres. But an expanding population estimated by the CIA in 2015 to be about 1.4 billion people cancels the perceived land area advantage.
It is the third largest country in the world after Russia and Canada, yes but her population and topography dampen the advantage.
Much of China is uninhabitable or nearly so. The Western half is mostly desert while the Central and Southern portions are covered with rugged mountains.
This is what Chinese policymakers can see and are planning with. Unlike Nigeria that has almost everything, and more, to make a great Nation, the Chinese are not necessarily inevitably rich. They planned it.
The Beijing Doctrine: Futuristic Thinking
And today, they are already looking to the future. The habitable parts of China are NOT enough for the people. They need living space. And direct colonization as in the days of old with hordes of population moving from one continent to another to colonize it is no longer acceptable.
UN rules and more, creates a veneer of civilization that prevents such open robbery. Today it can still be done, but by stealth.
“Enters Policy of Clever Lebensraum”
This involves reactivating the old Hitler policy of seizing living space for one’s own country via violence, but modernising it to suit today’s dissembling sensibilities.
Today, violent behaviour by countries is no longer feasible. Just as slavery went out of fashion and was replaced by Colonialism, and colonialism gave way to neo colonialism and imperialism, so also did the brute policy of lebensraum as practised by Hitler has now resurrected in China, but without the virulent Hitlerian racism and prejudice.
With the soft policy of Cooperation, Aid, and Assistance, China is showing you can catch more ants with honey than with vinegar.
Under this soft veneer, China is now on a World Tour of ostensibly offering aid to less developed countries. But the terms of these aid and assistance need to be examined.
For instance, the infrastructure that they are developing in our continent is usually built with Chinese materials, Chinese Labour, and Chinese funds.
They do not bother too much about developing the countries they are helping. They are simply applying the frog in a slowly boiling water principle to good effect.
‘Strategic national assets’
Then there is the small case of the collateral. They now make it a case of the beggar has no choice. As collateral, government strategic assets are demanded to be signed away as a precondition for granting a loan.
This grants, in case of default, Chinese access to these national assets for a period of decades, if not centuries.
This is already actually the case in SRI LANKA, (Myanmar), Sierra Leone and Zambia. Kenya is on the way to financial capitulation with over 70% of their debts owed to the Chinese.
Apart from this, in some parts of the Caribbean, the island countries are carved up, with the Chinese picking the choicest areas first, and settling
Malcolm X: Unrelenting advocate of Strategic Thinking
It. Such countries therefore lose Sovereignty over parts of their domain.
‘A Strategic masterstroke’
Thus, with one single Strategy, effective dissembling, and some stroke of luck, the Chinese are looking to encircle the globe.
Without firing a shot!
All their fearsome weapons of mass destruction are sitting silently in their silos. Those the Chinese can not dominate through physical presence they process into a form of debt peonage.
Today the United States of America stands as the largest debtor not only in the world, but in all history! And they owe the majority of their debt to the Chinese.
So even when the children of Chairman Mao are not making brazen claims to real estate by seizing large tracts of land in the West, they have in place, a firm noose of financial tools to hold the leader of the West to ransom.
It is not far fetched to state that the United States is close to being a financial colony or slave, if you like, of China!
A classic from the little Red Book of Chairman Mao
Trump is a thinker, and this is the reason Trump seems to be waging a trade War with China. He can see through the Chinese strategy and he wants to retrieve his country from creeping debt peonage before it is too late.
‘A normal practice”
Saying the foregoing does not mean we have anything against the Chinese. We are only pointing out a pattern that is noticeable in Chinese interaction with the world : Long term thinking, identification of their biggest problem going forward (land) and financial clout to control bigger countries, and they are deploying tools and means available to them, peaceful tools, mind you, to achieve their aim. That is how a country plans for its future. And we praise them for it.
Malcolm X, middle, at Unibadan: First class thinker of Black Nationalism, proposed a Black Strategic Agenda.
‘Nigeria, the sleeping Giant’
Nigeria holds the fate of the entire population of Negroes anywhere in the world in her hands. But we do not seem to know this. We keep going on like a folksy country and spend valuable time over extremely petty matters while the Black man everywhere faces a mortal threat.
Even our intellectuals are unaware of the danger. (The only possible exception being Professor CHINWEIZU).
Our intellectuals and most brilliant minds that were mostly educated at the expense of the country, who should be busy 24 hours a day, thinking of how to break the Black man out of his present strategic encirclement by other races, are busy running the country down, stealing mere properties like children stealing toys, and doing absolutely ZERO strategic thinking.
What is worse, some do this, and then flee to the Camp of the Enemy to start using the talents they have, to develop other races and their domains.
‘Unimaginable lack of imagination’
It is only an educated Black man that you will catch fleeing his country that is in dire need of his services to go to a foreign country where he is looked down upon, no matter his qualifications and achievements.
A little imagination would have made it clear that perhaps being born in a certain country means you have a duty to that country and its people… Brief thought would have led to the conclusion that countries are developed by her people, not strangers…
A little circumspection would have revealed that going to another country means voluntary slavery and relegation to second class status… A more patient consideration of the facts would have shown that for several reasons, all professionals belong here first and foremost to help solve the problems confronting us as a people.
By the last count, an estimated 26, 000 Nigerian doctors are in the US alone. Whereas Nigeria has one of the lowest doctor to patient ratios in the world.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Energetic organizer and Thinker: Warned Africans to beware of total annihilation
‘No excuse is tenable’
Our fleeing professionals claim, of course, that the local environment is not conducive. This may be so. But is the solution the one they are taking?
Turning yourself into a more refined version of migrants bolting through the Sahara and the Mediterranean surely can not be the answer to infrastructural and policy challenges at home.
Why would I leave my father’s house because some of my siblings are doing the wrong thing in administering the house? And then go get to enter another man’s house who has his own children to cater for. Where I will be relegated to second class.
Is it not better to use my knowledge to bring my misbehaving brothers back home to heel? For the benefit of all?
Why are our qualified professionals abandoning the country, our God given country and her people to their fate at the hands of the misbehaving politicians and civil servants? Why flee?
Our country needs precisely the talents of our fleeing professionals to retrieve it from bad policymakers and repair it. But no. Our middle classes are now busy processing Canada, Australia, and Ireland.
‘Historical betrayal’
Fleeing the country at its point of greatest need amounts to a betrayal of historic proportions. It casts serious doubt on the long term viability of the Black man as a race.
If we can not make a sacrifice for our own kind and stay here and make our country better, and prefer to go and slave for others for the sake of mere money, what integrity and self respect do we have? What right do we have to long term survival as a race?
Self abnegation, helping to lift our kind that are still lower than us is the hallmark of civilized growth. If we are so selfish and weak minded as to be unable to join hands and raise our country from its prostrate state, then we deserve what others are doing to us, the Chinese included.
This is almost at par with the tragedy of the slave trade where African elites actively colluded with foreigners to denude the continent of its best human resources. That piece of elitist selfishness cost us 300 years.
‘Blame not the Chinese’
All what has been said above about Chinese neo-imperialism does not amount to hatred or censure of the guys from the Middle Kingdom. No. It is just a statement of fact. Analysis of reality.
And the other references is just describing the historical betrayal of Nigeria by Nigerian professionals. Abandoning the country, at its point of greatest need.
I only wish the Nigerian professionals will emulate their European, Asian and American counterparts in looking beyond personal interest and thinking of the country and of the race.
‘Confronting the Chinese Dragon’
If it is fairly clear that the Chinese game plan is ultimately to the benefit of the Chinese and TO THE DETRIMENT of Africa, then what to Do is clear… Go back to the drawing board, and instead of acting and reacting like puppets at the hands of the Chinese, African leaders, including Nigeria, should, as a matter of survival, sit down and craft a continent-wide
Kwame Nkrumah (above) Revolutionary Thinker and legacy builder: He advocated ‘United States of Africa’
Strategic response to the Chinese gambit. International relations is no more than high level chess. If you study the board hard enough, there is always a solution.
‘Without firing a shot’
With strategic thinking and action, the Chinese have achieved something powerful and remarkable: they have created a system that can suck the resources of the world in areas that are thousands of kilometres from the Chinese homeland into their own country. Without firing a shot!
So, away with the enthusiasm of embracing without hard analysis, all development ideas and infrastructure support from the Chinese. All proposals for help from them to Africa should be completely thought through to the very end before committing.
A word, they say, is enough for the Wise.
The carelessness and myopic selfishness as exhibited by Africa during the slave trade cost the continent 400 years (if we are to add the years of colonialism) and trillions of dollars in time, human and material resources and wealth. We have not recovered from that tragedy.
If we (Africans) exhibit the same carelessness in this century in the emerging relationship with China, it would cost us millennia, not centuries. And we can count on total annihilation or complete enslavement as a final dreadful end.
Are our leaders listening?
Ezekiel Oloriegbe
Abuja. September 2018.
