Many observers wonder why numerous countries that gained independence long after most African nations now enjoy significantly stronger economies and development indicators. Looking beyond superficial explanations requires understanding how neocolonialism functions as a persistent system of control and extraction by Western powers, effectively preventing genuine independence and sovereignty across much of Africa. Maro Akpobi explores the issue in relation to Nigeria.
By Maro Akpobi
The Colonial Project Never Ended
Nations that failed to secure their independence through sustained resistance and sacrifice typically remain under foreign control through increasingly sophisticated mechanisms. Paper independence means little without strong institutions capable of defending national interests. In their absence, former colonizers invariably return to continue extracting resources and value, leaving countries trapped in cycles of dependency that make meaningful recovery virtually impossible.
Most non-African countries that have prospered successfully resisted foreign interference in their governance structures and development policies. Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew maintained tight control over its political and economic systems largely to prevent external influences from undermining national development priorities. In stark contrast, African countries have experienced waves of coups and political instability, frequently with the tacit or active support of foreign governments. These interventions have repeatedly destabilized countries like Nigeria, devastating institutional development and setting back economic progress for generations.
Western powers apply dramatic double standards in their responses to democratic disruptions. When coups or anti-democratic movements emerge in Western nations, they face immediate condemnation and resistance, as evidenced by the overwhelming response to the January 6th, 2021 Capitol attack in the United States. However, similar events in Africa are often treated as routine or even expected developments. This attitude was perfectly encapsulated in former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s consistently pro-colonial statements and offensive poems during diplomatic visits, revealing a deeply entrenched colonial mindset that persists among Western political elites.
The post-independence history of Nigeria vividly demonstrates how military coups function as effective tools for external control and resource extraction. Since gaining independence, Nigeria has endured six successful military takeovers, with each regime bringing increasingly destructive waves of corruption and institutional damage. The pattern runs from Buhari’s misappropriation of NGN2.5 billion in Petroleum Trust Fund money (later exposed by Saraki in an interview with Vera Ifudu) through Babangida’s systematic looting of the treasury to Abacha’s massive theft, with billions still being recovered from foreign banks decades later. These military regimes collectively devastated Nigeria’s development prospects while serving foreign interests.
Western governments’ responses to these anti-democratic takeovers reveal their true priorities. Ronald Reagan, then president of the US, routinely addressed coup plotter and military dictator Babangida as “President” in official correspondence, with his letters containing only vague, occasional references to eventual democratic transition. This normalization of military rule represented deliberate policy rather than diplomatic oversight. Military leaders proved particularly useful for implementing the devastating Structural Adjustment Programs, which Western financial institutions sought to impose on reluctant populations, bypassing democratic resistance to these exploitative economic reforms.
The personal corruption facilitated by these arrangements reached staggering proportions. Babangida’s wife, Maryam, reportedly maintained a single bank account containing £72 million by 1993, representing just one of many repositories for stolen wealth. This massive accumulation of personal fortunes occurred with implicit Western approval as international institutions simultaneously pushed economic policies through the IMF and World Bank that systematically undermined Nigeria’s economic foundations.
Babangida embraced these neoliberal prescriptions without reservation, establishing conditions for the catastrophic and ongoing decline for the country’s currency, the naira. Under his implementation of externally designed “reforms,” the currency plummeted from near parity with the dollar to approximately 4 naira per dollar by 1986. When he finally relinquished power, it had collapsed further to 17 naira per dollar. This represented the most severe currency devaluation in Nigerian history, fundamentally undermining economic sovereignty and creating long-term structural dependencies that persist to this day.
The Brutality Behind “Reform”
Any assessment of neocolonial arrangements must acknowledge their devastating human costs. Babangida brazenly annulled the 1993 presidential election widely recognized as the freest and fairest in Nigerian history, crushing democratic aspirations and popular hopes for meaningful political transition. Throughout these military regimes, citizens who voiced dissent faced systematic torture, indefinite imprisonment, or extrajudicial killing. Such brutal repression would spark international crises if attempted in the very countries that quietly supported these dictatorial regimes while extracting resources and influence.
The true motivations behind Western interventions occasionally surface through unguarded moments of candor. A U.S. Senator, Lindsey Graham, provided one such glimpse when discussing American interests in Ukraine, stating plainly that “This war’s about money… The richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine, two to seven trillion dollars’ worth. It’s in our interest to make sure Russia doesn’t take over the place.” This unfiltered acknowledgment reveals what critical observers have long understood about foreign interventions worldwide: they primarily serve resource extraction and geopolitical control objectives rather than the democracy and human rights narratives constructed for public consumption.
Non-Profits as the New Colonial Administrators
Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of a new vector for external control over African development: powerful non-profit organizations and private foundations. Institutions like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation have fundamentally reshaped development landscapes across the continent, operating largely beyond traditional accountability structures while wielding enormous influence over national policy formation and implementation.
These organizations provide substantial funding to think tanks and advocacy groups that directly shape legislation and governance frameworks in ways that would trigger immediate political backlash if attempted in Western democracies. A foreign foundation actively funding policy formation and implementation processes in the United States or European countries would generate widespread outrage and likely legal challenges, yet such arrangements have become normalized throughout Africa.
Within Nigeria, the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG) receives approximately $7 million from the Gates Foundation plus additional MacArthur funding, allowing it to exert significant influence over economic policy formation. Similarly, the National Assembly Business Environment Roundtable (NASSBER) operates with substantial financial backing from UK/DFID sources. These externally funded entities shape legislation and governance with limited transparency regarding their funding relationships or ultimate objectives. What began as discrete interventions has evolved into permanent secretariats with direct influence over national decision-making processes.
The testimony of Nigerian officials occasionally provides glimpses into the pressure these external funders exert. Former Director of Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, Yemi Kale, candidly acknowledged the constraints imposed by international organizations: “If the World Bank or the UNDP are bringing their money, you are going to do exactly what they want… I had to turn down a lot of funding because I was being compelled to do a lot of things that didn’t help policy makers.” This revelation highlights how external funding frequently redirects priorities away from national interests toward donor agendas.
Even government ministers occasionally break ranks to expose these dynamics. Festus Keyamo, the minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development, described intense international pressure on Nigeria to accept a damaging deal for establishing a national airline that would primarily benefit foreign interests: “Where will all that profit go? It’s not Nigeria… I saw the facilitator of that forum, one American man, crying from one TV station to another, saying that we lost foreign direct investment. We did not lose any foreign direct investment.” Such rare moments of candor from government officials provide valuable insights into the ongoing neocolonial pressures shaping Africa’s economic development.
Cash Transfers: The New Face of Dependency
Labor costs in Nigeria remain largely stagnant across many regions despite accelerating inflation, creating a deeply exploitative economic environment that foreign entities capitalize upon through continuous currency devaluation initiatives. Each devaluation episode triggers cascading socioeconomic effects where segments of the middle class experience downward mobility: those previously in the lower middle class fall into poverty, while the already poor descend further into extreme destitution. This class restructuring serves external interests by creating ever more desperate labor markets with diminished bargaining power.
Against this backdrop, the World Bank and similar institutions promote cash transfer programs as solutions to problems their own policy prescriptions helped create. These transfers, importantly, do not represent grants but rather loans that accumulate interest over time, forcing governments with limited revenue options to raise taxes or cut essential services. The resulting cycle perverts development objectives by redefining poverty rather than meaningfully alleviating it. Recipients find themselves temporarily lifted just above newly lowered poverty thresholds while fundamental economic conditions continue deteriorating beneath them. The brief duration of these transfers, typically lasting merely three months in Nigeria, ensures recipients quickly fall back below even these reduced standards of living, all while the nation accumulates additional debt burdens that will further impoverish future generations.
The 2022 IMF Article IV consultation with Nigeria, combined with the World Bank’s $800 million aid package, perfectly demonstrates this sophisticated process of economic control. IMF officials explicitly acknowledged that their prescribed policies would increase poverty levels, trigger inflation, and potentially spark social unrest. Yet rather than reconsidering these destructive prescriptions, they offered loans purportedly designed to “mitigate” the very social and economic crises their demands were engineering. This approach represents a particularly cynical form of policy manipulation that creates problems while simultaneously positioning the creators as the only available source of solutions.
Implementation details of these programs further reveal their true nature and priorities. A staggering 83% of program funds flow predominantly to urban areas despite rural communities bearing the overwhelming brunt of poverty with more than 106 million rural poor compared to roughly 27 million urban poor. Furthermore, despite ambitious targets to reach 15 million vulnerable households, only 3 million—a mere 20% of the intended recipients—actually receive any benefits. Requirements for national identification numbers and digital payment system access effectively exclude most impoverished citizens, particularly throughout rural regions where basic infrastructure remains virtually nonexistent. These systematic barriers suggest intentional program design rather than mere implementation failures.
The Mask Slips Away
Throughout the post-COVID era, the pretense of benevolent intervention by powerful nations has increasingly fallen away, revealing the raw power dynamics that have always underpinned international relations. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (mentioned earlier) provided a particularly telling admission when discussing international law, declaring without apparent self-consciousness that “The Rome Statute doesn’t apply to Israel, the United States, France, Germany, or Great Britain because it wasn’t conceived to come after us.“
This remarkably forthright statement encapsulates what critical observers have long understood: the rules, laws, and policies that powerful nations create systematically exempt themselves while binding smaller nations they wish to control. Western governments routinely construct international governance systems that preserve their freedom of action while constraining the sovereignty of others, particularly across Africa and the Global South.
While ordinary Western citizens bear little responsibility for these arrangements, their ruling political and economic classes, backed by powerful corporate interests, pursue foreign policies that systematically devastate African economies and societies while simultaneously presenting themselves as benefactors and models for emulation. This fundamental contradiction remains largely invisible to Western publics through sophisticated propaganda systems that sanitize imperial relations.
Understanding neocolonialism doesn’t require specialized academic training or obscure theoretical frameworks. What prevents widespread recognition of these patterns primarily stems from cultivated indifference toward global inequalities, driven by political and economic systems that prioritize individual advancement over collective wellbeing across national boundaries. Western educational and media systems systematically minimize historical and contemporary exploitation while emphasizing narratives of aid, development assistance, and supposed civilizational advancement.
For genuine African development to emerge, nations must identify and systematically dismantle these neocolonial arrangements while establishing authentic economic sovereignty. This process requires more than merely criticizing external actors; it demands building alternative development frameworks that prioritize African needs, capabilities, and perspectives. The fundamental challenge involves recognizing existing mechanisms of control while simultaneously developing practical strategies to overcome them through collective action and solidarity.
Across Africa, various movements and governments have begun this difficult work of creating counter-hegemonic alternatives to neoliberal development models. Their diverse approaches share a common recognition that economic independence represents the essential foundation for political sovereignty in a deeply unequal global system. Supporting these efforts requires moving beyond simplistic narratives about African governance and corruption to understand the structural forces that continue shaping development possibilities throughout the continent.
Maro Akpobi is a Nigerian independent researcher and writer known for developing low resourced language datasets for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and contributing insightful social commentary on Nigerian societal issues
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