pronounced OH-GOON-MOH-DEH-DAY | Third-Worldist | sneakerhead | West Africa + foreign policy + 90s hip hop + sports + Catholicism | i'm not here to argue
Mar 22, 2023 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Op-eds like this are useful for many reasons. They reveal the defects of U.S. and Western policy toward and opinion-making about Africa, including the "soft bigotry of low expectations" that defines it.
I'll talk about some of those issues in a #thread 🧵 washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
To begin with, consider this op-ed to be more or less the logic behind the Biden administration's embrace of the result of Nigeria's presidential election. The Washington Post is the unofficial bible of elite Beltway opinion. Its editorial board is authoritative in that regard.
Mar 20, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The tragic part about the rigging, violence and weaponizing of ethnic bigotry during elections in Nigeria is that they're a contest to decide which politicians are responsible for the affairs of governments which barely do anything for citizens and can kill them with such ease.
The state barely plays a meaningful role in the life of the average Nigerian regardless of their "tribe." Few of the people who take up arms or peddle the ethnic nationalism political elites cynically deploy to win their votes derive any material benefits over those four years.
Feb 10, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
An excellent thread by @WPReview 's editor-in-chief @Judah_Grunstein that does justice to essentially everything I've written over the past two years about Africa's foreign relations.
This tweet in particular basically sums up my critique of U.S. policy toward African countries.
If you've read my work or tweets for an extended period of time, you're likely familiar with the points made in that thread. That's because I myself have made them extensively for many years, I wrote some of the pieces the thread links, and we at WPR are kind of on an island.
Nov 10, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Related to my previous tweet saying that talk of the Great Twitter Exodus is mostly a "Global North" phenomenon is the idea that this place is basically the only real avenue for many in the West to come across people and perspectives from the "Global South" they may never have.
Twitter is where you can get perspectives on events and issues in African countries without the filters and gatekeeping lenses of Western media or academia. Its potency on the continent isn't so much in the number of its users, but its ability to reverberate across ecosystems.
