Ever wondered why most Americans prefer coffee over tea and why they call those two popular sports of theirs that look like rugby and cricket, football and baseball respectively?
America’s love affair with coffee and the invention of American Football and Baseball was a bold economic and socio-cultural statement of America’s rejection of their British colonisers whom they finally chucked out in 1776 after years of bitter struggle for independence. Tea in particular which was (and still is) the favourite beverage drink of the Brits left an economic sour taste (pun intended) in the mouth of the colonials in the 13 original American colonies.
Sourced from vast plantations in India, the British tried to compel the Americans to trade in the commodity under terms favourable to British merchants. To the British, it was all about enforcement of the concept of free trade which they reckoned must be allowed to flourish without let or hindrance. But the Yanks would have none of it and tried all they could to sabotage British ships carrying the stuff approaching the American coastline and burning warehouses where British trading companies kept them.
Needless to say that not only did the Yanks hated trading in the stuff they regarded drinking tea, which the British loved, as akin to drinking horse piss. And one foggy night in 1776 under the cover of the darkness a motley group of Yankee activists silently rowed their boats to a massive British ship loaded with tea that was docked in the harbour of Boston, Massachusetts and set fire to it destroying the ship along with the entire content in its hold. So was born the legend of the Boston Tea Party, a turning point in the American struggle for political and economic independence which to this very minute Americans look back and celebrate with unabashed aplomb. And this also spawned the rejection of anything British in the American system including those sports I mentioned.
Curiously centuries down the line in a twist of irony, it is the Americans who are now playing the role of the British of old, this time though not by gunboats but by the subtle means of economic skullduggery and blackmail through America’s special purpose global economic cop, the International Monetary Fund or IMF as it is more commonly referred to.
Last week, as more and more Nigerians across the country were making their feelings known about the suffocating economic situation in the country through protests and with the naira plummeting down to its lowest rate yet at N1,600 to 1 USD, the IMF Executive Board, while acknowledging the desperate economic situation in Nigeria, was nonetheless asking the Nigerian government to remove subsidies on electricity and what remained of subsidies on petroleum products. In making these recommendations, the IMF stated that “These subsidies are inefficient in reaching the intended beneficiaries’’. Eliminating such subsidies therefore will “redirect resources towards more targeted and impactful social welfare programmes’’.
We have heard that mantra eons before and to be honest, it is boring and disingenuous of the IMF and anybody for that matter to continue to repeat this fraud as a disguised excuse to heap more hardship on Nigerians.
Many people reached me with questions like “Is the IMF not aware of the suffering and growing threat of social revolt in Nigeria”? “Do they want to kill us patapata and enslave the remaining ones as they did before’’? “Will our government listen to them’’?
On this matter, I am sorry I have bad news for my fellow compatriots. The IMF will not back off even if Nigerians revolt against their government. Indeed the IMF is aware and may have anticipated that such will be the result of their policies and may have thus also included in their plan how to profit from the chaos they have created in Nigeria.
Nothing pleases the IMF more than to see a country in distress and near bankrupt where with its government in disarray it can easily squeeze more concessions and sink that country into ever more dependency.
So are we just going to wring our hands helplessly in despair seeing our beautiful land and heritage go under? Or are we going to fight off like the Americans of old did against the British, this looming Armageddon planned against us by the America-controlled IMF?
The first order of things in this regard is to arm ourselves with the knowledge of what the IMF is and how it operates.
Beneath the outward appearance of organisational order and the routinely nuanced professional presentation in analysing economic data, the IMF is a corrupt and soulless instrument of American international economic enforcement that preaches to others what it cannot dare ask its principals to practice.
Although established in 1945, IMF operations which we are now all too familiar with have been embedded in American history from independence to date. All through its history America had always acted in a predatory manner to expand its economic interests fair and foul at the expense of others.
In the 1930s when the United States of America was well and truly an economic basket case and was tending towards anarchy with the collapse of its economy, American leaders looked with envy at the flourishing British and French colonial empires and hoped that something in the form of a casus belli (pretext to launch war) would occur to destroy those empires and allow America to takeover.
This sort of strategic thinking was not new to American history. Way back after the American Civil War which was fought under the pretext of abolition of slavery, hordes of Yankees known as ‘’Carpetbaggers’’ from the victorious northern states descended on the economically bankrupt southern states like Georgia, the Virginias, Carolinas etc seizing off plantations, mansions, landed properties and other valuable economic assets.
After its independence in 1776 much of the vast lands to the west of the original 13 colonies were acquired through sleight of hand skullduggery at the expense of France, Netherlands, Spain and Mexico. Thus the entire territories in the northwest of America starting from Michigan were wrestled out of the French. The territories from Texas right up to California were gobbled at the expense of Spain and Mexico. The Philippines and some Islands in the Pacific were muscled out of Spain under questionable circumstances. (To be continued)
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