US imperialism has been conducting military operations in Nigeria since at least 1999. AFRICOM, officially established in 2007, became involved in the training and deployment of security forces in the Niger Delta. It is in this resource rich region where Shell Corporation exports much of Nigeria’s vast oil reserves to the West. The Shell Corporation is responsible for the mass impoverishment of Nigerian farmers and workers. The #BringBackOurGirls support for further intervention from the US puppet state in Nigeria masks the reality that US imperialism is protecting the corporate theft of the country’s wealth from the Nigerian people.
This reigns true in every region of Africa. In the east, the US and AFRICOM backed Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia in 2006, destabilizing the nation’s government and leaving millions to starve from withheld food-aid and fend for themselves against CIA sponsored death squads. In central Africa, the US and AFRICOM armed and financed proxies in Uganda and Rwanda, which proceeded to loot the Congo’s coltan, cobalt, and lithium for US and Western multinational corporations. In this ongoing conflict, six million Congolese have been murdered since 1996. In southern Africa, The ANC-led South Africa remains a neo-colony where the profits of US and Western capital are protected at the expense of the Black majority. Further, the US and EU imperialist alliance strapped economic sanctions on Zimbabwe in hopes that the country will reverse its land reform and indigenization policies.
“Since the fall of independent Libya, evidence of terrorist elements causing chaos across Northern Africa has become impossible to ignore.”