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Isdore Guvamobe Reflections
The last decade has seen increased alternative source markets for business in Africa, bringing a paradigm shift to traditional business strangleholds of the United States of America in particular, and its allies in general, whose approach was premised on the big brother mentality.

In all most all cases, the US and its allies in Western Europe treated African countries as toddlers and even dictated how Africa’s untapped raw material should be exploited.

The coming in of the Chinese and other Far East countries into Africa, albeit with a big bang, has shaken the US and its allies to the point that in their desperation to maintain hegemony on Africa’s natural resources, they have turned to regime change antics, through sponsoring of opposition political parties and/ or military interventions, disguised as anti-terrorism military co-operations. At times they call it peacekeeping, yet the reality is that they will be scouting for ways to increase US military presence and influence on the exploitation of natural resources, in a desperate attempt to elbow out the Far East.

We should all be glad that Africa is moving towards self-governance through the establishment of the African Union Standby Brigade, which in effect should militarily deal with all of the continent’s trouble spots, instead of using foreign military outfits such as AFRICOM and NATO. AFRICOM and NATO can turn out to be devils in sheep skin, depending on the instruction they have from their capital for a specific mission.

The US continues its activity on increasing military presence in Africa as a pretext to bringing troops to Africa and they use the slogan “war on terror”. Outside Africa, Syria is a good example.

The American military operation, aimed to fight ISIS has lasted for a very long time and has not achieved its declared goals. It has killed many people.

One of the reasons for this situation is that under the slogan “war on terror” the US’s real goal is to depose the Assad regime. But Washington has not taken into consideration that Syria still has historical allies (first of all Russia), that managed to stop the criminal activity of US.

Another reason of US activity in Africa is a growing military influence of China. It makes Pentagon behave not just defensively, but offensively, to stop Chinese expansion in Africa in military and economic spheres.

An example is the Chinese-Namibia talks over the establishment of a new naval base in Walvis Bay. So it is logical to wait for some steps from US side taking into consideration that both China and the US have their interests in Namibia, particularly in its resource base. These steps may be expressed in pushing Namibian authorities to abandon this project and “replace” it with American analog again under the slogan of “fighting against terrorism”.

Such talks with the US are very tricky. If you agree with their conditions, you risk losing your sovereignty; if you don’t agree, your country can be next in the list for regime change because of the protests and sponsored revolutions, etc, like the case in Libya, Egypt and so on.

So African leaders should think hard in finding reliable partners (particularly, in military cooperation) who can become real allies with no “hidden” interests.

Another criticism proffered by Washington to Africa is “human rights abuse”. They use Eurocentric values such as gay rights to measure Africa’s human rights standing and this is wrong.

But nobody criticises America for its human rights violations in countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere, where American “military support” caused a lot of deaths of innocent civilians. For example, the absolute ignoring by the US of the Israeli policy towards Palestine!

All this means that if the US gets interested in your country – it is time to be wary about it, because under different pretexts it finally results in intervention.

In this case African countries must follow SADC initiatives to ban any deployment of foreign troops in the region and especially under AFRICOM. This decision seems only a proper one because it prevents any kind of foreign influence on African leaders’ policies.

When it comes to enriching themselves, the US and its allies will stop at nothing.