Russom H

Whenever I see Africans having all of the takes over countries like Eritrea, I just want to cover my face and go somewhere to have a lie down. Because the way some of you talk is a confirmation of every malicious racial stereotype that was ever created about African people. You have no original thoughts or independent opinions inside your head. Everything that comes out of your mouth is Garbage-In-Garbage-Out programmed nonsense that was dictated directly directly into your head by the BBC news anchor who talks like they have plums in their mouth. Kinikan "Eritrea is a dictatorship," "They don't have freedom," "Police state that citizens need permission to leave." First of all, let's be clear on something - no African country is fundamentally better off than Eritrea. You might not be under the same sanctions as they are, so you might have access to the cheapest cast-off consumer items from global trade that China gracefully lets you have, which creates the illusion of wealth and comfort, but the minute your weak and compromised governments ever try to exert actual sovereignty and independence, is the minute you will discover that global trade is a mafia operation controlled by US sanctions, and we are ALL at the same level as Eritrea. Just because you have cheap consumer items from Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and you have MTN or Safaricom 4G internet that you use to play Nairabet and watch porn does not make you better off than an Eritrean who doesn't have those things. Because the price your country is paying for having those things can be measured in all kinds of horrible ways, like how IMF structural adjustment has devalued your Nigerian currency 99.7% since 1986, or how British soldiers at their base in Kenya regularly rape and murder local women without being legally answerable to Kenyan law. That is the price Eritrea refused to pay, so think about that before you sneer at people who to a certain extent are actually better off than you. Second and more importantly, "freedom" is a concept that you should define for yourself as an adult human being with a fully functioning brain. If a group of white people and their NGO/media/civil society servants in Abuja and Nairobi have told you all your life that "freedom" means "multiparty universal suffrage elections", "free trade", "free press" and "individual liberty", that is fine and I love it for you. But as a grown-ass adult in a world that is clearly bigger than you, perhaps you also need to ask yourself what "freedom" means to Agnes Wanjiru, the Kenyan nursing mother in Nanyuki who was gang raped by British soldiers, stabbed in her lungs (so she drowned in her own blood), and dumped (alive) into a septic tank where her body was discovered 3 years later. What does "freedom" mean to the 3 million people who died in Nigeria's civil war, which was externally instigated by Charles de Gaulle, who wanted to punish Nigeria and set it up for long term instability because Nigeria dared to publicly oppose France's nuclear bomb tests in Algeria? What does "freedom" mean to the local Tuaregs in Algeria around those nuclear test sites whose descendants still suffer extremely high rates of cancer, birth defects, and genetic mutations 60 years later? What does "freedom" mean to 40 million black South Africans who were born into an economy whose structure has NOT changed since 1994, and who are statistically condemned through no fault of their own, to live tiny lives surviving off small government handouts, all because someone crossed the Atlantic, came to their country, stole all the means of production, and codified their theft into law? All these people I have mentioned have elections and smartphones and Google and porn and mobile money and some measure of gay rights, and whatever other thing that these NGO people have told you constitutes "freedom." What use are these things to them? As an African adult in 2026 with a functioning, non-colonised mind that can take in and process information independently - and not just mindlessly parrot whatever you have been told - you should be able to define what "freedom" means in your own personal, communal, national and civilisational context. Because the ability to trade memecoins, use Uber, make an online purchase with your Mastercard, subscribe to somebody's OnlyFans, express dissatisfaction with your government openly, be part of political opposition, or attend a Pride parade are definitely important freedoms to some people. But freedom from white people and their IMF, World Bank, CIA, MI6, Mossad, DGSE, International Bank of Settlements, New York Federal Reserve, foreign military bases, NGO industrial network, sponsored terrorism, contrived colour revolutions, and Epstein safari trips to hunt and eat your kids are even more important freedoms to other people. And since in the world that existed between 1945 and 2023, it was basically impossible to have both sets of freedoms at the same time, Eritrea chose the second set of freedoms over the first set, as is their sovereign right to. So if you come from a country that allowed Epstein islanders to hunt and eat your babies and drown your women in septic tanks in exchange for having Mastercard, Sportpesa and Pornhub, maybe focus on managing the faustian bargain your government made and quit rubbernecking at Eritrea. You actually have bigger problems than they do.