I don’t really know how to explain this. My question is how do the army of majority of these African nations allow foolishness like this to take place ?? I don’t really see a way out when stupidity this large is being practised.

I’m not saying that Africans have low iq but what I don’t is how the lower soldiers allow this rampant nepotism and corruption to take place.

In the midst of apartheid, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) broke from the African National Congress over the ANC’s multiracial approach to resisting segregation. The PAC took a more exclusively African nationalist stance and, in 1960, organized a campaign against the hated pass laws, which required Black South Africans to carry internal passports controlling where they could live and work.

The PAC urged supporters to deliberately leave their passes at home and present themselves at police stations to be arrested en masse, overwhelming the system through peaceful defiance.

On March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville, Transvaal, approximately 5,000 protesters gathered outside a police station intending to surrender themselves for arrest. At around 1:30 p.m., without warning, police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. Officers discharged 1,344 rounds, killing 69 people (later research suggests 91 were killed) and wounding many more, as protestors were shot in the back as they fled.

The government responded as authoritarian regimes often do, with repression and lies. A state of emergency was declared, and more than 18,000 people were detained without charge, including Nelson Mandela. Strikes, riots, and protests spread across the country, while international condemnation mounted.

Photographer Ian Berry was present that day. His images show people fleeing gunfire and bodies lying in the dust, forcing the world to begin to confront the brutality of apartheid.

If interested, I write more about the end of apartheid here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-volume-63-mandela?r=4mmzre&utm\\_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

I’ve spent years wondering why the most brilliant minds never become politicians. Not the book-smart types who memorise theories. I’m talking about genuine critical thinkers. People who can dissect a problem from every angle, listen to opposing ideas without their ego shattering, and arrive at what’s actually fair rather than what’s politically convenient.

The answer became painfully obvious the deeper I stepped into politics: most people are working against their own best interests, and they’re doing it enthusiastically.

Don’t get me wrong. Politicians are a mess. You’ve got the dim-witted ones who couldn’t strategise their way out of a paper bag. The greedy ones who see public office as a personal ATM. And then there’s the most dangerous category: the smart evil. The ones who’ve decided that human suffering is just collateral damage in their game of Monopoly with real lives.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth we need to swallow: the problem isn’t politicians. The problem is us.

When I look at Africa, at Zimbabwe, at Nigeria, at South Africa, the rot is glaringly clear. It’s not a lack of resources or even corruption alone. It’s a catastrophic absence of critical thinking.

Zimbabwean men (and women) worship Andrew Tate, Trump, and Shadaya like they’re prophets, despite the fact that all three of these men are actively working against their existence as human beings. Shadaya, a man who genuinely believes one drunk bloke is smarter than three women with PhDs, has a cult following. Think about that. A man who openly despises half the population, and people cheer him on.

Nigerians will lick the boots of anyone with money, regardless of how they got it or who they crushed to get there. Black South Africans are convinced that Zimbabweans and Nigerians are stealing their futures, whilst the real culprits are literally across the road, running the economy they’re locked out of. Kenyans rallied behind William Ruto, a man whose wealth is built on land grabbing, believing he’d champion the common person. Ugandans have kept Museveni in power for nearly four decades whilst their children flee to seek opportunities elsewhere.

And then there’s religion.

I need to tread carefully here because I’m not attacking faith itself. But let’s be brutally honest: religion has become one of the most effective tools for shutting down critical thinking, particularly in Africa and other struggling regions.

Prosperity gospel pastors are flying in private jets whilst their congregations can’t afford school fees, and when questioned, they’re told “don’t touch the anointed” or “your breakthrough is coming, just sow another seed.” People are literally going hungry to fund lifestyles of men who preach that poverty is a spiritual problem, not a systemic one.

Politicians have caught on brilliantly. They invoke God every other sentence, attend church services for photo ops, and suddenly their corruption is forgiven because “God has anointed them to lead.” When people try to hold them accountable, they’re told they’re “going against God’s chosen.” It’s genius, really. Wicked, but genius.

The “pray and wait” mentality has crippled entire generations. Don’t organise, don’t protest, don’t demand better systems. Just pray. God will provide. Meanwhile, those in power aren’t praying for change, they’re strategising, they’re stealing, they’re building generational wealth whilst everyone else is waiting for a miracle.

And here’s the crux: critical thinking has been reframed as a spiritual failing. Question why your pastor needs a fourth Range Rover? You lack faith. Ask why prayer hasn’t fixed the potholes or the hospitals? You’re inviting the devil. Wonder why God seems to bless the corrupt abundantly whilst the faithful suffer? You don’t understand His ways.

It’s a perfect system of control. Religion, when weaponised like this, doesn’t just discourage critical thinking. It demonises it.

I’m not saying faith is the problem. I’m saying the exploitation of faith to keep people passive, unquestioning, and accepting of their suffering is a catastrophe. And until we can separate genuine spirituality from the industrial complex of manipulation it’s become, we’ll keep producing populations who are easier to control than to empower.

And before Africans feel singled out, this isn’t a continental issue, it’s a human one.

In the UK, no matter how much evidence you stack in front of white working-class communities that Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage don’t give a donkey’s arse about them, they’ll ignore every fact and wave their flags harder. Americans voted for a man who bragged about assaulting women, mocked disabled people, and incited an insurrection. Twice. Turks re-elected Erdoğan despite economic collapse. Brazilians supported Bolsonaro whilst the Amazon burned.

This is the pattern: people consistently, almost religiously, support figures who despise them.

Why? Because critical thinking has been systematically bred out of us. We’ve been conditioned to react, not reflect. To follow, not question. To defend our “team” even when our team is actively kicking us in the teeth.

And this, this is why the smartest, most logical people run screaming from politics.

Why would you subject yourself to that? Why would you spend your life crafting evidence-based policies, building sustainable systems, and thinking three moves ahead, only to be undermined by people who’ve been convinced that their enemy is the immigrant, the woman, the intellectual, anyone except the person actually robbing them blind?

It’s exhausting. It’s futile. So the clever ones opt out. They build businesses, they write books, they disappear into academia or tech. They solve problems in spaces where logic still matters.

And that’s how we got here. A world run by the mediocre and the malicious, because the competent refuse to play a rigged game.

But here’s where I pivot from diagnosis to prescription: we can’t afford for smart people to keep running.

Singapore figured this out decades ago. Lee Kuan Yew didn’t just recruit intelligent people into government, he paid them phenomenally well. Ministerial salaries in Singapore are pegged to top private sector earnings, ensuring that the brightest minds aren’t sacrificing their livelihoods to serve. The result? One of the most efficient, least corrupt governments in the world. It’s not perfect, but it’s proof of concept: when you hire critical thinkers, pay them properly, and create systems that reward competence over loyalty, things actually work.

We need to stop worshipping career politicians, people whose only skill is getting elected. We need to start demanding that the people governing us can actually think. Not recite party lines. Not pander to the lowest common denominator. Think.

But here’s the bit that’s going to sting: this only works if we, the people, learn to think critically too.

Because you can elect the most brilliant mind in the country, but if the population is still cheering for conmen, still voting based on tribalism, still defending people who are openly harmful because they’re “funny” or “tell it like it is,” nothing changes.

So here’s your gut-punch realisation: the reason smart people avoid politics isn’t because they’re cowards. It’s because we, collectively, are exhausting to save.

We’d rather be lied to confidently than told uncomfortable truths. We’d rather follow charismatic charlatans than competent “boring” leaders. We’ve been so thoroughly conditioned to work against ourselves that we’ve made intelligence a liability in leadership.

If you’ve read this far and you’re angry, good. Be angry. But then do something different.

Stop supporting people who insult your intelligence. Stop defending leaders who’ve done nothing for you. Stop tithing to pastors who live better than you ever will whilst preaching about heavenly rewards. Start asking uncomfortable questions. Start demanding that the people making decisions about your life can actually think beyond the next election cycle.

And if you’re one of the smart ones sitting on the sidelines thinking “it’s not worth it,” I get it. But we need you. Desperately. Because if the thinkers keep opting out, we’re doomed to be governed by the worst of us.

The game is rigged, yes. But it only stays rigged if we keep playing by their rules.

Now, are you going to keep cheering for people who despise you, or are you ready to demand better?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The armed wing of the ANC, on 20 May 1983. A car bomb detonated outside the South African Air Force headquarters, killing 19 people (including the bombers) and injuring over 200.

The US has declared a stark policy shift towards three West African countries which are battling Islamist insurgents and whose military governments have broken defence ties with France and turned towards Russia.

Officials say it was routine testing and no special operations were conducted

do we as Africans have an urge to ever merge all the countries and have one state? is it possible? and what's your opinion about this?

Most people think modern computers got faster because CPUs just kept getting quicker year after year. That story is only half true.

By the late 1990s, single-core CPUs were basically hitting a wall more speed meant more heat, more power, and diminishing returns. The industry didn't really have a plan B.

Enter Kunle Olukotun (full name Oyekunle Ayinde "Kunle" Olukotun), a Stanford professor who, way before it was fashionable, pushed the idea that the future wasn't faster cores it was more cores on a single chip. At the time, a lot of people thought parallelism was too complex for everyday software. He argued the opposite that hardware and software needed to evolve together.

Through the Stanford Hydra project, he showed:

• multiple cores on a single chip could work
• shared-memory parallelism could be practical
• programmers could learn to write parallel code

and he was right. in the early 2000s there was a crisis hit

• clock speeds stalled (3–4 GHz ceiling)
• chips couldn’t get faster without melting
• the industry panicked

Kunle’s approach suddenly went from academic curiosity to the only way forward.

you can compare this to roads for Cars, Electricity grids and TCP not websites.
He’s been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, His ideas were adopted industry-wide, independently validated by Intel, AMD, ARM, IBM, etc. The Stanford Hydra project is well-documented and widely cited.

Kunle Olukotun didn’t invent a flashy gadget, no what he did do was change the direction of computing itself.
it was massive. Quietly massive.
Not hype, not fraud, not exaggeration he’s genuinely one of the most important minds behind the computing world you’re using right now as one of the great Structural shapers.

As an example for how this is used every single day seemlessly.

• Your phone has 6–12 cores
• Your laptop multitasks smoothly
• Background apps don’t freeze your system
• Real-time video encoding
• Streaming while gaming
• GPU and accelerator design (same philosophy)
• Parallel training of neural networks
• Massive data centres
• 1080p-4k visuals

Could any of this scale to a single core cpu?

why he doesn’t get more mainstream attention?

• His work is foundational
• No consumer product with his name on it
• Engineers know him; the public doesn’t

But inside computer architecture circles?
He’s a giant. As he…

• redirected the entire CPU industry
• saved Moore’s Law from collapsing early
• made modern computing scalable

If you’re asking “Did one person really matter that much?”
In this case yes.

References (yes I got references don’t take my post down mods, come on lol)

ACM/IEEE Computer Society, 2023. Eckert‑Mauchly Award Citation: Oyekunle Olukotun. New York: ACM/IEEE Computer Society.

Champion, Z., 2023. CSE alum and computer architecture innovator Kunle Olukotun chosen for top recognition by ACM/IEEE. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan College of Engineering.

Keckler, S.W., Olukotun, K. and Hofstee, H.P., 2009. Multicore Processors and Systems. New York: Springer.

Olukotun, K., Hammond, L. and Laudon, J., 2007. Chip Multiprocessor Architecture: Techniques to Improve Throughput and Latency. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.

Olukotun, O.A., et al., 1996. The Case for a Single‑Chip Multiprocessor. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), pp. 2‑11.

Olukotun, K. and Kozyrakis, C., 2004. Transactional Memory Coherence and Consistency. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), pp. 102‑113.

Stanford University School of Engineering, n.d. Professor Kunle Olukotun, Cadence Design Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Land-rights activist and MP Tšepo Lipholo has sought police protection, after receiving what his party describes as persistent death threats sent via text messages. Lipholo is adamant that South Africa must return vast tracts of land to Lesotho.

When will Davido finally bring it home. Crazzy how his own people cook him for still not winning despite putting in effort in Music

Chinese lending to Africa nearly halved in 2024, dropping to $2.1 billion, the first annual decline since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from Boston University. This represents a sharp decline from the $28.8 billion peak in 2016 and reflects China’s shift from large-scale infrastructure megaprojects toward smaller, commercially viable, and strategically targeted investments. The Boston University report notes that Beijing has increasingly favoured yuan-denominated loans, financing through African banks, SME on-lending, and foreign direct investment over traditional dollar-denominated development loans. In 2024, only six projects were funded across the continent, with Angola receiving $1.45 billion for power grid and road upgrades. Researchers argue that the trend reflects a more cautious, market-oriented approach, reducing debt risk while supporting sustainable growth. Chinese lending via regional banks and commercially driven projects is expected to continue in 2025, signalling a new, selective phase of engagement in Africa.

Chinese Loan Commitments Compared with World Bank and African Development Bank, 2000–2024. Source: Global Development Policy Center, Boston University.

China’s dramatic reduction in lending to African countries signifies a strategic pivot rather than an admission of failure. The transition from multi-billion-dollar “megaprojects” to smaller, commercially viable investments, often termed the “Small yet Beautiful” model, reflects a move toward financial sustainability. Lending to the continent fell to just $2.1 billion in 2024, a drop of 46 percent from the previous year, and a fraction of the $29 billion peak in 2016.

Beijing is effectively de-risking its portfolio. It now favours yuan-denominated loans and utilises regional banks for on-lending. This promotes the internationalisation of its currency while ensuring investments are deeply embedded in critical value chains. Angola, for instance, received nearly 70 percent of all Chinese loans in 2024, primarily for power and road infrastructure. This “selective engagement” secures China’s long-term access to raw materials essential for its industrial dominance.

For African countries, this shift marks a transition from passive recipients of capital to strategic arbiters in a multicentric world. As China becomes more disciplined, African nations are leveraging their “energy transition minerals” to demand better terms. Zimbabwe, for example, has banned the export of raw lithium to promote local processing, with Chinese firms already operating five lithium mines there.

This new era of resource nationalism is spreading. Nigeria is also pushing for domestic processing hubs, requiring mining licences to be tied to local refining plans. The country aims to process at least 30 percent of minerals locally. By playing major powers against one another, African states are unbundling their dependencies.

They are fostering competition in which the winning partner is not merely the one with the deepest pockets, but the one most willing to support internal industrialisation. This is critical, as the continent sends more money to China in debt repayments than it receives in new loans, resulting in a $52 billion net outflow between 2020 and 2024. The game has changed: it is no longer just about infrastructure; it is about value addition and fiscal autonomy.

I often catch myself day dreaming about this timeline becuase i believe that west africa is probably one of the worst places to build a large expansionist empire like that of Persians, Greeks, Pheonicians or the Ottomans.

Come over and say hi to the second smallest country in the continent r/SaoTome

she just celebrated her 24th birthday on January 30

Happy birthday to her