By Sicebise Msengana
The USA remains a dictatorship of oligarchs, tech monopolists, a sprawling surveillance state, and the military-industrial complex. Europe stumbles forward as an aging fortress of dynastic wealth, colonial nostalgia, and institutional decay. Yet, Western-dominated media still gaslights the world by labeling these unequal, corporate-managed societies as the pinnacle of freedom.
When I tell Black people that we should look past the illusion of liberal governance and build disciplined, self-determining sovereign states, they lose their minds and call it "extreme." Every race is allowed to protect its collective interests and practice strategic ruthlessness except for Black people. Am I wrong when I say that liberal democracy is an illusive butterfly designed to keep the African masses in Africa and the diaspora docile, believing they are free while foreign powers rule their economies with an iron fist?
Worse yet, Black people complain every single day about systemic unfairness and the relentless exploitation of the continent.
I ask them: if we are truly living in a democratic global village, where are the globally competitive Black-owned monetary systems, independent industrial tech sectors, and truly sovereign African institutions? Why do puppet regimes in Africa continue to facilitate the looting of their own resources for Western and foreign capitals? The US, EU, and NATO maintain a footprint of military commands across the continent, yet Africa holds zero military presence or strategic leverage on Western soil.
Look at how global exploitation has mutated in the modern era. The scramble for Africa is no longer restricted to physical minerals and oil. Today, Silicon Valley tech giants, Western intelligence apparatuses, and foreign corporate syndicates run a new campaign of digital colonialism and AI extraction.
Artificial intelligence is built on the backs of the Global South. While the physical infrastructure of the AI revolution—massive energy-guzzling data centers and specialized high-performance chip production—is concentrated entirely in advanced Western and Asian economies, Africa is reduced to a quarry for raw inputs. Cobalt mined by underpaid artisanal workers in the DRC fuels the batteries, while thousands of digital gig workers across Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa are exploited for starvation wages to train large language models, moderate toxic algorithmic content, and label data. Our languages, behaviors, and cultural data are harvested for free by foreign servers, only for proprietary AI systems to be sold back to us as "neutral, advanced solutions."
In South Africa and across the continent, traditional resource extraction by multinationals like Anglo American, Glencore, Chevron, and TotalEnergies is now coupled with digital dependency loops. "Democrazy" and liberal trade frameworks ensure that local laws remain weak, enabling foreign tech monopolies to bypass taxes while locking developing markets into perpetual consumer status.
But the picture does not have to remain gloomy. History proves that centralized, unyielding protection of the people's collective interest—what revolutionary theory terms the dictatorship of the people—is the only vehicle that has ever forced structural transformation against insurmountable odds.
As Joseph Stalin noted regarding the necessity of breaking free from the capitalist-imperialist chokehold:
"Marx and Engels taught that it was impossible to get rid of the power of capital... except by revolutionary violence against the bourgeoisie, by a proletarian revolution, by establishing its own political rule—the dictatorship of the proletariat — which must crush the resistance of the exploiters..."
History shows how Russia transitioned from a backward, illiterate peasant monarchy into an industrial and atomic superpower capable of breaking the back of European fascism in under two decades—all while facing the hostile machinations of Western powers hoping for its collapse.
Today, as a fractured global order teeters on the edge of a new technological and political system, Africa cannot afford the luxury of slow, compromised, Western-prescribed reforms or digital vassalage. Survival in the 21st century demands absolute data sovereignty, state-directed technological industrialization, and the unapologetic assertion of African power against both physical and digital chains.
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