“The $20 billion refinery investment, spearheaded by Aliko Dangote, highlights Nigeria’s commitment to expanding its fossil fuel industry at a time when global climate discussions are increasingly focused on transitioning away from fossil fuels. This development comes in the wake of COP28’s agreement to create a roadmap for this transition, though it stopped short of a definitive phaseout of oil, coal, and gas.”
The above was the third paragraph of an article writing brief sent to me at the end of July, and by the time I finished reading it, I knew two things: 1) There was absolutely no way I could ever work on this brief; and 2) What was on my laptop screen was much more than a strange or unethical work assignment – it was a declaration of war.
The African NGO/CSO industrial complex – A primer
For the unaware, NGOs are simply harmless nonprofit organisations that are funded by donors to make the world a better place. The basic premise of the 21st century African NGO is that where Africa’s chaotic, poorly organised, low-capacity states decide to make everyone’s life difficult with their shenanigans, out comes the NGO to fix their mess for them or even occasionally to stand up to them when things really go south.
To those who do know what actually takes place behind the curtain, the actual truth behind the proliferation of NGOs in the African space has nothing to do with delivering on their stated do-gooding mandates, and everything to do with an ongoing Global North vs Global South economic and information war. Where powerful nation-states wish to wield their influence in the affairs of other (often less powerful) states outside the rules of international law and politics, there are few tools more effective than the (foreign-funded) NGO.
This entity is funded by a nondescript trust or basket of donors, who in turn receive their funding from high net-worth individuals, state funding programmes, and private organisations that purport to be independent, but are in fact state intelligence cutouts. In other words, the ‘N’ in ‘NGO’ is completely silent. A well-known example of this is the infamous National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which purports to be a nondescript American NGO that supports initiatives aimed at promoting democracy around the world. In fact, it is a CIA cutout that specialises in fomenting colour revolutions and non-violent regime change operations as and where its parent agency sees fit.
Out of this shadowy, incestuous network of state intelligence cut-outs has emerged Dialogue Earth – a “climate-focused” NGO which advocates reducing pollution from fossil fuel use – but interestingly, restricts this advocacy entirely to the Global South. Apparently, it is Asia – the offshored manufacturing base of the Global North – that is responsible for polluting the earth, not the consumption of the Global North, which has sent all the production to Asia. Africa and South America – which barely register in global pollution rankings – somehow also need anti-pollution ‘advocacy’.
The real motive for this entity’s existence became obvious to many after I made the contents of that email public a few weeks ago. Simply put, the industrialisation of Africa is interpreted by the powers that be in the Global North as an existential threat to their way of life. Their economic system, built on cheap industrial inputs from Africa, needs Africans to remain eternally poor or possibly become extinct as our labour increasingly becomes obsolete.
For these vested interests, the Dangote Refinery represents the worst possible spectre: a private, energy-intensive, high-tech project – owned and operated by an African they don’t control – with the potential to transform a cheap energy exporter – itself suffering from energy poverty – into an industrial energy consumer with a domestic market projected to reach 400 million people by 2050.
To forestall this and ensure that a “green” (read “low technology, low-energy”) future is imposed on Africa, NGOs such as Dialogue Earth have been deployed. Their job is to meddle and interfere directly in the domestic politics of Nigeria and other African energy exporters, using well-known local voices for the legendary Western practice of astroturfing.
Africans must take charge or others will
I have a good friend who works in the West African geopolitical risk consulting space. He probably would not appreciate being identified here, so let’s call him Kwaku. Kwaku understood everything that has been mentioned above when he decided to pitch the idea of funding a local think tank to a Nigerian centimillionaire. He himself was a veteran of the foreign-funded civil society gravy train in Ghana and Nigeria, so few people could speak with as much authority on the subject to the potential funder.
According to Kwaku, the conversation went swimmingly well and Mr. Millionaire appeared to understand the importance of what was being pitched to him. That is until he demanded to know how a think tank that would hire smart people to write research and policy papers that could benefit his business, would generate revenue and become a profit centre. Kwaku describes watching the glint of keen interest in the potential funder’s eyes flicker and die once he began explaining the indirect returns that such an endeavor would generate.
All Mr. Millionaire could see was the monthly or annual profit and loss section in the books. This fundamental lack of knowledge about how to survive and thrive in the world explains why the African financial elite are the least secure on the planet. While their contemporaries on every other continent understand how to play the long game and strategically line up chess pieces in their favour using their financial resources as a lever, Africa’s moneyed classes can only see today’s PnL column. This is a serious problem.
Dialogue Earth and the shadowy American deep-state funding entities behind it, alongside the countless other organisations in Africa’s booming NGO/CSO/CLO spaces regularly adopt certain ideological positions that are directly contradictory to the economic and geopolitical interests of these elites and the rest of Africa. These organisations are able to dominate the NGO space because there is essentially zero alternative funding available for Africans who want to work in the nonprofit space. Anyone who currently wishes to receive funding must adhere to a strict set of guidelines dictated from Washington DC, London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, and everywhere that is not Africa.
What is more, banning foreign NGOs out of hand will not help. It will only play into several unhelpful narratives surrounding Africa including the idea that Africans can only be governed by tyranny and brute force. The only real solution is for Africa to create avenues to fund its own non-profit organisations that work exclusively for its own interests. Instead of walking off the field of play in protest against the bias of self-appointed referees like Dialogue Earth, more referees should be brought into the game. Thus, when the self-appointed referee from London tries to award a penalty for what should be a throw-in on the halfway line, another referee from Lilongwe can wave play on, and yet another from Libreville can award a free kick in the opposing direction. We can then pick and choose which referee to pay any attention to.
Whether the solution is to be found in organised private sector initiatives or state-linked entities, the most important point that needs to be understood is that NGO funding is not some kind of altruistic, philanthropic expense, but is actually a tool of geopolitics, state intelligence, and military-adjacent interests. Africa desperately needs not only to restrict the operations of the many foreign state intelligence cutouts disguised as “NGOs” currently operating freely across the continent, but also to develop – as a matter of urgency – a funding mechanism to build its own NGOs, think tanks, research institutes and global media organisations.
Doing this is not merely a nice-to-have, but is an urgent matter of national and continental security.
