By Bola BOLAWOLE
Two momentous events, nay three, closed Year 2025 and flung open the door to the new year 2026. If morning shows the day, as they say, then, we must watch Year 2026 with keen interest. One was the gruesome accident involving former world boxing champion, Anthony Joshua, along the Ogun state axis of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, in which two of those travelling in the same vehicle with the boxer instantly lost their life.
The second was US President Donald Trump’s New Year “gift” of a tirade of bomb blasts rained on Nigeria’s terrorists – a follow-up to a similar Christmas “gift” to the same terrorists by the same Trump. The third, which shook the world, was the capture of Nicholas Maduro, the sitting Venezuelan president, by the US military on the orders of their commander-in-chief, Trump.
The Anthony Joshua accident was avoidable and the casualties recorded were needless. The slur which the incident cast on Nigeria’s already tainted image is unfortunate indeed. Was the driver over-speeding? If so, that is in consonance with the penchant of Nigerians to disregard speed limits when driving. We witness this every day on our roads. It will be difficult to find many drivers here who conscientiously keep within speed limits, this writer – and possibly this reader – inclusive!
Every now and again, we find vehicles that break down and are left unmarked and unattended to by the roadside. Because available data is unreliable here, we may never know how many untimely and unnecessary deaths and havoc this careless and carefree attitude has caused. Why should anyone pack or abandon vehicles in locations not authorized? We are all guilty of this as well.
Indiscriminate parking is caused by a combination of factors: The indiscipline of drivers; the unavailability of parking space: and lousy, even total absence, of governance.
One report spoke of burst tires, which speaks to lack of maintenance culture and paying full attention to details. Another spoke of brake failure. And was the driver sleeping on the wheels; was he distracted that he failed to pay adequate attention to his environment?
Anyway, such is the nature of accidents! Like Orlando Owoh crooned, accidents don’t respect or bow to wisdom or knowledge. It happens when it will. May the good Lord save us from accidents, big or small!
The Anthony Joshua accident exposed the underbelly of the decrepit Nigerian system as well as the morbidity and moral deficiency of some of our people. Reports said rapid response was tardy.
Rescue operation was lousy. While some were doing rescue operations with bare hands, others were busy stealing from the dead and wounded. Joshua reportedly lost his phone to such miscreants!
I read the rebuttal of my brother, Kayode Akinmade, with photographs, of the avalanche of ambulances and other equipment at the disposal of the Ogun State Government! Great! We need helicopters and drones equipped for medical emergencies as well. We also need to work on the competence and sense of duty and responsibility of care-givers, especially in emergency situations.
The Anthony Joshua accident received presidential and gubernatorial attention because of the personality involved! How many such accidents, even more ghastly ones, go unnoticed each day all over the country?
I lost interest in the boxer the day I saw him prostrate full blast for former President Muhammadu Buhari. Joshua, obviously, was wrongly advised; otherwise, Buhari was the last person on earth the boxer should have accorded that honour. It is the culture of the Yoruba to prostrate before elders quite alright, but not one with Buhari’s record.
When, after that, Joshua lost one fight after another, I was not sorry for him at all. Buhari was bad luck. That bad luck he must have pinned on Anthony Joshua. Brand me superstitious if you like! But did you not read of a woman who threatened never to forgive Joshua for beating her son in a fight? And now the accident!
Africa’s causal explanation of events goes a step beyond the White man’s “what, where, when, and how” to also ask “why” This is the correlation between the witch which cried yesterday and the child that dies the next day!
So much for Anthony Joshua! The United States of America is in decline and what the world is witnessing from President Donald Trump is the last vicious kicks of a dying horse. No empire lasts for ever: the United States, which effectively assumed the status of the world’s hegemon at the end of the 2nd World War in 1945 will not be an exception.
The countries that will edge the US out and supplant it, just as the same US had edged out and supplanted the European powers of Great Britain, France, Germany, etc., are already on the horizon – China, India, Russia are examples. The BRICS countries are knocking on the US hegemonic door; the military and economic alliance that will up-end NATO and its global financial systems are getting stronger by the day. And as they get stronger, the US gets weaker!
Don’t pity the Yankees! Their misfortune is self-inflicted. Although they were warned, they failed to take heed. Says Karl Marx: “Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.” Driven by the inordinate ambition to maximize profit, the Western powers moved their production – and with it their prized technology – to Asia to take advantage of cheap labour and lax labour laws while avoiding stricter environmental laws and higher wages at home. They produced at cheaper rates and sold at exorbitant prices to make huge profits quite alright – but they left something important behind:, their prized technology. They were penny wise but pound foolish.
Not only have China and Asia caught up with the West technology-wise, they are overtaking and up-ending it! In a matter of years, China and India will surpass the US as the world’s leading economic power house. In one or two decades, China is likely to even out the US military superiority. This is the paranoid that is driving Trump.
But don’t you ever think that it is Trump alone that has seen the handwriting on the wall. It will also be a mistake to think he is alone in his objectives of slowing down, if not totally stopping and then reversing, the inevitable slide of American power and influence. His style may be abrasive to others; indeed, they may be self-destructive and may, ultimately, accelerate rather that de-accelerate the very Armageddon he seeks to avoid.
That is where Trump differs from other US leaders. It is a matter of style, and not of objectives or goals: Slow down China, India and the others; roll back Chinese influence everywhere, sabotage or frustrate BRICS, and grab more territories and resources worldwide.
Trump ferociously launched a tariff war but it failed fantastically, further signaling to the US that “things are not the way they used to be”, like Bob Marley crooned. Twenty, thirty years ago, everyone would have cringed before the US. Not any longer!
Compared with a combination of China, India, and Russia, for instance, the US does not have the advantage of population, land mass, and natural resources. So it must eye Canada, threaten Mexico and Greenland, gobble oil-rich Venezuela while also putting resource-rich African countries under its armpit.
Trump and his ilks in the US are desperate but their misfortune – and the world’s fortune – is that Trump has only one term in office, and time is not on his side. As time runs out, expect him to get more desperate – until his aircraft overshoots the tarmac!
This is not about international law. It has nothing to do either with morality. It is not about drugs, democracy or what Maduro did right or wrong. It is realpolitik. The destiny of the world’s superpower hangs in the balance. It is all about what the US thinks it must do to maintain its world dominance – and which it must make haste to do while it still has the time and might to impose itself.
But even if it succeeds now, Trump can only postpone the evil day. The US is destined to go the way of the superpowers before it. This is the verdict of history.
Says Jean Jacques Rousseau: “The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty.” Unfortunately, hegemons keep their dominance only by force of arms.
Again, hear Rousseau: “Force is a physical power, and I fail to see what moral effect it can have… To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will – at the most, an act of prudence…For if force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every force that is greater than the first succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate; and, the strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to be the strongest. But what kind of right is that which perishes when force fails?”
Tell Donald Trump: America’s strength will ultimately fail. A force greater than the United States will emerge some day and Trump’s shove-it-down-their-throat grandstanding will no longer hold water.
Despite all the efforts at curbing absolutism or hegemonism, power relations still determine the behaviour of state actors in the international political system. The strong have their way while the weak suffer their fate.
The beauty of it, however, is this: No hegemon imposes its will for ever!