(Africa Must Refuse Another Seat at the Children’s Table)

Today, 1 September 2026, marks the first anniversary of President Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI) announced at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Plus meeting in Tianjin. Its five propositions are deceptively simple: sovereign equality, the rule of international law, genuine multilateralism, a people-centered approach, and the conversion of declarations into real action.

Simple propositions, perhaps. But in a world in which the powerful routinely reserve the right to interpret law for themselves, these principles are not innocent platitudes. They are an indictment which exposes the moral bankruptcy of a system in which the West invokes sovereignty when defending its own frontiers but treats the sovereignty of Africans, Asians, Arabs and Latin Americans as a temporary privilege, revocable whenever Washington, London, Paris or Brussels becomes displeased.

The GGI is therefore significant not because China has discovered the word “multilateralism.” The United Nations Charter has spoken of sovereign equality since 1945. It is significant because Beijing has gathered these neglected principles into a political challenge to the presumption that the world must forever be governed from a few North Atlantic capitals.

In June 2026, China’s white paper on global governance placed the United Nations at the center of its proposed order and called for greater representation of the Global South in the institutions that make and enforce global rules.

The question the West would prefer not to face is: who authorized a handful of historically privileged countries to remain the permanent board of directors of humanity?

The answer is not international law but history - the history of conquest, slavery, colonial extraction, military supremacy, and financial control by people of the European Stock.

The old order Europeans constructed was never merely a system of rules; it was a hierarchy of human worth disguised as universal principle.

For five centuries, Europe’s ruling classes treated Africa less as a continent of civilizations than as a warehouse of precious resources to satisfy Europe’s insatiable, greedy palate. The Atlantic slave trade depopulated and disorganized African communities. When slavery became too odious, Europeans invented colonialism, which replaced slavery and converted African land, labor, minerals, and markets into instruments of imperial accumulation.

The abolition of colonialism did not abolish the mentality of control. Westerners modernized their vocabulary and transformed colonialism into neo-colonialism, which Kwame Nkrumah warned was more insidious.

Under this transformed colonialism, “Aid,” “capacity-building,” “good governance,” “civil-society support,” “humanitarian intervention,” and “development assistance” often became the respectable language through which the old power continued to supervise the supposedly immature children who reside in Africa.

The most offensive feature of today’s neo-colonialism is not only the exploitation; it’s the uncultured and uneducated arrogance with which some European elites refuse to abandon the assumptions of their forebears. They inherit the crimes of empire and then inherit, as if it were a family silver set, the conviction that they are naturally qualified to lecture everyone else.

Who in 2026 wants to be treated with condescending paternalism?

Apart from developing historical amnesia, Europe refuses to learn geography, which should have made Europe Africa’s principal natural commercial partner.

Of the Big Powers, Europe is Africa’s nearest major neighbor; the Mediterranean is not an oceanic barrier.

Were Europeans to wean themselves away from racial arrogance, a relationship based on reciprocal trade, industrial partnership, and respect could have made both continents prosperous.

Europe, unfortunately, repeatedly behaved as though proximity entitled it to continue issuing colonial fatwas. The colonial reflex survives in the European official arriving to explain Africa to Africans; the envoy threatening consequences before listening to the grievances that produced a crisis.

The underlying Western philosophy has too often been brutally concise: “why pay for it, when you can kill for it?”

Africa knows the historical meaning of that sentence. It knows what happened when European powers wanted rubber, palm oil, gold, uranium, land, labor, and strategic access.

To Africans, Europe’s continuing unbridled violence was not an accident at the edge of commerce; it was the tested business model.

This is why the current African rejection of condescension should not be mistaken for a sudden appetite for dictatorship or for hostility to Europe.

It should surprise no one that Africans are increasingly rejecting a relationship in which European governments demand obedience while offering lectures; in which sovereignty is praised in European capitals but treated as a nuisance in Africa; and in which the continent is still approached as the White Man’s burden, a phrase that should have been buried with the empire that invented it.

Like in colonial times, European responses to Africa continue to be a performance of injured entitlement. While the former colonial governor is gone, the governor’s grammar remains: condemn, threaten, sanction, instruct, kill.

By contrast, China’s diplomacy presents itself as a conversation among equal governments rather than a summons before a colonial governor. In Africa, people regard the showing of respect as part of a good cultural upbringing.

In January 2026, the African Union and China opened the China–Africa Year of People-to-People Exchanges in Addis Ababa. China’s foreign minister continued the long-standing practice of beginning the year with a visit to Africa. The 2026 Africa Center for Strategic Studies assessment notes that African governments are pressing China on debt sustainability, technology transfer, local manufacturing, industrialization, and value addition, rather than accepting the old arrangement in which Africa exports raw materials and imports finished goods.

This is the reality the Western caricature misses. Africans are not welcoming China because they have exchanged one master for another. They are leveraging the multiplication of external partners to broaden their room for maneuver. They want roads, railways, power, telecommunications, processing plants, jobs, and access to markets - all the things that Europe failed to do in its 500 years of occupation.

Africa also wants contracts that can be inspected, debts that can be repaid, environmental standards that can be enforced, and local workers who are not reduced to spectators in the development of their own countries.

The position a genuinely Afrocentric policy should take is: cooperate with everyone, submit to no one, and audit every agreement.

Africa should not be deluded into thinking that China’s engagement in the continent is charity. Africa should recognize Palmerston’s truism that nations have no friends but interests.

Beijing has booming economic, diplomatic, and strategic interests in Africa. Chinese companies seek markets, supply chains, and access to critical minerals. And as its security cooperation expands, China seeks African support in international institutions.

The African strategy must resist the Western claim that every Chinese project is a trap, and the romantic claim that every Chinese initiative is liberation from Western oppression.

Africa must judge each project by outcomes. The point is not to replace a Western dependency with a Chinese dependency. The point is for Africa to end dependency as the organizing principle of international relations.

The first pillar of the GGI, sovereign equality, is the most important and attractive for Africa. It rejects the colonial doctrine that some countries are entitled to decide the political systems, economic models, and security arrangements of others. It challenges the practice whereby powerful states impose sanctions outside the authority of the UN Security Council, overthrow governments they dislike, or selectively invoke human rights as geopolitical tools.

The second pillar, international law, exposes the hollowness of the phrase “rules-based order” when it is used to mean rules written by the powerful and obeyed by the rest. Africans remember Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Libya, - all destroyed without a UNSC authorization.

The third pillar, multilateralism, means more than arranging a meeting at which the United States speaks first, and its allies applaud. It means that African states must have a meaningful voice in the institutions that govern finance, technology, peace and global security. It means reform of the UN Security Council, a fairer global financial architecture, and an end to the assumption that the G7 possesses a natural right to make decisions for the entire planet.

The fourth pillar, a people-centered approach, is especially resonant in the continent that developed Ubuntu, and is exhausted by development plans that produce conferences more readily than electricity. A people-centered order must mean food security, public health, education, decent work, affordable energy, industrial capacity and the right of communities to participate in decisions concerning their resources. It cannot mean that external consultants (with salaries that look like international telephone numbers) arrive to explain poverty to people whose minerals, labor and markets have financed the prosperity of the experts’ own countries.

The fifth pillar, real action, is the test by which every power, including China, must be judged. China is building infrastructure and has become a major commercial and diplomatic actor in Africa; yet projects must be transparent, financially sustainable, locally beneficial, and aligned with African continental priorities. The Africa Continental Free Trade Area, the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and regional infrastructure plans should determine the direction.

For Africa, the deepest scandal is not that the Great Powers are competing to shape the new world; they will always compete. The scandal is that Africa so often appears as the terrain on which others compete rather than as a power with a coherent continental strategy.

Africa’s answer is not to beg for a seat at someone else’s table. The continent needs to build a table at which Africa’s collective weight is impossible to ignore. Like the EU, African states should coordinate positions on critical minerals, debt restructuring, technology transfer, military bases, data governance, climate finance and trade. The AU must be strengthened not as a ceremonial summit institution but as an instrument of negotiation. Regional blocs must stop allowing external powers to play one capital against another. Transparency is crucial: African civil society, parliaments, journalists and researchers must be able to examine the contracts made in their name.

Africa should welcome every partner that is willing to engage in honorable trade on an equal footing. Europe should be welcomed whenever it abandons its unwillingness to arrive as a neighbor rather than a supervisor. We should welcome China when Chinese finance and construction deliver transparent, sustainable, and African-centered development. We should do the same thing with India, the Arab states, Latin America, Russia, and the rest.

What Africa should not do is confuse a welcome with surrender, cooperation with submission, and it should remember that vibrating with gratitude is not a foreign policy.

One year after the GGI was announced, its appeal lies in its invitation to restore the lost principle that the colonial powers never truly accepted: nations are sovereign equals, and civilizations require space to develop without external tutelage.

That is why the CGI language resonates across Africa: modern Africans no longer regard themselves as helpless children waiting for foreigners to speak on their behalf. They are heirs to ancient civilizations, contemporary states, intellectual traditions and a future that cannot be outsourced.

But Africa must not merely applaud China’s call. We must appropriate the principle for ourselves. Sovereign equality begins with African self-respect, but it cannot end there. It requires accountable governments, competent institutions, industrial policy, continental coordination and the courage to reject both European paternalism and African misrule.

No one knows; the GGI may become a serious contribution to a more balanced world, or it may remain another grand declaration absorbed by the machinery of power.

Its fate vis-à-vis Africa will depend partly on China’s sincerity and partly on whether Africa enters the debate again as a subject.

Africa has lived through that history before, and we know what it costs.

This time, Africa must not arrive with a begging bowl. Africa must arrive with a coherent plan, a united voice, and the unmistakable authority of a people who have finally decided that the age of being governed as an object is over.

©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com