Burkina Faso’s Oil Boom: Capitaine Traore Must Abandon the Resource Rental Economic Model

Recent media reports of the AES state of Burkina Faso exporting a$10 billion worth of gold in 2025 have marvelled at a feat which could have vey positive effect on the Sahelian nation’s economic development. However, while many have commented on the opportunities for making vast improvements to the country’s infrastructure, none have mentioned the fact that maximising the extraction and exporting of a range of minerals can form the basis of financing Burkina Faso’s a route to achieving industrialisation and a transformation from the resource rental economic model to that of a productive and independent economy.

The military leaders of Burkina Faso need to understand that earning billions if you continue to utilise a resource rental economy will get you nowhere in the long run.

Maximising the mining of Burkina Faso's minerals which include Zinc and Lithium would collectively bring in billions of dollars (or Yuan) which must be used as a first step to financing a plan for industrialising Burkina Faso's economy.

No incurring of usurious Western Bretton Woods-institutional debt or debt from Chinese loans.

The income from mining these minerals would form the basis of developing an industrial plan for payment of electrical generation capacity, steel capacity, and non-ferrous smelting capacity.

Concomitant to this would be the cost of mechanising agricultural production and a programme of mass education. The agricultural revolution must aspire way beyond peasant farming and the educational revolution must go beyond basic goals in literacy so as to encompass vocational-technical training and university and post-graduate level education.

Also, given that Burkina Faso like other Sahelian states face problems related to water scarcity, the programme ought to invest in the creation of a Great Man River project as accomplished in Libya under the leadership of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi.

If this were accomplished, Burkina Faso would be on its way to transforming itself from a rent resource economy into a productive one with the advantage of being in a position of being able to extract their own raw materials and convert them into global standard products under one currency regime.

The USSR and South Korea accomplished this respectively under Stalin and Park Chung Hee.

Traore and his co-leaders need to learn from the mistakes of the economic programmes of Nkrumah in Ghana and Nyerere in Tanzania. The former relied on international finance loans which created a state of indebtedness and the latter's peasant-is-king ideology was not only unambitious in scope but also created a cycle of debt with the Bretton Woods institutions.

In retirement Nyerere would complain that Tanzania did EVERYTHING that he was advised to do and yet the country ended up spending whatever meagre income it had on servicing debt which of course is the intent of the Bretton Woods institutions.

It is time for African leaders to move beyond the resource rental model and for their populations to demand that they do so. An important consequence of building an industrial society would be to put Burkina Faso in a position to be militarily self-sufficient. This is important considering the jihadist insurgency bedevilling the Sahelian region and the threat of recolonisation. The rulers during Japan's Meiji era understood this through their slogan Fukoku Kyohei: "Rich country, strong army".

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Nathan Cofnas and his “race realism” revolution

Nathan Cofnas, the academic at the centre of the storm surrounding the late Cambridge academic Jason Arday, is an unabashed proselytiser of what is termed “race realism”. He is also part of a network which is actively promoting the rehabilitation of eugenics as a discipline of study and a core determinant of social policy. Cofnas believes that genetics determine average cognitive and behavioural differences between racial and ethnic groups, and as such should be used as the crux of dismantling prevalent ideologies which have enabled Western societies to operate under the basis of equality of all. He has directed his theories mainly at Black people who he claims would be unable to compete in a sphere of activities save those of sports and entertainment. But Cofnas, an ethnic Ashkenazi Jew, has one particular impediment to his intended “hereditarian revolution”. This is the cooperation of those White identitarians who consider Jews to be a separate and hostile group who work against the interests of Whites. In 2018, Cofnas published a paper aimed at rebutting the works of Kevin MacDonald, an evolutionary psychologist, who argues that Jews practice a form of hyper-ethnocentrism which they use to outcompete other racial groups including Whites in whose societies they form a “hostile elite”. MacDonald is widely considered to be the intellectual guru of a large segment of White nationalists. Cofnas’ engagement of MacDonald’s work can be argued to have been an attempt at converting MacDonald’s followers and co-opting them into a philosemitic white nationalist movement. It failed signally. The irony that Cofnas, a Jew whose European antecedents were victimised by 19^th century “race realist” notions of Jews as a people with ineradicably flawed biological traits, cannot go unremarked. And he will have to contend with the logic that in the “non-woke” marketplace of ideas he envisages, such thinking, along with that pertaining to the group evolutionary strategy applied by MacDonald to Judaism, will also necessarily have a place in the public discourse.

In an article titled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” which was published at his substack page in 2024, Nathan Cofnas, the fervent “race realist” and supporter of eugenics set out a plan to end “wokism”. It is a task which he believes will involve a “siege of the institutions” and “legal reforms”. And central to such an effort is the need to undermine what he refers to as the “equality thesis”, which if successful will destroy the “intellectual basis of wokism” and provide “the elites a reason to join the (political) right.”

The key to undermining this “equality thesis”, as he puts it, is to bring public discourse on racial differences to the mainstream where over the course of time he believes the notion of intellectual and moral inequalities between races will find wide acceptance.

Cofnas’ strategy is centred on pointing to studies which attribute to Blacks lower intellectual abilities than Whites. The taking down of the late Jason Arday, the Black Cambridge Professor of Education, who resigned and was later found dead after a trial by media instigated by an article written by Cofnas, has been marketed by Cofnas and his right-wing network as a vindication of his views.

Arday, a neuro-divergent individual, was evidently easy pickings for Cofnas and his confederates who would surely have targeted any other Black academic at Cambridge who was vulnerable to an accusation of being a so-called “DEI hire”. The impression, however false, that Black academics at Cambridge and other universities owe their positions to a form of affirmative action rather than their qualifications and professionalism, will have been implanted in the minds of a swathe of persons who will be susceptible to this line of thinking given the backdrop of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment.

Cofnas and his backers will be hoping to exploit an increase in White identitarianism as an essential component in his quest for an “hereditarian revolution”.

But Cofnas, a man of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, has a huge stumbling block which is not apparent to the many who have only recently become familiar with his work. One of his greatest desires appears to be to co-opt a huge segment of White identitarians into the race realist movement of which he is a part. These people do not consider Jews to be part of what they believe to be the biological and cultural family of the European race. This impediment to his dream of erecting a philosemitic White Nationalist movement is found in the work of perhaps the preeminent White Nationalist intellectual, Kevin MacDonald, a professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Long Beach.

It is important therefore to explore Cofnas’ motivation for challenging MacDonald’s extensive work on Jews in the context of evolutionary psychology, considered by many in the academic field to be every bit as pseudo-scientific as Cofnas’ race realist research. It is also essential to point out the deep irony of Cofnas’ affinity for biological racism only in so far as Jews are not targeted.

He is doubtless aware that the bulk of the 19^th century pioneers of scientific racism were explicitly anti-Jewish. Wilhelm Marr the German journalist whose 1879 pamphlet Der Seig des Judentums uber das Germentum coined the term “antisemitism” (Antisemitismus). Marr’s efforts marked a clear separation between anti-Jewish sentiment which was a religious-based animus and that which was a secular one related to biology and race.

The British-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, like Marr thought of Jews as an alien people who were a destructive force on German society. The core ideas of his book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century  discarded the philosemitic tendencies of Arthur de Gobineau and provided a clear template for the Nazi movement in the following century.

Chamberlain formed a key influence on the American Madison Grant, a lawyer and amateur anthropologist, who developed the racial concept of Nordicism. Nordicism was an intra-European form of racism which designated a three-tier hierarchy in which the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and Scandinavian people were placed above, respectively, the Alpine race and the Mediterranean’s. In his book The Passing of the Great Race, Or, the Racial Basis of European History, stated that only members of the highest tier Teutonic races should be allowed to enter America and that the others were “intrusive elements”. Grant characterised Jews as an “inferior” and a “worthless racial type”. His beliefs were later adopted by the anti-Jewish German National Socialists who developed from these descriptions the classification of Untermensch.

It is worth noting that most of the race realists of the 19^th century and early 20^th century like Cofnas believed in eugenics, a phrase coined by Francis Galton. Borrowing from evolutionary concepts developed by amongst others his cousin Charles Darwin, Galton used these ideas to argue that “more suitable races” should be encouraged to outbreed “less suitable” ones. Eugenics formed an integral part of the ideology of Nazism which placed a premium on what was termed Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), with the greatest threat to the supposed racial purity of Germans coming from Jews.

The endpoint of race realism and its eugenical counterpart came in the Nazi policy of methodically exterminating Jews through the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen in the eastern part of Europe and in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau where Dr. Josef Mengele, a committed eugenicist, performed a range of inhumane experiments on Jews.

It is of course a vastly different world in which the Jewish Cofnas lives in, one in which he can arrogate his hope that once his “hereditarian revolution” is completed, he will be made the Dean of a “race science and eugenic department at Harvard”.

The post-war acceptance of Jews into the full spectrum of American society has made them a less conspicuous target for racial animus. The use of the term “Judeo-Christian values” has been effectively utilised to reflect a kindred relationship between Jews and the majority Christian nation of America even though, as the late Rabbinic scholar Jacob Neusner noted, it is a "theologically and historically" inaccurate term used by non-believers.

Nonetheless, it is believed to have been popularised during the anti-fascist efforts in the 1930s and 1940s of liberal inter-faith groups and continued through to the 1950s when it served as a counter to “godless communism”. Its revival during the 1970s when it began to be used by the Christian right, also played a part in dimming old attitudes against Jews and it is still used today by those seeking to draw a distinction between traditional Western values and the values of recent non-Christian immigrants.

This backdrop of acceptance has led to a reformation of sorts among a segment of the contemporary proponents of race realism which for so long served as fertile ground for anti-Jewish sentiment. The Jared Taylor-led American Renaissance has since its inception in the 1990s always accepted Jews of White European descent as members. For Taylor, they “look white”, have been contributors to Western culture and can therefore be an asset in promoting White nationalist views.

This acceptance of Jews is fiercely disputed by many in the White nationalist movement to whom Kevin MacDonald functions as a kind of spiritus rector. MacDonald's primary academic interest lies in the field of evolutionary psychology, a scientific approach that studies human cognition and behaviour through the lens of evolutionary biology.

And it is from this discipline that MacDonald developed the concept of “group evolutionary strategy”, the theory that specific cultural, religious or ethnic groups utilise shared social and genetic practices to maximise their collective survival and success. In the final chapter of his 1988 book Social and Personality Development: An Evolutionary Synthesis, MacDonald analysed the Spartans to argue that human groups can cohere together and form highly collectivized "group evolutionary strategies". It was received in niche circles of academia as a serious experimental effort aimed at bridging mainstream developmental psychology with evolutionary biology.

But reactions were different when he turned his quill to the study of Jews.

His thesis on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy was outlined in his book titled A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy which was published in 1994. MacDonald argued that Jews are extremely ethnocentric and display high levels of cohesion and aggressiveness in the pursuit of group interests which have enabled them to out-compete non-Jews for resources. The book also argues that Jews specifically aim to dominate the economic, academic and cultural institutions of White societies. Jews, he contends, have inspired and led a series of radical social movements which have served to undermine these societies. Among the most harmful he asserted has been the support given by Jewish groups and politicians to immigration policies which threaten White culture and the White gene pool.

He followed this book with Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism and The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth Century Intellectual and Political Movements both of which were published in 1998. In 2005, he also wrote a long paper in his journal, the Occidental Quarterly, titled “Stalin’s Willing Executioners: Jews as a Hostile Elite in the USSR”, a review of Yuri Slezkine’s 2004 publication The Jewish Century.

MacDonald’s books were met with silence by the academy community until Kevin Hannan reviewed The Culture of Critique in the December 2000 issue of the academic journal Nationalities Papers. Hanna’s method of review was to describe chapters and summarise MacDonald’s main arguments. He concluded that the book was "well written and has much to offer the reader interested in ethnicity and ethnic conflict."

Thus, it was not until 2018 when Cofnas wrote an academic review paper on the Culture of Critique for Human Nature that MacDonald’s work was challenged in a well-known peer-reviewed academic journal, albeit that it was not in a top-tier general science journal.

Titled "Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy: A Critical Analysis of Kevin MacDonald's theory", the essence of Cofnas’ rebuttal was to accuse MacDonald of misrepresenting and cherry-picking facts in constructing his arguments. MacDonald made a detailed 42-page reply in the Occidental Quarterly and following Cofnas’ rejoinder issued another 42-page reply in which he concluded that the thesis he presented in Culture of Critique “remained unscathed from Cofnas’ critique”.

While MacDonald’s comment may be adjudged as self-serving, it is worth pondering on Cofnas’ insistence on engaging with MacDonald. Was his motivation solely rooted in the spirit of engaging in academic debate? Did he believe that he could either convert MacDonald or the anti-Jewish segment of the White nationalist movement into a following a philosemitic path? Or was he motivated by a tribalistic concern?

Certainly, MacDonald appeared to think that tribal sentiment played the major role in this. In the conclusion of his second reply, MacDonald noted a clear “abusive tone in Cofnas’ writing, organised, it would seem, around defence of Jewish honour.” An aura of desperation surrounds Cofnas who in the year he wrote his academic critique of MacDonald’s book also co-wrote an article for Quillette titled “What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong About Jews”.

Cofnas continued his efforts in a paper titled "Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy," published in January 2023 in the journal Human Nature. Betraying feelings of angst, Cofnas bemoaned MacDonald’s role as editor of The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly in regularly publishing “nasty, scientifically baseless screeds against Jews."

Cofnas’ focus on DEI and academia is an interesting one. While White identitarians such as MacDonald are in agreement about what they consider the unfairness of affirmative action policies to Whites who are denied appointments or admissions to less qualified minorities, they also adamantly criticise what they claim to have been the wholesale takeover of America’s Ivy League colleges by Jews.

MacDonald’s thesis that unlike economically high-achieving groups such as the “overseas Chinese” of Far East Asia, Jews seek to convert such economic power into the control of politics, culture and academia. This is a frequent point of examination in White nationalist circles.

The backdrop they argue is that Jews have displaced America’s traditional White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elite which has been translated into what they perceive as “Jewish domination” of Ivy League colleges.

Cofnas has used the quota system employed by the Ivy League against Jews as evidence that Jewish overrepresentation in elite spaces is not the result of a co-ordinated group evolutionary strategy but the result of a high average IQ people who have persisted in the face of overt discrimination.

But his framing of the now overruled policies regarding affirmative action as solely a Black and White issue in which Black admissions infringed upon the rights of better qualified Whites has been misleading in some key respects. For one, the applicant’s gender was also considered and females, the majority of who were White, benefitted from that system. Cofnas’ has also been disingenuous in interviews when implying that Blacks were the root cause of Harvard’s discrimination against Asians.

Some background is needed here.

The legal action brought by a group of Asians against Harvard which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision which ruled against “race conscious” affirmative action policies was based in large measure on the work of Ron Unz, a multimillionaire ex-Silicon Valley entrepreneur, whose assay "The Myth of American Meritocracy" was published in 2012.

One key point of evaluation on Unz’s part was the following comparison of Asians and Jews:

Based on factors of objective academic performance and population size, we would expect Asians to outnumber Jews by perhaps five to one at our top national universities; instead, the total Jewish numbers across the Ivy League are actually 40 per cent higher. This implies that Jewish enrolment is roughly 600 per cent greater relative to Asians than should be expected under a strictly meritocratic admissions system.

Moreover, he stated that figures pertaining to Jewish admissions rose sharply in defiance of the trend of what he termed the "collapse" of Jewish academic achievement which began from the late 1990s and 2000s.

Unz’s finding of Jewish overrepresentation and that White gentiles had become grossly underrepresented in Harvard admissions, was he asserted based on institutional bias or favouritism. MacDonald of course, found Unz’s work to be a validation of his thesis on Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the quest for ethnic dominance. The massive overrepresentation of Jews at Harvard and other Ivy League universities he argues cannot be justified even allowing for correcting by IQ.

Although mainstream media acknowledged the centrality of Unz's arguments to what was a successful legal case brought by Asians, his argument regarding Jewish overrepresentation at the expense of whites was referred to as "inaccurate" and even "antisemitic", a charge which Unz, himself an ethnic Jew, rejects. Charges of “antisemitism” do not override the fact that the beneficiaries of anti-Asian discrimination could not be pinned on affirmative action practices in favour of Blacks and Latinos.

Nathan Cofnas is for his part consistent in maintaining that selecting students be strictly based on a standardised test which purely examines cognitive ability. He is doubtlessly aware that the “personality test” at Harvard back in the 1920s as a device to weed out Jewish to impose a strict Jewish quota.

But he also rigidly refuses to accept any proposition of Jewish bias, something which many White identitarians do not accept. Apart from what they believe to be the officially unexplained reasons for the colossal level of Jewish overrepresentation; they perceive the factor of Jewish tribal favouritism in the appointment of Elena Kagan as Dean at Harvard’s Faculty of Law in 2003. Kagan was depicted as been grossly underqualified for the job role, largely because of her lack of published work and represented as the beneficiary of an appointment by then Harvard President Larry Summers – himself a Jew- although Summers is claimed to have consulted widely with faculty and students prior to making his decision.

Kagan was also criticised for her handling of the inquiry into whether Professor Alan Dershowitz had plagiarised from Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial when writing a book titled The Case for Israel. Dershowitz was unfairly exonerated in the opinion of many including Professor Norman Finkelstein, Frank Menetrez, a legal scholar and the writer, Hilton Obenzinger.

And there is the case of Jared Kushner’s entry into Harvard even though administrators at his high school, the Frisch School, noted that his grade point average and test scores did not meet standard Ivy League requirements. Kushner’s 1999 admission occurred after his father Charles Kushner had made a $2.5 million donation to the university the previous year. The White identitarians naturally bemoan the lack of a demographic breakdown of the ultra-wealthy parents who utilised this admission method referred to as “development cases”.

They also view Steven Pinker, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard, as a Jewish academic who like Cofnas is keen to promote the idea that any form of Jewish attainment and high representation in institutions and in movements is solely down to high Ashkenazi IQ. They also fault Pinker for hypocrisy given his endorsement of a 2005 research paper titled Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence which posited the theory that the higher average level of verbal and mathematical intelligence found among Ashkenazi Jews has a genetic and an evolutionary basis.

Given that the central thesis of the paper veered on the path of evolutionary psychology applied to an ethnic group, many in the MacDonald-influenced White identitarian movement found Pinker’s approval to be extremely hypocritical. Pinker was on record as dismissing MacDonald’s work as lacking scientific credibility and of been beneath the threshold of academic attention-worthiness. He followed up his endorsement by giving a public lecture titled “Jews, Genes and Intelligence” in which he expounded on the aforementioned paper’s proposition that selective breeding had resulted in superior intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews.

Pinker, it should be noted, implicitly supports eugenics. He has defended the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on American blacks, stating that the experiment was a “one-time failure to prevent harm" in the future. It is astounding that Pinker would offer such justification for such a shameful episode in American history when he or any reasonable person would be repulsed at the idea of justifying Dr. Mengele’s experiments on Jews in the same or similar fashion.

He is a fervent supporter of Cofnas on the grounds of “academic freedom”, first signing a letter to the London Times in May 2024 which urged Cambridge University’s Faculty of Philosophy to call off their investigation into his comments about race and genetics, and more recently signing and inviting other scholars to sign a petition protesting the University of Ghent’s suspension of Cofnas regardless of their opinions about Cofnas’ views.

To conclude, the resurrection of race science by Nathan Cofnas and his enthusiasm for eugenics must surely be viewed with great irony given the pathway both created for the attempted annihilation of European Jewry in the mid-20^th century. The aggressive and snide direction of his race realist views at Black people while expressing denial and revulsion at those who seek to apply theories of race realism to Jews can only be viewed as rank hypocrisy.

It is possible that present trends in North America and Europe toward anti-immigrant sentiment and a noticeable polarisation in views on race and religion may form a large reason for Cofnas’ confidence in pushing his race realist agenda. But while the idea of collectively renouncing unfair practices in the academic sector regarding hiring staff and selecting students is one which fair-minded and rational people would agree, Cofnas’ push, at the behest of his backers, to achieve meritocracy on the basis of biologism is a dangerous one. Such a reconfiguration of social policy would run the risk of creating racial hierarchy and segregation in the public sphere. And while he may think that assertions of the high IQ status of the ethnic group to which he belongs will ensure that they will fare well in a system organised around biological determinism, his dispute with White nationalist adherents of Kevin MacDonald demonstrates how sorely mistaken he will likely be.

The lessons from history of what his people endured ought to weigh heavily on his mind, as should the adage:

“Be careful what you wish for.”

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

The Jason Arday Affair and the probing of academia

The recent furore centred on the late Jason Arday has brought into focus the question of whether what is termed EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) policies are consistent with fundamental ideas about meritocracy and fairness. A strict definition of what EDI entails negates the proposition that such policies inherently equate to anti-white discrimination and the compromising of standards. However, allegations that Arday, appointed with much fanfare as Cambridge University’s youngest ever black professor, had plagiarised parts of his doctorate thesis alongside claims about the value and scholarship of his papers and teaching competence have served to create an atmosphere designed to render suspect the credentials of black academics. This was the objective of the race realist network behind Nathan Cofnas who served as the “whistleblower” whose evidence would take Arday down. But if an academic deserves to be scrutinised, such scrutiny should not be conducted in the form of trial by media. Arday should have been examined by the same standard procedures afforded to other academics who have been accused of plagiarism and even of financial impropriety. Further, a probe of the university sector ought not to be delimited to the alleged perversion of the objectives of EDI but should encompass a range of issues including those related to questions of propriety in hiring faculty, as well as in financial management. Lessons must be absorbed from the apparent flaws in Cambridge’s procedures in investigating misconduct and the manipulation of the media by an organised group of people who were bent on waging a malicious campaign against a neuro-divergent individual.

Consider for instance the case of Dr. William O'Reilly, an associate professor of modern history at Cambridge. In 2018 an article was published in his name in the Journal of Austrian-American History. However, it was later discovered in 2021 that his article contained large segments of two essays that had been copied from one of his undergraduate students. The former student made a complaint to the university showing that more than 12 pages of O’Reilly’s journal submission were wholesale reproductions from his undergraduate papers.

The investigating panel was left with no choice but to uphold the complaint.

It is important to note that the university’s disciplinary guidelines consider plagiarism to be a form of “serious or gross misconduct” which will “normally merit dismissal”. O’Reilly faced a disciplinary tribunal which accepted the charge of plagiarism but after two-years of investigating and deliberating ruled that this had been “the product of negligent acts but was not deliberate”. 

O’Reilly kept his job.

Consider also the story about Professor George Holmes, the university vice-chancellor who was dismissed for financial corruption involving over £1 million and other misconduct. Holmes had been suspended in 2025 following allegations raised in The Mill, a Manchester-based investigative news outlet. Arrests followed in relation to allegations of fraud, money laundering and bribery.

Both cases involving O'Reilly and Holmes did not bring anywhere near the level of scrutiny put on Jason Arday. In the period between late July and early August after an article written by Nathan Cofnas at his substack page, almost 200 articles were written about a miscellany of allegations against Arday. These included those published by broadsheets such as the Guardian, the Times and the Telegraph.

The argument that Arday's case contained elements of Baron Munchausen Syndrome or that he was a "Walter Mitty"-type character does not justify the aggravated level of scrutiny heaped on him by the British media. By way of contrast, William O’Reilly who also had unflattering allegations made about him outside of his confirmed plagiarism was treated much differently. Student journalists of Varsity, the oldest of Cambridge University’s main student newspapers, who decided to follow up on the university’s upholding of the complaint of plagiarism in 2023, claimed that they were threatened with legal action by O’Reilly. Earlier in 2020, Varsity reported on O’Reilly overseeing a disciplinary process involving a male student accused of rape and sexual assault. This despite the claim that O’Reilly had a “close relationship” with the accused student and that O’Reilly himself had been accused of sexual assault by a student. O’Reilly denied the allegations and no action was taken by the police.

This media blitz only served to stimulate the level of opprobrium directed on Arday by racial identitarians who are convinced -and seek to convince others- that blacks in positions in academia, including Oxbridge have obtained their jobs without merit. This was of course the aim of Cofnas and his “race realism” backers who favour a return to the biological racism of the 19^th century, as well as the rehabilitation of eugenics as a field of study and an essential factor in the formulation of social policy.

It is possible that the Jason Arday affair is being used by certain interest groups and some sections of the media as a route towards the shaping public sentiment to favour a probe of the university sector. There would be nothing new about investigating key institutions designed to serve the public.

The policing sector for instance, has periodically been subjected to both formal and press scrutiny over concerns such as bribery and other corrupt practices. The police were also subject to scrutiny after the handling of the murder of Stephen Lawrence which culminated in the Macpherson report declaring the London Metropolitan Police as “institutionally racist”.

Yet, while a probe of universities concerning the unfair hiring of minorities is conceivable, the idea of limiting this to the employment of minorities would not be sound given the circumstances surrounding the likes of Dr. O’Reilly and Professor Holmes.

An objective investigation or series of investigations into the university sector would need to encompass issues related to undisclosed plagiarism and financial impropriety alongside biased practices pertaining to the appointment and promotion of staff.*

And those who believe in the message orchestrated by the instigators of the campaign to destroy Arday will be almost certainly disappointed to discover the falsity that Black representation in British academia is down to biased hiring. This supposition is quite ironic given that many have complained of disadvantages linked to obtaining appointments, getting promotion, and receiving funding for PhDs from research councils.

While there is truth to the perception that the majority of British academics are left leaning in views on politics and social policy, this does not mean that conservative and right-wing ideologies are totally shut out. James Orr, an Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Divinity, is an example of the right-wing presence in academia.  

Orr, until recently the Head of Policy of the Reform Party from which he was suspended for allegedly discussing ways of obtaining foreign funding, was already revealed to have been part of such a network. The aim it appears was according to the independent media outlet the Byline Times to “bring students into a hard-right, theocratic political project.”

Orr’s appointment was claimed to have been accompanied by a clandestine donation by Peter Thiel, the founder of Palantier, who has links to figures involved in the propagation of “race realism” and the politics of the “dark enlightenment”, the anti-democratic political concept posited by Curtis Yarvin.

His academic career at Cambridge has been sullied by accusations of neglecting his contractual obligations due to his commitments with the Reform Party. There appear to be instances in which complaints have been made been made about his conduct which have not been acted on and he has had a grievance against him for academic negligence and misconduct partially upheld. Moreover, the evidence thus far appears to reveal a morally compromised man who while teaching ethics was willing to circumvent electoral law.

The Arday affair with its frenzied press attention and breathless social media commentary presents an unfortunate case study of background orchestration and partisan evaluation before all the facts have been rationally assessed. Cambridge in their attempt to provide a fairy tale story of a black man who overcame a socially disadvantageous background and a disability appear to have failed to exercise their due diligence prior to appointing Arday. There also appear to have been flaws in the way they have dealt with complaints against O’Reilly and Orr.

The priority must be for Cambridge to put its house in order and for the mainstream media to acknowledge their role in the sensationalist campaign against Arday which was prompted by a network composed of elements dedicated to projects related to scientific racism and eugenics.

* Putting aside the question of plagiarism, these issues will become increasingly relevant as the sector grapples with present and future challenges. These include the many English universities whose indebtedness threaten them with insolvency, and the demographic trend of declining numbers of teenagers within the population. The consequence of this phenomenon is already being felt in the United States and there is an increasing awareness that Britain’s “enrolment cliff” is fast approaching.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

An Interview with Trillblack Channel on the Recolonisation of Africa

I was interviewed yesterday on a livestream by the Trillblack channel where I discussed neocolonialism.

Among the topics covered were:

. The assassinations of Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese political leader, and of the Cameroonian politicians Ruben Nyobe and Felix-Roland Moumie.

. France's use of its colonies to rebuild its economy after the devastation of World War 2 and the creation of its "Shadow Empire" after granting them "independence" under the auspices of the French Community.

. How the creation of the EU was based on the concept of "Eurafrica", a paternalistic relationship between Africa and Europe which is predicated on exploiting the mineral resources of Africa.

. The distinction between "open" and "closed" societies in the context of the survivability of governments which the CIA or other intelligence agencies wish to effect "regime change".

. The distinction between "white chauvinism" and "white supremacy" and how it fits into the post-World War global construct and rising anti-immigrant sentiment and white identitarianism.

. Operation Legacy: a secret British Colonial Office programme  from the 1950s to the 1970s to destroy, hide, or remove official documents that could implicate the British Empire in wrongdoing before its former colonies gained independence.

The show is hosted by Isaac Sable (nom-de-plume).

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Photograph of General Colin Powell awarding General Sani Abacha the Legion of Honor

General Sani Abacha (right), the Nigerian chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, receiving the Legion of Honor medal from General Colin Powell, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Pentagon on Wednesday, May 15th, 1991.

"(General Sani Abacha) has the worst CIA bio I've ever read, and I've read lots of them."
- U.S. General Colin Powell (rtd) speaking in 1995.

This photograph will come as a surprise and even a shock to the many who are familiar with the quote made in 1995 by U.S. Army General Colin Powell.

Why would the United States government bestow a prestigious medal to a foreign dignitary only for one of its top officials to make such a disparaging comment?

There are several reasons for this, but it is first important to note that Powell would have become familiar with the contents of Abacha’s CIA profile when he served as the 15^th U.S. National Security Advisor (NSA) from 1987 to 1989. The period includes that of 1987 when he was the deputy NSA during the Reagan presidency. He may also have had access to Abacha’s file on a need-to-know basis during his spell as the 12^th chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993, during which time he awarded Abacha the medal.

A foreign military officer must perform exceptionally meritorious services in support of the United States to be awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit. Abacha may have presided over increased cooperation between the militaries of the United States and Nigeria, although the volume of trade was not exceptional at the time. The United States made up only a minor fraction of heavy weapons deliveries to Nigeria.

It is important to note that while Powell’s comment on Abacha was an expression of frustration about the intelligence services of the United States having little useful or psychological insight into Abacha, it was of sufficient ambiguity to be construed as a disparaging evaluation of a man who was becoming a figure of hate in Western media circles.

In 1995 Powell was no longer in government and was promoting his autobiography. His comment was made in the same interview in which he described Nigeria as a "nation of scammers".

His words succeeded in uniting all Nigerians in condemning Powell himself. As a Nigerian pointed out, how would Powell have liked it if -as biological racists assert- that high levels of violent crime among Black Americans in annual FBI figures make all Black Americans criminals?

Others who tracked Powell’s career may not have been impressed by his moralising tone. They allege that he distinguished himself as a "company man" and servant of the American empire through his part in covering up the Mai Lai Massacre in Vietnam while a mid-ranking officer.

Powell also allowed himself to be used by ruthless neoconservatives to spout lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. His factually compromised statement to the United Nations was a key step in the build up to the illegal invasion of Iraq, and his legacy became irretrievably tarnished by this.

As for Sani Abacha, Powell’s comments were made in the context of his controversial tenure as the military head of state of Nigeria, a period which saw widespread repression including Abacha’s formation of a unit which assassinated political dissenters. He was also extremely corrupt, managing to embezzle between U.S. $2-5 billion which was secreted to a multitude of destinations including Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the United Kingdom and the United States.

He was also working towards transforming himself from a military dictator to a civilian one.

But Abacha’s flaws do not explain the disparity between the United States decision to on the one hand honour Abacha with a prestigious medal and on the other to demonise him. A clue lies in a tried and tested formula that has been part of U.S. foreign policy for decades. Those foreign leaders who are not subservient to American whims are often given such treatment. It is no secret that American policymakers were wary about Nigerian successes in striving to bring peace first to Liberia and then to Sierra Leone through ECOMOG, the West African military force which was composed of mainly Nigerian troops. The Abacha regime oversaw these deployments. The Abuja Peace Agreement signed by warring factions in the Liberian war was also done under Abacha’s watch.

If Abacha in 1991 was -to borrow the phrase coined by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt- a proverbial “son-of-a-bitch” serving U.S. interests in 1991, it is clear that by 1995 that this was no longer the case.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

About Paul Muni

Actor Paul Muni on the set of the movie Scarface with Jocko the Monkey.

I don't think I've watched more than two movies in which he starred, namely I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Scarface but have always been aware that he was a highly regarded actor.

I once read of Marlon Brando stating that Muni was his greatest influence as an actor or words to that effect.

I think he had the vibe of being a "method actor" before the term was invented. But his roots were in Yiddish Theatre, starting as a child actor, and not in the Stanislavski system which hugely influenced "The Method".

Regardless, I believe that an evolutionary line can be drawn from Muni to both Brando and Montgomery Clift, with John Garfield fitting somewhere in-between. They all incrementally developed the side of acting concerned with psychological realism.

I must make an effort to watch more of his movies.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Wey, Mountbatten and a glimpse at my past

Commodore J.E.A. Wey, the Chief of Naval Staff, Nigerian Navy, and Lord Mountbatten, an Admiral of the Fleet of the Royal Navy and the Chief of Defence Staff of the British Armed Forces, during the latter's visit to the Naval Base in Apapa, Lagos on October 14^th, 1964.

This frame from a Reuters newsreel covering the visit of Lord Mountbatten to the naval base in Lagos caught my eye.

The white painted building in the background used to serve as apartments for naval officers. We lived there for a short period after returning from England where my father's diplomatic posting as the Deputy Defence Advisor at the Nigerian High Commission came to an end in April 1973.

The building, which overlooked Lagos Lagoon, was located further up from the jetty from which Mountbatten alighted. Beyond it was a cove.

Our stay at the base was a little longer than that at the Excelsior Hotel where we had stayed for a week or two upon our return. We had arrived after Easter, and the school terms had already begun. My father had originally intended to enrol me at Command Children’s School, Ann Barracks, Yaba which my three older siblings had attended prior to our departure to England. It had been previously named Army Children’s School. However, since the quota of pupils for my age grade was filled, I was enrolled at its sister school at the cantonment in Ikeja.  

The Navy School Buses which took the children of naval personnel to both schools in Ikeja and Yaba started at the base. It meant that we had to wake up earlier than most other children. Our father who had worked at the base during the 1960s -first as the Flag Lieutenant and the Flag Secretary to Wey- was deployed to the Ministry of Defence which was situated across the Lagoon on Lagos Island, and we arrived home early enough to see him return via a naval launch and alight from it at the aforementioned jetty.

Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t much playing space in a military establishment although we could roam a little on weekends. The base offered a range of delights such as viewing the lagoon at sunset and absorbing the cool breeze that often wafted our way. I also enjoyed looking at the various naval vessels berthed in their designated spaces. They included NNS Nigeria, a frigate which was the navy’s flag ship, and the twin corvettes NNS Otobo and NNS Dorina. Another enjoyable aspect of living at the base was of our father regularly ordering seasoned goat meat from the new officer’s mess which was built on sticks some metres away from the jetty.

It was an altogether enjoyable experience living at the base but it was something of a relief to finally get housed in a large two-storey home which had a very large balcony.

As for the block of flats, I recall that they were turned into administrative offices by the late 1970s, although I was recently informed that it has been converted to living quarters for junior officers.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.