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[Introduction: Once again, contemporary events forced me to reach back into my archives. I wrote this piece, ‘IMF-Sapiens,’ more than two decades ago; but readers will find it as fresh as if it were written today.
A few days after President Ruto of Kenyan who wanted to pretend to be a fervent Pan-Africanist returned from paying homage to his masters in Washing DC, where the teleprompter-reading ventriloquist mannequin lauded and called him and termed him a non-NATO strategic partner (whatever that bs is supposed to mean), he imposed a vicious IMF-Dictated taxes on his already impoverished people. Incredibly, Kenyans, noted for their butter-will-not-melt-in-my-mouth docility, began a riot that stunned the world.
We will never know what made the reprobate misrulers in Africa think that their people will forever put up with being treated with impunity so that these cretins can continue to satisfy their foreign curators.
As of writing this, sporadic riots still break out in part of the country from utterly fed up and angry citizens who since independence have been treated like colonial vassals by the heirs of Western imperialism.]
[Rioting Kenyans protest against IMF-imposed taxation]
Readers, here is “IMF-Sapiens.”
“Neo-colonialism, after all, is not centered in a vacuum. It is built on the previous colonial history of the country in which it operates, from the foundation that the colonial regime lays before its ostensible departure. The object of neo-colonialism is to ensure that power is handed to men who are moderate and easily controlled, political stooges. Everything is done to ensure that the accredited heirs of colonial interests capture power.” (Oginga Odinga, ‘Not Yet Uhuru’, Hill and Wang, New York. p.256)
“Do not be ashamed of your poverty unless you got it dishonestly.” – Anon.
According to those who made it their business to know about those types of things, humanity began in Africa about five point five million years ago when varieties of Australopithecus separated from their monkey cousins.
Through gradual gradation, we moved from that lowly beginning to what we call ourselves today – Homo sapiens, (supposedly thinking beings).
A new species of the human genus has evolved. Future researchers will again place its birthplace in Africa and time at circa the late 20th and early 21st century.
Morphologically, physically, genetically, mentally, and intellectually the IMF-SAPIEN is the equal of the HOMO-SAPIEN.
Future anthropologists will have big-time difficulties distinguishing the two species.
What, then, are the characteristics of the IMF-SAPIEN that made it a distinct species?
To recognize an IMF-SAPIEN, we have to go beyond the physical sciences.
Neither biology, nor geology, nor anthropology, nor archaeology, nor chemistry will help us.
Only in its behavior does an IMF-SAPIEN differ from a HOMO-SAPIEN.
It is only by studying their behaviors that can we make a distinction between the two species.
We thus move away from the domain of physiology and enter the province of psychology.
How, then, do we properly recognize an IMF-SAPIEN?
Many features distinguish the IMF-SAPIENS from other species of the human genus.
Below we list some of the easily recognizable traits of IMF-SAPIENism, though not necessarily in any specific order:
The most significant trait is that the IMF-SAPIEN is a colonial being.
A colonial would be an adequate description of one under colonial domination, but an IMF-SAPIEN goes way beyond that.
For starters, a colonial subject always harbors the HOPE of gaining his (we are not being sexist here) freedom. He considers his position unnatural, and he is full of hope for freedom.
IMF–SAPIENS, on the other hand, have abandoned all hope for his salvation.
Our unfortunate cousin does not believe himself capable of self-redemption; he considers his position the natural order sanctioned by the gods.
An IMF-SAPIEN appears satisfied, even reveled, with his lowly, colonial, lot.
Having abandoned any hope for self-development and self-redemption, the IMF–SAPIEN waits with childlike helplessness for others to come to his aid.
Our average Homo sapiens acknowledged it is abnormal to be nice to those who do not know how to appreciate the gesture, never mind to reciprocate it, not so with an IMF-SAPIEN.
He continues to give when his generosity is used as a tool to abuse him and curtail the very essence of his self-reliance and development.
Indeed, IMF-SAPIEN starved in other to make others full.
Centuries of being treated with ingratitude have not dulled his sense of misguided altruism. So, our unfortunate cousin continues to starve despite the abundance of resources endowed to his motherland.
An IMF-SAPIEN sits on vast wealth whilst living in wretched poverty. Case in point: Whilst Niger languishes in darkness, The French powered their town and cities with the uranium that they take from Niger at thieving prices.
It is needless to state that IMF-SAPIENS are inadequately educated and ignorant of how their resources are exploited by foreign firms while they continue to live in void superstitions
Few will contest the fact that Africa is the world’s most resource-rich continent.
How then do we explain the strange phenomena of our continent being the world’s beggar and the world’s basket case? How did we end up selling our gold, our diamond, our tantalum, and other precious minerals and yet not get enough money to give ourselves potable water or electricity?
How do we explain why Africans are the world’s most malnourished, the worst clothed, and the most poorly housed people on earth?
We need not mention the simple truth that we are the worst educated and the most ignorant. Stupid superstitions still rule our lives.
How do we explain the strange phenomenon that makes Africans the lowest of the world’s poor wherever we live?
Why are UN pamphlets on hunger and starvation always adorned with pictures of Africans?
The IMF-SAPIEN has long been out of reasoning abilities and similarly abandoned all efforts to find lasting solutions to problems confronting him.
Like hapless infants, he continues to entrust his growth and development to others while coiled in self-restraint to find solutions to his unending self-made problems.
This can be the only explanation we have for the uncountable NGOs, institutions, and Think Tanks Westerners have set up to maintain their stranglehold on our lives in Africa.
Today, it is impossible for IMF-SAPIENS to make any developmental agenda without approval from foreign NGOs or institutions.
Or where is it possible to breathe nowadays in Africa without a Western NGO telling us how to do it?
The IMF-SAPIEN is ravaged by poverty to the point of intellectual inertia.
He accepts without protest when others insult him with their mis-analyses of his problems.
He believes when told that his problem are lack of democracy (he should have questioned why his situation hasn’t improved after over three decades of democratic experimentation).
Let someone tell us what dividend Nigerians, Ghanaians, Kenyans, or South Africans have gained from their so-called democracy.
IMF-SAPIEN shares in the view that the lack of democracy accounts for his underdevelopment, surprisingly no organization not even the UN can come up with anything Africans have gained from the imposed democratic rule.
IMF-SAPIEN accepts without a murmur that his problem stemmed from the corruption of his government (he should have asked how the economies of the USA, Italy, China, and Japan boomed despite their frequent corruption scandals).
He receives it solemnly when told that ‘bad governance’ is his major palaver; it never occurred to our unlucky cousin to ask what the nebulous term is supposed to mean.
Our IMF-SAPIEN cousin believes that over-population is the root cause of his destitution (he should have questioned why that is not a problem in say, Holland, where about eighteen million human beings crammed themselves into a real-estate of forty-thousand square kilometers versus Sudan where a land-mass of two point five million square kilometers is populated by only about twenty-eight million people. And that about fifteen million Angolans have over one million square kilometers in contrast to the almost eighty million Germans who share about three-hundred and fifty-six thousand square kilometers.)
Oh yes, an IMF-SAPIEN loves titles and nothing pleases him more than to hold political office.
Whether or not it is a political office that is totally bereft of any real power or authority, the IMF-SAPIEN is contented to hold his sham office.
He loves aplomb and pageantry to no end. To make his day, give him a small piece of real estate, throw in a flag, and an anthem, and equip some rag-tag band of delinquent ruffians with museum pieces and call it a national army, our strange cousin will find nothing ironic in celebrating his sham independence.
Adorning himself with all the brass and epaulets money can buy, he will be seen vibrating with joy on ‘Liberation’ or ‘Independence’ Day!’
Everyone the IMF-SAPIEN invites to his house is having the best time of their lives, whilst he continues to exist in grinding poverty and mendicancy: This is among the most obvious signs of IMF-SAPIENism.
Any society largely populated by IMF-SAPIEN is immediately recognizable by the fact that the Aboriginals are always at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
As pointed to, supra, the IMF-SAPIEN sits on vast natural wealth but does not benefit from them in any tangible way.
It is thus left for foreigners to exploit these resources for their benefit.
The IMF-SAPIEN lives in rat-infested, mosquitoes -overwhelmed, and vermin-plagued hovels in slum and ghost towns (a ghost town is a ghetto inside a ghetto); the foreigners live in walled mansions in ‘exclusive’ suburbs.
The IMF-SAPIEN crammed himself (44 sittings, 99 standing – apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti), into ancient jalopies (trotro in Ghana, molue in Nigeria, and matatu in Kenya) whilst the foreigner tool around his towns in the latest designer high-tech 4*4 jeeps.
What is also easily apparent to visitors is the fact that almost all the foreigners in his land are having the best times of their lives, whilst the IMF-SAPIEN wallow in abject poverty.
Or has anyone ever seen a European, Arab, or Asia living in any of our numerous shantytowns, ghettoes, and ghost towns in Africa?
An IMF-SAPIEN does not grow what he eats: Present-day keen observers and future archeologists will notice this unique feature of IMF-SAPIEN immediately.
This being is easily recognizable by his eating habits. His foods consist of exclusively imported items: British mad cow beef, expired Australian poultry products, European foot and mouth diseased pig feet (yuk!), expired Dutch, and Swiss milk products have become the staple food of our unfortunate cousin.
Our strange cousin believes himself civilized by the number of ‘Fast (junk) Food’ outlets in his land! That these foods give him debilitating (diabetics, stroke, HBP, heart) diseases has not dissuaded our unfortunate cousin from consuming them with gusto.
Strangely our cousin, who has absolutely no conception of time, likes to eat at Fast Food joints!
IMF-SAPIEN does not eat what he grows: Like almost all other colonial subjects, the labor of the IMF-SAPIEN is not employed in producing food for himself and his family.
No. His heavy muscles are engaged in producing what they tell him is a cash crop. (If IMF-SAPIEN is capable of asking questions, he should have asked where the cash is, that he had employed his labor in producing over the years).
He should also have asked why it is possible for people who only push pens around in Paris and London to make more money than he, who slaves upward of fourteen hours a day in the tropical sun to farm and produce cocoa.
Our weird cousin hates his culture. As Apostle Paul said in his Epistle to the Ghanaians 20:05: "By their taste for foreign culture, ye shall know them."
A society populated by IMF-SAPIENS must be a miniature (actually a caricature) of the metropolitan (dominating) power.
The IMF-SAPIEN has lost touch with his roots and most of his energies are employed in running away as fast as possible from his cultural roots.
Not only would an IMF-SAPIEN not speak his language but also, in speaking a foreign language, he must use foreign tones, mannerisms, inflections etc, etc.
A properly evolved IMF-SAPIEN would rather die than bear his traditional name.
Traditional African names have meanings and sometimes a long history behind them; today many Africans feel no shame in bearing totally ridiculous and meaningless foreign names.
The IMF-Sapiens’s mannerism consists entirely of mimicking other cultures.
Anything foreign is OK for the IMF-SAPIEN as long as it does not remind him of his own culture or traditions.
You can easily know when you get to a society of properly-evolved IMF-SAPIENS – Just listen to the leader talking to his people.
A well-evolved IMF-SAPIEN society is the only place on earth where the rulers address the ruled in a foreign language!
In these societies, no one sees anything wrong or ironic in societies where leaders address their people in a foreign language!
Let us now consider the structures of the society inhabited by IMF-SAPIENS, albeit briefly.
The most notable feature of this society is structures (political, economic, social, sociological, and psychological) erected that have no traditional or cultural base.
The political and economic institutions of IMF-Sapien’s society are based on alien, imported structures.
IMF-SAPIENS have long abandoned their traditional systems of governance and economic activities.
Their system of social organization is imported in its entirety, with zero local content.
What’s baffling is that the IMF-SAPIEN failed to grasp why these structures, which he hardly understands, are failing him.
As mentioned supra, the IMF-SAPIEN is running away from his roots as fast as possible, we find him junketing from one foreign country to the other seeking solutions to his local problem.
Those who pretend to be helping him are swarming his land with their unemployed and unemployable youth, thereby solving their own unemployment problems at the expense of our unfortunate cousin.
We thus find the peculiar situation whereby those who created the problems are proffering the solutions.
This happens only in a thoroughly evolved IMF-SOCIETY.
In the sphere of spirituality, the IMF-SAPIEN is a lost soul.
Religion has been properly defined as the deification of the ancestors. Every society creates its own religion and creates its own gods in its own image.
Religions and gods reflect the societies that created them. Not so for our peculiar and wonderful cousin.
As Apostle Paul warned in his Epistle to the Nigerians 20:15, “By their worship of foreign gods, ye shall know them.”
With alacrity, our strange cousin made a bonfire of the images of his gods. With stunning speed, he adorned his temples with the images of other people’s gods.
How else to explain the burning by Africans of the wooden images of their gods, only to replace them with the plastic images of a blond, blue-eyed European nailed to a cross in obvious agony?
No properly-evolved IMF-SAPIEN finds anything ironic in adorning his walls with the picture of a Caucasian Jesus the Christ – even one painted by the Italian artist Michelangelo!
Nothing makes our cousin giddier than imitating the religious rituals of other people.
Our cousin is at his best elements when he can recite off his head the ‘holy books’ of other people's religions.
Our unfortunate cousin sees nothing wrong in adopting the badly copied religions of his ancestors in Egypt – both Islam and Christianity evolved from Judaism, which is nothing but an ideological variant of Ancient Egyptian Religion.
Whereas in Europe, it is possible to engage in rational debate with priests, no well-evolved IMF-SAPIEN will countenance any debate on his new-found religion.
How true that: New Converts make the worst Zealots.
The leaders of IMF-SAPIEN societies love titles, ceremonies, and speech-making, though not necessarily in that order.
The sight of the maximum leader spewing rhetorical verbiage on the television and the radio and the newspapers daily confronts a visitor to any IMF-SAPIEN society.
In these societies, the leader is the state and the state is the leader.
The only other personage competing with the maximum leader for coverage is invariably the numero uno’s wife.
Go and ask Mevrouw Kibaki in Kenya or Madam Goodluck in Nigeria.
Leaders of IMF-SAPIEN societies are simply beyond irony. The opulent lifestyles enjoyed by these leaders bear no relationship whatsoever to the poverty suffered by the masses of the people they are leading. This is the only explanation we can adduce for the nauseating sight of well-fed African leaders, resplendent in the best attires money can buy, meeting annually and pontificating about their people’s suffering.
The Diasporan IMF-SAPIEN: Let’s briefly touch on those IMF-SAPIENS that managed to escape poverty in the Homeland, and were given asylum in other lands. One would expect such fellows to look around them and do their best to borrow, even steal, ideas they can use to transform the societies from which they ran away.
Then one would have been mistaken, since IMF-SAPIENS, as we mentioned above, are totally beyond irony. They are also, let’s repeat ourselves, beyond self-redemption.
What we have is the irrational and mind-boggling spectacle of those who escaped poverty back home taking to the social media in their new abode, to ferociously defend the otiose elite that made living in their Homeland unlivable. As soon as our unfortunate cousin manages to secure his residence permit, he will be transformed into Cyberspace Warrior - he will be on all the media shouting down anyone who has anything to criticize in the situation in his Homeland. Before long, our Cousin will soon start to demand that he be allowed to praise his god the way he was used to back in his Native land. Woe betide those who asked why his all-powerful god was unable to care for him in his Homeland.
©️ Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́
Farmer, Writer, Published Author, and Social Commentator
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As the "suffering " begins to hurt, more than ever, so will the "awakening " become louder and louder.
Yes, we are on our way now to true freedom.