The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, has apparently closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war, so now the United States has to open the Strait of Hormuz that was already open before the not-war began.
The not-war began because Iran had uranium that was totally, completely, beautifully obliterated, so they can’t build the nuclear bomb they weren’t building, which is why the United States had to start the not-war it definitely didn’t start.
Now the United States, which has nuclear weapons, is threatening to use nuclear weapons to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because nuclear weapons are far too dangerous for countries with nuclear weapons to allow other countries to have.
If the United States saw the United States doing what the United States does in other countries, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.
It is tragic that those of us here in Africa who are victims of imperialism, who still carry the physical and psychological scars of colonial looting, are comfortably celebrating the rise of imperial monopolies like Netflix, Uber, and Temu or Shein, just because we want to deliver a cheap punchline for a few brainless retweets, to chase worthless online clout, or to sound intellectually superior while cheering on our own economic destruction.
Netflix did not "out-innovate" DStv, and DStv was not sleeping. The fundamental, unaddressed difference is that one is a local African broadcaster working with meager, heavily taxed local funding, while the other sits on a mountain of subsidized Western capital, an endless money-printing machine backed by Wall Street, and the geopolitical muscle of the US government.
Netflix gets about $17B in effectively interest-free capital and tax-subsidized benefits every year, which allows them to run their operations at a massive loss while aggressively capturing sovereign markets. On the other hand, DStv is treated as a value stock, meaning public markets ruthlessly demand immediate dividends, strict fiscal discipline, and quarter-by-quarter profitability. If DStv spent ten billion dollars on a single year's content, its share price would crash into oblivion overnight, its board would be wiped out by panicking investors, and its credit lines would be cut.
And just in case you are wondering, the South African government cannot step in to rescue DStv with interest-free loans, thanks to the predatory, highly restrictive treaties enforced by the ruthless World Trade Organisation. If the South African government dared to offer DStv a simple one hundred million dollar grant, they would immediately face brutal litigation at the WTO, because African nations foolishly signed suicidal trade agreements which dictate that if a sovereign state subsidizes its own local industry, it is legally obligated to offer the exact same financial welfare to the foreign predators invading their market.
And this is just the WTO. We have not even discussed the financial hitmen at the IMF or the World Bank, who view any form of state support for local industries as fiscal irresponsibility, a violation of free-market dogmas, or an outright sin. If the government gave DStv a massive loan, the IMF would immediately downgrade the country's credit rating into junk status. This engineered downgrade would make it punishingly expensive for the South African government to build clinics, fund schools, or repair highways, because the interest rates on their national debt would skyrocket to line the pockets of Western lenders.
But brainwashed Africans, who are the primary victims of this neo-colonial economic castration, will happily log onto Western platforms to tell you that Netflix was innovative while DStv was just sleeping.
The absolute worst part of this farce is the brain-dead comparison between Uber and local taxi drivers. A local driver must make an immediate profit today to buy maize meal, bread, and petrol tomorrow. He cannot compete with a multinational behemoth that has an explicit mandate from Wall Street to burn five billion dollars a year in predatory pricing, artificially subsidizing rides just to starve local operators into bankruptcy and clear the field.
The local taxi driver is the most visible, highly vulnerable target of his own state's predatory municipal machinery. He is hunted daily by corrupt traffic officers for compliance, like an expired permit, a slightly worn tire, a missing fire extinguisher, or an arbitrary traffic offense. For him, a single fifty-dollar ticket is not just a minor inconvenience; it is a catastrophic blow, the difference between his children sleeping with a full stomach or going to bed hungry.
But Uber does not even recognize these drivers as human beings with labor rights. They see no need to protect the dignity of work, the right to a living wage, or the basic sovereignty of the citizen. Instead, Uber smugly informs the courts that local labor laws do not apply to them, because they are just an app, and their drivers are merely independent contractors.
With this legal sleight of hand, they have effectively deleted the Bill of Rights for millions of working-class men and women. They have engineered a lawless corporate territory where they can terminate a breadwinner's account via a heartless algorithm with zero human review, pay him slave wages after stealing 30% in service fees, and refuse him a single cent of medical coverage for the crashes he suffers while lining their pockets.
Worse, they offer their rides at a 50% discount because they are heavily subsidized by Silicon Valley venture capitalists playing a global game of market conquest, and local governments are too terrified to intervene, knowing that any attempt to regulate these giants will result in immediate economic retaliation, diplomatic bullying, or Washington threatening to sanction them into oblivion.
Newspapers did not lose because they were lazy. There is no physical way a local newspaper can compete with Facebook or Instagram, which sit on massive surveillance networks, endless pools of free user data, and algorithmic monopolies designed to capture human attention for profit.
This is exactly why China banned these digital parasites and built their own sovereign ecosystems to allow local industries to develop.
How do you expect African manufacturing to ever survive when Shein and Temu are allowed to flood our markets with heavily subsidized, ultra-cheap fast fashion and low-quality equipment?
Do you honestly think China would have transformed into an industrial superpower if they had allowed their territory to be used as a digital and physical dumping ground, a massive cesspool where the West discarded their second-hand clothes, their obsolete laptops, their toxic e-waste, and their plastic garbage under the fraudulent banner of free trade?
This is the core problem I have with motivational speakers, with their brainless "grindset" rhetoric, and with how they completely erase the structures of global capital to blame the victim, because in their world, your poverty is a personal failure rather than the predictable outcome of an international economic system designed to keep you subjugated.
Let me conclude by saying that we must stop applauding the very chains designed to bind us, we must stop worshipping the corporations that are asset-stripping our continent, and we must realize that true innovation cannot exist without economic sovereignty.
Guys, if your parents have like a billion in illicitly acquired funds lying around your house, I have a spare bedroom where I can keep it for them for just 20% of the value until the political environment calms down.