I am a Born-Again Christian but let us dispense with comforting lies that may easily be deployed to rubbish an alternative line of thought that may benefit the weak and insulate them from the megalomania of the strong. The world has never been governed by law, ethics, or shared humanity. Against the laws of Nature which assures organisms exist in a dynamic system and therefore endows individuals with unique survival mechanisms, it has been governed by power – raw, unapologetic power – and by the willingness to deploy it without remorse. Every so-called “international order” has merely been a temporary arrangement reflecting who was strongest at the time.
Today, that pretence is collapsing. Even in the natural environment, the lion king needs to watch out for some other animals while the largest of all still succumb to the microscopic, based on the deployment of unique endowments of the enemy.
Europe’s conquest of Africa was not a civilising mission; it was a technological ambush. Guns, ships, and industrial violence were deployed against societies that possessed order, philosophy, governance, and intelligence—but not gunpowder at scale. Africa was not defeated because it was inferior; it was defeated because it was outgunned. That truth was never corrected, only buried under propaganda.
The Second World War did not redeem the world; it merely revealed what happens when unchecked power turns inward. The “Cold War” that followed did not produce peace—it institutionalised fear. “Mutually Assured Destruction” (MAD) restrained violence only because annihilation became automatic. Morality played no role. When the Cold War ended, the powerful announced a “rules-based order.” What they meant was rules for the weak, discretion for the strong.
Today, that hypocrisy no longer hides. Russia invades at will. China expands without apology. The United States—especially since the Trump era—has openly demonstrated contempt for sovereignty, legality, and restraint. When a U.S. president can authorise the abduction or forced rendition of another nation’s leader for alleged offences committed remotely and outside U.S. borders, the meaning of sovereignty is finished.
Power has abandoned manners.
Africa’s Strategic Suicide
Africa’s response has been tragically misguided. Instead of questioning the nature of power, African states chase its Western caricature. They pursue weapons they cannot maintain, technologies they do not control, alliances that will never save them.
This is not strategy. It is imitation as surrender. Africa cannot win an arms race against nations that dominate semiconductor supply chains, satellite infrastructure, artificial intelligence platforms, and global finance. Attempting to do so guarantees permanent inferiority. If Africa insists on defining power exactly as its historical predators do, it will remain prey forever.
The Power the World Tries to Erase
There is, however, a form of power that imperial systems have always feared: spiritual intelligence. In a lecture I delivered at the Humboldt Kolleg in Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba-Akoko, a few years ago, I quietly advocated the need to return to our own God-given talents which the current state of knowledge often makes strenuous efforts to discountenance or dismiss either as non-existent or downright primitive, when faced with stark realities.
Not religion as performance, not superstition as caricature but spiritual intelligence as technology – the disciplined command of belief, legitimacy, consciousness, fear, and consequence. It is as if Spiritual Intelligence needed to be submitted to Boyle’s Law, Charle’s Law and Einstein’s Laws of Relativity before validation without acknowledging the fact that it is governed by superior laws of the supernatural.
Africa has never lacked this power. It was forced to forget it.
In Yorubaland and across Nigeria, spiritual intelligence is not abstract. It is operational. It is embedded in daily life.
Technologies such as “Okigbe” and “Ayeta” are widely understood as systems of bodily insulation – protections believed to render individuals impervious to bullets and physical assault. Deployments such as “Ofe” are understood as mechanisms of evasion, enabling escape from imminent danger without confrontation.
Homes and compounds are routinely protected by spiritual boundaries that armed criminals avoid, not out of courtesy, but out of experience. Properties are secured without guards. Attacks fail without explanation. Reputations do the work that walls cannot. We have heard stories that some Yoruba kings used to travel distances without automobiles while an Alaafin’s mere words led to a federal minister barking like a dog, to death.
Practices such as “Ata” or “Atagba” are understood as means of remote consequence—responses delivered without physical proximity. Whether approved of or not, they demonstrate something the modern world refuses to admit: power does not necessarily require machinery to function, nor will it submit to the equation, e=mc2.
It works at super-hypersonic speeds and beyond the “particle theory” unrestrained by heat which limits the travel of matter.
Africa Is Not Alone: A Global Pattern of Suppression
Wherever indigenous societies developed non-material systems of power, imperial forces responded identically: delegitimise, demonise, criminalise and erase.
In Asia, Chinese civilisation integrated metaphysical principles – Qi, harmony, moral authority—into governance and warfare. Sun Tzu’s Art of War remains the most influential strategic text in history precisely because it prioritises psychological dominance and victory without battle. The West quotes Sun Tzu endlessly while denying the spiritual foundations that make his ideas work.
In India, yogic and tantric disciplines were technologies of endurance, influence, and consciousness. British colonial rule did not merely ignore them—it ridiculed, surveilled, and marginalised them. Knowledge that could not be industrialised was branded as backward. Japan fused Zen discipline with martial effectiveness so thoroughly that defeat without honour was inconceivable. The West copied Japanese efficiency while stripping away its spiritual core, pretending the results emerged from factories alone.
In Indigenous America, spiritual systems organised land, leadership, war, and healing. Colonial authorities understood their power immediately—and outlawed them. Ceremonies were banned. Shamans imprisoned. Children forcibly re-educated to sever cosmological memory. These practices were labelled satanic not because they were false, but because they sustained resistance.
This is not coincidence. It is doctrine.
Demonisation as Counterinsurgency
Spiritual intelligence was not dismissed because it was ineffective. It was dismissed because it worked and posed a dangerous challenge to Western Technologies. By branding indigenous power systems as crude, satanical, or primitive, imperial forces severed societies from internal authority and forced dependence on external validation. Once belief collapsed, domination became easy.
The hypocrisy is now complete. Modern powers openly invest in psychological warfare, narrative manipulation, behavioural engineering, and perception control – secularised versions of the very forces they once condemned. Artificial intelligence manipulates consciousness. Information warfare destabilises nations. Narratives determine legitimacy. Fear is deployed remotely.
This is spiritual warfare by another name – without the honesty to admit it.
The Choice Africa Can No Longer Avoid
The world has returned openly to “might is right.” The (dis)United Nations has become a relaxation club from where nothing meaningful or respectful comes, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) is nothing more than a moot court. The powerful have made that clear. Appeals to law, morality, or fairness will not save weaker nations. Only deterrence – visible or invisible – commands respect.
Africa faces a stark choice:
• Continue imitating a definition of power designed to exclude it
• Or reclaim an indigenous, asymmetric, renewable form of power that requires no permission, no patents, no satellites, no defined boundaries to act and no alliances.
Spiritual intelligence is not a romantic relic. It is not an embarrassment. It is an asymmetric strategic asset – one that operates where missiles fail and algorithms cannot calculate.
Empires collapse when belief dissolves, Weapons dominate bodies whereas spiritual intelligence commands minds.
The strong fear what they cannot break, predict, or quantify. Africa has been taught to forget what it already knows. That forgetting is no longer affordable.
Final Declaration
The age of polite illusions is over. Power has shown its face. The world no longer pretends to be fair. The triumvirate of Russia’s Putin, China’s Xi and Donald Trump’s MAGA nation have made this explicit by their definitions of morality and what is right and what is wrong. Africa must now decide whether it will continue measuring itself by the standards of those who fear its indigenous power – or whether it will reclaim the intelligence that empires worked so relentlessly to destroy.
Survival will not come from bigger guns or faster algorithms. It will come from redefining power itself without boundary or physical limitations.
Those who control consciousness do not need permission to exist but when a leader like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin finds out that by a mere proclamation from one of the “Shit-hole countries” he can be commanded to laugh uncontrollably till eternity or continuously wet his trousers, his ways and actions would be decently calibrated.
