Addiction, Not Conflict: Notes from a Continent That’s Seen It All

EDITORIAL, 20 Apr 2026

#947 | Raïs Neza Boneza – TRANSCEND Media Service

There is something almost poetic about the way the world organizes its chaos. Not poetic in the Rumi sense—more in the bureaucratic, “please take a number and wait for collapse” sense.

The conflicts are a part of the «relationship.” Fine. Then humanity is stuck in the world’s most toxic partnership—with power, with trauma, with denial. And like every bad romance, everyone keeps repeating: “It’s not that simple.”

From where Africa sits—where “not that simple” usually meant “someone’s getting fleeced”—the global circus looks less like diplomacy and more like a flea market of hypocrisy. From a continent long treated as both laboratory and landfill of global ideas—we watch these grand conflicts unfold like a badly rehearsed play where everyone insists on being the main character, and no one reads the script.

Let’s Redraw the Lines

Today, Washington talks like a wroth landlord. Now publicly with no decency, shoving away and stressing all «allies», “partnerships,” “shared values,” and “hemispheric cooperation.”

But history has a longer memory than any State Department press release. And often diplomacy? Diplomacy forgets on purpose.

For over a hundred years, the rules were written in blood and memos: Monroe (1823), then Teddy Roosevelt’s upgrade (1904), then boots on the ground in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and a greatest-hits reel of coups—Guatemala ’54, Chile ’73.

The “backyard” wasn’t a cute metaphor. It was a crime scene with a welcome mat.

Fast-forward to Cartagena, 2012. Summit of the Americas. Thirty-two out of thirty-three countries said: let Cuba back in. Also, maybe talk about decriminalizing drugs. The US answer? No. Not “let’s debate.” Just no.
Democracy is a beautiful thing—until it becomes a regional vote. Then it’s suddenly “complicated.”

The real Cartagena scandal wasn’t the Secret Service’s extracurricular activities. It was geopolitical: the moment everyone realized Uncle Sam still thought he owned the furniture.

So Latin America started rearranging the living room. Quietly. Politely.
In late 2011—months before Cartagena—CELAC was launched. No US. No Canada. No dramatic exit speech. Just a quiet nod to reality: “We can meet without Big Brother.”

From Africa, that felt like déjà vu. We too were once “zones of strategic interest” and “development partners.” Translation: take everything, then grant independence, then supervise—via aid, loans, and advice that comes with handcuffs.

Now Latin America is in its third act: negotiating without a guardian.
They’re cozying up to China. Voting their own way at the UN. Questioning the old catechism on Cuba, Venezuela, drugs, sovereignty.
And Washington? Stuck between two bad dates:

• Accept a multipolar world and become a peer, or
• Cling to 19th-century hierarchy like a toddler with a blankie.

The fix isn’t rocket science. It’s almost stupidly simple: honor the vote, engage for real, share the steering wheel. But empires don’t just wake up as neighbors. They haunt old buildings. They mistake privilege for gravity. They call compromise “surrender.”

So, the relationship stays the same—just with better LinkedIn profiles: a landlord slowly realizing the tenants just bought the building.

Now Slide Over to the Middle East–It’s Not a Conflict, It’s an Ecosystem

Israel-Palestine is the headline. Lebanon is the overflow valve. Iran is the ghost at the feast—never leaving, never liked around and oversea.  Missiles move faster than negotiators. Ceasefires show up like bad weather: brief, unreliable, followed by thunder.

Again, from the sub-Saharan region, this architecture is familiar:  regional conflicts stitched into a single, permanent instability. Everyone invokes history. No one escapes it. Iran speaks of resistance. Israel speaks of survival. Palestinians speak of existence. Lebanon absorbs the overflow like a nation-sized sponge. And the world debates vocabulary: “Escalation.” “Proportionality.” Words so polished they almost hide the rubble.

Solutions are on the shelf—regional pacts or frameworks, mutual recognition, de-escalation roadmaps. But peace has a chronic illness: too many cooks, not enough kitchen. Or let say clearly, too many stakeholders, not enough humanity. Again, a Deja vu

Europe Faint to Rediscover War—Russia Annex–Ukraine Rediscovers Now That Maps Matter

NATO pushes east. Russia punches back. Ukraine bleeds. And suddenly, everyone becomes a cartographer.

From the other side of the extractive equation, we sip tea and smirk. We’ve known for decades: when big powers fight, small countries become verbs— “pacified,” “neutralized,” “liberated.”

Sanctions fly like party confetti. Weapons pour in like humanitarian aid. Peace is always next Tuesday. Underneath? Pipelines, influence zones, strategic depth. Same old language, just shinier packaging.

But Here’s the Real Time Bomb: An Empire Losing Faith in Itself

A nation built on exceptionalism begins to feel… negotiable.
Not collapsing—no, empires rarely collapse cleanly. They fray. They flicker. They argue with themselves on live television.

Inequality stretches like a fault line. The middle class thins out. The poor multiply. The rich? They don’t just multiply—they consolidate.

Welcome to the age of the polished oligarch—not called oligarchs, of course. That word is reserved for others. Here, they are “billionaires,” “innovators,” “job creators,” philanthropists with tax strategies. Different vocabulary. Same gravity.

A Deja vu again from the south, we know what it looks like when wealth rises above accountability and begins to shape reality itself. Policy bends. Media softens. Politics becomes a negotiation between donors rather than citizens.

And then—like a crack in a carefully painted wall—the scandals seep through: Take the Epstein affair.

Not just a man. A network. A map of proximity between power, money, and impunity. A scandal so vast it briefly threatened to redraw the boundaries of consequence—and then, almost magically, dissolved into fragments.

Files hinted at. Names whispered. Questions… archived.

From the outside, it looked less like justice and more like containment. Because the real danger was not the crime—it was the implication:

That power, when sufficiently concentrated, does not merely influence the system. It becomes the system.

And so, instead of systemic reckoning, the narrative machine activates. Blame circulates on minorities,  immigrants, shadowy elites (always vaguely defined, carefully ambiguous); and of course, foreign threats or
Cultural decline.

Anything—everything—everyone else except the structural reality staring directly into the mirror.

From the periphery, we recognize this reflex instantly: When systems fail, narratives become weapons. When economies fracture, identity becomes currency. When inequality becomes unbearable, distraction becomes policy.

The tragedy is not that criticism exists. The tragedy is that it is misdirected. Because instead of asking: How do we rebuild a system that serves the many? The question becomes: Who can we accuse loudly enough to avoid rebuilding anything?

And accusation, unlike reform, is cheap. It requires no infrastructure. No redistribution. No courage. Only microphones. And an audience willing to believe that the problem is somewhere or someone else. Meanwhile, the reflect in mirror remains unbroken and unanswered.

Debt Bondage: The Global Quiet War

No bombs. No headlines. Just signatures. Debt is the cleanest weapon ever invented—no mushroom cloud, just a mushrooming interest rate.

The Global South learned this the hard way: loans arrive like manna, repayment arrives like drought. Now the lesson has migrated north. Greece, Portugal, Spain—welcome to the club nobody wants to join.

Let’s talk specifics. Greece, 2010–2018: three bailouts, €289 billion, and a “Troika” (IMF, ECB, European Commission) that acted less like lenders and more like colonial administrators. Pensions were gutted by 40%. Youth unemployment hit 50%—yes, half a generation told “learn to code” while hospitals ran out of bandages. Suicides rose 35% between 2010 and 2012. That’s not austerity. That’s slow asphyxiation with a spreadsheet.

Portugal followed the same script: wages frozen, public healthcare co-pays tripled, and a generation of nurses boarded planes to London. Spain? Evictions passed 100,000 families per year. The country still has ghost housing developments—cement tombs for a middle class that vanished.

And through it all, what did the politicians say?

One European finance minister, channeling Marie Antoinette’s greatest hits, famously shrugged: “If there’s no bread, let them eat cake.”
Well, not in those exact words. He said: “Austerity is the only path to growth.” Same recipe. Same cruelty. Different century.

Because here’s the quiet scandal: much of this suffering wasn’t even about external debt. It was internal—national debt held by the country’s own banks, pension funds, and wealthy citizens. In Italy, public debt now exceeds 140% of GDP, and every “fiscal correction” translates into crumbling schools, unpaid overtime for nurses, and bridges that literally collapse (Genoa, 2018, 43 dead). The politicians still call it “sacrifice.” The people call it robbery.

First, relief. Then, suffocation. Then, blame the poor for not baking faster.

The irony? The architects of austerity—the same technocrats who prescribed starvation diets for Mediterranean nations—are now reading their own manuals as inflation and debt crush their own voters at home. Suddenly, “restructuring” doesn’t sound so radical.

Solutions exist: Forgive debts altogether. Invest in local cooperatives. Trade among the indebted. But that requires something terrifying: admitting the system itself is a fraud.

But neo-liberal ideology is a powerful narcotic. And systems, like empires and European commissars, hate confession. They’d rather hand out cake recipes than bake a single loaf.

Now Enters the New Crew

BRICS is expanding—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa… plus a line around the block. AES shows up in the Sahel—Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso—basically announcing: “We’re done being managed.”
A club born from coups, sanctions, and a raw hunger for control. They’re building joint armies. Planning their own banks. Renegotiating their own dirt.
Not saints. Not clean. But impossible to ignore.

From Africa, this feels like plates shifting. The world isn’t unipolar anymore. It’s just… argumentative. BRICS offers alternative cash. AES offers security without permission. The West offers “concern.” Everyone offers “influence.”

This isn’t a new world order. It’s a crowded bar where nobody agrees on the last call.

Conclusion?

Humanity has already rehearsed both its disasters and its recoveries, but the «powers» prefers reruns to reinvention. The diagnosis is brutally simple: the problem isn’t conflict—it’s addiction. Addiction to control, to fear, to narratives that make domination sound like duty. From this African vantage point, the spectacle is almost predictable: the same scripts, the same vocabulary, the same carefully staged amnesia. We’ve seen this before—we were written into it. So,  we watch, not surprised, as the wheel turns in place.

And when the world finally tires of recycling its own hypocrisy or something that doesn’t collapse under its own arrogance? and dares to build something different, it will discover we are still here—not waiting for permission, but for seriousness. We’ve had the kettle on for centuries.

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Raïs Neza Boneza is the author of fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry books and articles. He was born in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Former Zaïre). He is also an activist and peace practitioner. Raïs is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee and a convener of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment for Central and African Great Lakes. He uses his work to promote artistic expressions as a means to deal with conflicts and maintaining mental wellbeing, spiritual growth and healing. Raïs has travelled extensively in Africa and around the world as a lecturer, educator and consultant for various NGOs and institutions. His work is premised on art, healing, solidarity, peace, conflict transformation and human dignity issues and works also as freelance journalist. You can reach him at rais.boneza@gmail.com – http://www.raisnezaboneza.no

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Apr 2026.

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