Bongo Drummed

40 per cent of the young men in Gabon are unemployed, and 34 per cent of the population is in absolute poverty, yet the ruling family is so fabulously rich from the country's oil that it once imported fake snow for Christmas. In 2015, President Ali Bongo paid Lionel Messi €2.5 million for a one-day appearance. There are only 2.4 million people in Gabon. Every one of them should be rich. Today, they have decided that they would no longer tolerate being poor.

France still taxes 14 of its former colonies for "the benefits of colonisation", and forces them to use a currency that it issues, the CFA franc. That is pegged to the euro and so on, for be assured that, for all the cheap jokes about French military cowardice, their utter ruthlessness in Africa is an integral and important part of "the rules-based international order", the rules of which are such as these. The French and the Americans alike maintain a huge military presence in those countries. They are not there as rivals.

With that backing, Omar and Ali Bongo ruled Gabon from 1967, 10 years before Emmanuel Macron was born, until today. A single individual, the 90-year-old Paul Biya, has been President of Cameroon since 1982, the year that Macron turned five. And so on. Oil-rich Gabonese starve. France has the world's fourth largest gold reserves but no goldmine except in French Guiana, while gold-rich Mali has no reserves. France has the world's highest rate of nuclear energy but no uranium, while only 18 per cent of people in uranium-rich Niger have electricity at all. But not the least of Africa's overflowing natural resources are a median age of 18.5, a mean age of 19.5, and a birth rate of 4.2 per woman. And the youth is in revolt.

That Russia and the Wagner Group will want their cut is not, for now, seen as a problem in Africa. The Russians never colonised the place, they were the lynchpin of its liberation struggle, and they still are. By contrast, the United States did and does support the colonial powers and oppose the liberators. Whether as the Russian Federation or as the Wagner Group, the Russians will be welcome to a share of the spoils of the liberation as far as Africans were concerned. Russia earned them in the last stage of The Struggle, and it has already begun to earn them in this stage. That is how things are seen there.

France is not the only bad guy in Africa, and this uprising has notably begun under its first ever Anglo-style centrist President. Hence the silence of the likes of Black Lives Matter. Those are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party, which is the most successful white supremacist organisation in history based on how and for how long it ran the South, and of its intercontinental network of wannabes. Including Macron's Renaissance. And including all main parties here.

But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Keir Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.