An Essay on Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative

By Femi Akomolafe

Today, we turn our attention to global geopolitics. As we have said several times in this blog, the Western world has squandered its five-hundred-year run of global dominance. Drunk on plunder, sustained by oceans of blood, and blinded by insatiable greed, gluttonous avarice, and stupendous arrogance of exceptionalism, Westerners could not imagine a world where they would no longer call the shots. Their racial arrogance engendered by stupendous ignorance would not allow that.

While the cretinous collective West with all its hubris continues to play empire with its decaying NATO toys and its hollow chants of “rules-based order,” the real tectonic plates of power are shifting under its feet. Anyone with eyes could see that global geopolitics is being remolded in real-time.

Recently, China’s President Xi Jinping quietly but decisively unveiled a vision that may be remembered as the funeral dirge of Western hegemony—the Global Governance Initiative (GGI). It rests on five cornerstones:

• Adhering to sovereign equality
• Abiding by international law
• Practicing multilateralism
• Advocating a people-centered approach
• Focusing on taking real actions

Although the stenographers who parrot official talking points as journalists in the West pretended that they did not hear, and, on the surface, President Xi’s words may sound like platitudes for a world summit brochure, we should not be deceived.

In geopolitical terms, Xi’s declaration is a bombshell, a paradigm shift, a rewriting of the global architecture born after the Second World War.

The Chinese president, in effect, announced the birth of a post-Western world order.

For decades, I have cried that the West needed to change gear. It needed to stop behaving like a bloated aristocrat living on stolen inheritance and squandering it with reckless abandon, fighting useless wars for example. I cautioned Westerners that it was necessary to rein in their greed and learn to live in a world where other civilizations also have a right to exist and prosper.

Of course, drunk on hubris, they would not listen to me. Still inebriated from their self-generated triumphalistic hurrahs over the collapse of the Soviet Union, they continue with their sanctions, more bombs, and more lectures about “human rights” given by people whose history is a museum of crimes against humanity – witness the genocide in Palestine.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West had its chance to build a truly inclusive world. Instead, it went berserk with insane triumphalism. NATO expanded like a metastatic cancer, gobbling countries eastward in direct violation of solemn promises. The twin evil organizations the West set up to rape the world (IMF and World Bank) continued their economic banditry (what else to call it?) in Africa and Latin America.

Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels strutted the world like schoolyard bullies, throwing threats and insults around. They gave themselves the authority to determine who must rule one country or the order. Their cries of “Assad must go!” “Gaddafi must go!” rent the air. The arrogance!

The crowning insult was the hubris of the so-called “unipolar moment”—the fantasy that the United States could reign supreme forever. Analysts with foresight like my favorite military strategy guru, Russian-born Andrei Martyanov, wrote four books and numerous blog posts to warn his adopted country, the US, that it was losing the military to the Russians. Of course, US Army Generals with their chests puffing with medals won from “victories” over inferior third-world armies paid no attention.

That arrogance has now detonated in their faces over their misadventure in Ukraine where Russia, single-handedly, handed a humiliating defeat to the Collective West and its expeditionary force, NATO.

President Xi’s first principle—sovereign equality—is a direct slap across the face of the West. For five centuries, Western powers operated on the doctrine that some nations are more “sovereign” than others. Britain could dictate to Africa. France could decree the terms of “Francafrique.” The United States could overthrow governments at will—from Iran in 1953 to Chile in 1973 to Libya in 2011, plus the countless in the Americas.

President Xi declared that the age of selective sovereignty is over. No country, however powerful, has the right to decide the destiny of another.

We already see that this is no longer a theory. Russia, China, and India refused to bend to Western diktats over Ukraine. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and even tiny Gulf monarchies now tell Washington “no” with increasing frequency. The Saudis recently wisely perched themselves under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella.

The balance has shifted. The West no longer has a monopoly on coercive power.

The second cornerstone—abiding by international law—is another blow to Western pretensions. When Western leaders prattle about a “rules-based order,” they mean, “Rules we make, you obey.” When it suits Washington, international law is invoked like scripture; when it doesn’t, it is tossed aside like a soiled rag. More importantly, Westerners refused to share the book containing the rules with the rest of us.

Who illegally invaded Iraq in 2003? Who bombed Yugoslavia in 1999 without UN authorization? Who tore Libya to shreds in 2011 under the grotesque pretense of “humanitarian intervention”? It was these shameless paragons of “rules-based order.”

President Xi’s insistence on international law strips away this hypocrisy. What the Chinese president told us, in his calm voice, was that law is law, not a buffet where the West picks what it likes. It is apparent that the age of Western impunity, if not altogether over, is fast fading. It is being by replaced by a multipolar enforcement reality—where Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, and even Ankara or Tehran can say: enough.

Third, multilateralism. Westerners hear this word and immediately sneer, for in their dictionary, “multilateralism” meant a system where the US led and its vassals echoed. President Xi is not talking about the G7 club, where Europe still imagines itself relevant. He is talking about BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Eurasian integration, and an economic and political architecture that dwarfs anything the West can muster.

As they say, numbers do not lie. BRICS+ now represents more than 45% of the world’s population and nearly a third of global GDP—surpassing the G7 in purchasing power parity. Militarily, Russia alone has outclassed NATO, exposing it as an overrated relic. Add China’s industrial juggernaut and India’s demographic momentum, and the Western bloc looks like an aging rock band still touring on nostalgia.

Unfortunately, one only needs to listen to them to know that Westerners continue to live in a parallel universe.

Under President Xi’s vision, multilateralism means no more monopolies, unilateral sanctions, or economic chokeholds by Washington or Brussels. The new geometry of power has multiple centers, not one imperial metropolis.

President Xi’s fourth cornerstone—a people-centered approach—is almost alien to Western governance and culture. The West’s system is built not on people but on profit. For five centuries, from the slave trade to colonialism to modern neoliberalism, Western governance has meant the systematic robbery of the many to enrich the few. The West remains a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy.

Whatever its flaws, China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in four decades—something the World Bank and IMF could never dream of. When the Chinese president says “people-centered,” he means development that puts food on tables, roofs over heads, and education in children’s hands. Not endless wars that fatten Lockheed Martin and Raytheon shareholders while millions of human beings starve.

This is not merely a moral difference—it is a civilization contrast. One system views human beings as expendable resources for profit; the other sees them as ends in themselves.

Finally, focusing on real actions, President Xi effectively skewers the West’s favorite sport: rhetoric without responsibility. Western leaders are masters of grand rhetorical speeches—Paris climate accords, Millennium Development Goals, Structural Adjustment Policy, endless summits with glossy communiqués. But what are the results? More carbon emissions, more inequality, more wars, more poverty.

China, by contrast, builds. It builds roads in Africa, ports in Asia, and railways from Asia to Europe. The Belt and Road Initiative may be controversial, but it is concrete, not a PowerPoint display. The West offers PowerPoints and bombs; China offers railways and trade. Free to choose, most countries will prefer President Xi’s Model.

Except for the purblind, everyone could see that there is no longer any doubt that the baton of global leadership has shifted. It is no longer Washington or Brussels that sets the tune. The new triumvirate—Russia, China, India—more than dwarfs the G7 in industrial and military firepower.

Together, these three form the backbone of a multipolar world. The G7, meanwhile, resembles a geriatric ward clinging to past glories with the narcissistic buffoon ordering everyone around.

And here comes the tragedy that stabs the heart. As this new global architecture is being built, where is Africa? Where are the voices of Lagos, Addis Ababa, Nairobi, or Johannesburg? Where are our technocrats, our economists, our philosophers? Tragically, the voice is missing. Our reprobate misrulers are missing in action when the world is being shaped.

It is Berlin 1884 all over again. Then, the Western powers carved Africa like a roast at dinner, without a single African at the table. Today, as Xi, Putin, and Modi redraw the map of power, Africa is again a spectator, not a participant.

The plantation managers we call presidents seem content to administer poverty while the real game of nations is played elsewhere.

Who will wake up our slumbering leaders and tell them that if Africa does not assert itself now, it will once again be written into the footnotes of history as an object, not a subject. That is the bitter lesson of Berlin 1884 and must not be repeated.

Africa cannot afford another century of irrelevance. Our technocrats must wake up from their slumber, shake off their colonial hangovers, and insist on a seat at the table—not as beggars with begging bowls but partners wielding the continent’s vast resources and human potential.

President Xi’s Global Governance Initiative signals the end of Western domination. But unless Africa asserts itself, we will again be the raw-material quarry of the new world order, just as we were for the old one.

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©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Polemicist-General of the Pan-African Republic)

My Mission: Stultitia Delenda Est – Stupidity Must be Destroyed!

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