While we were learning how Mungo Park discovered the river Niger which had people living on its banks before he ever got there , other societies were learning how to develop things and how to think in a way that would ultimately change and dominate the world . As a result , we are forced to play catch up and dance to the music played by others today .
Similarly while we were celebrating our elitism with foreign goods , others placed an embargo on foreign goods and built their own home grown industries . Over the last few months there are some key events that have shaped the world and dominated the news which are worth mentioning .
First , we saw how truly powerful social media companies are when Twitter and Facebook shut off Donald Trump . It was a sad dark and stark reality . Anyone who can take away your voice is more powerful than you . The president of the United States has been referred to for decades as the most powerful man in the world . Well , it does appear that there are new sheriffs in town and these sheriffs are more powerful than the president of the United States . They took away his voice and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it even though he was a sitting president .
Next let us look at what we can call Wall Street versus The people . To sum it up in a very easy to understand manner , Wall Street had a practice called Short selling where they would look at certain companies and predict that the companies were going to fail . The big boys of Wall Street would then borrow shares in these companies that they were expecting to lose value and sell them , with a promise to buy them back at a later date .
Simplified it is like you look at your friend ' s phone and decide that this old phone can only lose value so you borrow the phone at say $ 10 expecting its value to drop to $ 3 . In the process you make $ 7 . Well that is what Wall Street bet on concerning the company GameStop . They predicted its fall .
Now regular guys on the investment forum of social media platform Reddit began to have conversations about how to save GameStop . These conversations led to people buying GameStop stocks in their droves . In a 6 Month period the value of the company had risen 8000 %.
This crippled the Wall Street companies that had bet against GameStop and suddenly the people had won against the powerful forces of Wall Street . It was the purest democratization of investments where the ordinary man suddenly had access to investing in places that had been the exclusive domain of the big Wall Street companies .
Another story making the rounds is The Australian government versus Facebook . It played out more like the story of a helpless nation against a powerful platform - a David and Goliath story . Legislation was being proposed that would make social media platforms pay for the news on their sites . Facebook was not happy with the way the legislation was being proposed and so a back and forth happened and one day , Facebook as one news outlet put it , shot the hostages . Yes . Facebook pulled down all news related matters on its site .
News providers , some Australian government health-department and emergency-services pages and many others were affected . Facebook later agreed to restore Australian news pages after the government offered amendments to the legislation .
One would think that in its pride , the government would retaliate by pulling off all its content from Facebook but that did not happen . Perhaps in an attempt to show some semblance of dignity after the drama , Australian health minister said that they will no longer put their ads on Facebook . It later turned out that what he actually meant was that they will still put their ads on the platform but will not boost the ads .
We can still remember the role of social media in fueling the Arab spring that led to regime changes in a number of nations . Considering the fact that this was a decade ago , we cannot even begin to fathom what is possible today . The truth is that the whole world is literally run today by big tech . Not even an American president is spared .
With such power if the internet decides to turn on a small country what do you think they can do to that country ? Ok let me be more specific . Can the entire African continent stand up to the tech giants of today ? Are we not playing a very risky game as a continent ? We thought colonization was bad but we fail to realize that digital colonization will be worse .
We are talking of nations with no secrets hidden to these giants , nations with no control over their own narratives and nations that will be totally at the mercy of the digital colonizers . Again remember , if these digital colonizers could shut the mouth and voice of a sitting president of the United States , who then can be protected from their long and mighty arm ?
If we do not know our history then we are more likely to repeat the negative parts of it . Students of history will remember that the entity called Nigeria today was sold to the British by a company ! Palm oil was the major crop of the Niger Delta and was the area ' s major export . The Europeans needed it for their soap and many other industries and so the demand for it was very high . What started with the natives selling directly to whoever gave the best deals soon metamorphosed into a fullfledged industry which made a number of natives quite wealthy .
This sparked great competition among the Europeans and the United Africa Company was formed by Briton , George Goldie . With this in place , the United Africa Company immediately began to establish outposts in different parts and ten ventured deeper and deeper into the land from the Niger Delta . The company changed its name to the National Africa Company in 1886 and later changed it again to the Royal Niger Company .
It was this company that sold the territory which is known today as Nigeria to the British . Yes . A company was that powerful . They sold it for £ 865,000 . The Royal Niger Company changed its name again and is known today by that new name - Unilever .
Anyone who therefore thinks that the threat of digital colonization by big tech companies is an unfounded fear clearly has no understanding of how Africa got colonized in the first instance . History is about to repeat itself and we are not even aware as we are roped into the mesh as accomplices .
Social media presence is what shapes perception in today ' s world yet no one will tell you that they leant it in school . The most powerful influence of our generation is self-taught . Our educational systems are yet to catch up with this .
Sadly most people did not take the emergence of these platforms as serious tools for societal indoctrination when