Analysis

This paper engages in a critical legal analysis of Professor Ian Taylor’s article, Sixty Years Later: Africa’s Stalled Decolonization. It is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis but will provide a limited legal perspective of the article’s foundational arguments on the underlying causes of Africa’s economic underdevelopment, through a legal lens rooted in intellectual property (IP) law and international investment law (IIL).

I propose that it is our current and future battles that will determine the meaning and impact of decolonisation in Africa and beyond. As things stand now, the dead are certainly not safe. Let me elaborate on this claim drawing from Professor Taylor’s work: his piece draws from the classics of Third Worldist Marxism and dependency theory to provide a sober account of Africa’s nominally post-colonial present.

This article aims to demonstrate that the Interocean case is a paradigmatic decision, testing the limits of the Nigerian Foreign Investment Framework. The analysis concludes with tactical considerations regarding the designation of the State as well as its National Oil Company ("NOC") in ICSID proceedings. It concludes that the Interocean case has paved the way for shareholder disputes in oil and gas to be heard in Nigerian Courts.

This blog post highlights the International Law encounter at WBNUJS for the undergraduate programme in addition to the incidental confrontations with International Law for students and my reflections of the same.

We need to think broadly, and across policy areas as: “Indeed, in general, the improved aggregate poverty situation [in South Africa] is due to the increased support coming from social grants and not from the labour market”. Social, technological and economic policy should coordinate for better outcomes. If COVID-19 has shown as anything, it is not that we are the subjects of external, uncontrollable phenomenon - but rather that we are subject to outcomes born of the deliberate decisions of policy, law and economics.

Neo colonialism as described by Ian Taylor is as valid then as it is now, but there are alternatives beyond the modern paradigm and we have to run the risk of decolonizing the academy, people are changing and fighting from other ways of life, but our academies? can you hear them? Indigenous peoples, community organizations, peasants and nature are speaking to us. The question is what language and what knowledge we will use to listen and speak them.

Neo colonialism as described by Ian Taylor is as valid then as it is now, but there are alternatives beyond the modern paradigm and we have to run the risk of decolonizing the academy, people are changing and fighting from other ways of life, but our academies? can you hear them? Indigenous peoples, community organizations, peasants and nature are speaking to us. The question is what language and what knowledge we will use to listen and speak them.

Decolonial thinking urges us to go beyond questions of public / private dichotomy, in which key transnational private actors for the global economy participate. Instead, decolonial thinkers suggest the need to transcend the notion of “development”, which continues to influence the actions of the global south and permanently reinserting them into a subordinate position within the “Euro-American capitalist / patriarchal-modern / colonial world-system”.

In summary, it is vital to place this case in the broader context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Regional financial integration of the sort discussed above, (such as an integrated banking market or a banking union), would significantly benefit the AfCFTA in the light of the bigger regional markets in trade that is now in operation.

The question of whether decolonisation stalled in the Global South has been addressed in some form for as long as the concept of decolonisation has been present in our world. As many educational institutions across the world, and especially in the Global North, begin to include ‘decolonising’ in their knowledge transmission agendas, connecting this question with the past, present and future of all aspects of the colonial project has never been more important. This short essay argues firstly that the question itself relies on certain presumptions that should be revisited. Secondly, the essay argues that the answer itself is complex and depends on where our gaze primarily lies – state or people.