The Trouble With Hundeyin

Happy weekend,

At this point, anyone who follows David Hundeyin knows that, since his disappointment with the CIA for not releasing President Tinubu’s case files, the world is now neatly divided into the ‘imperial core’ and ‘us’.

The ‘imperial core’ here includes the US, the UK and France—and the source of all of Africa’s problems without exception—while of course, ‘us’ is Africa, with Russia and China as our new guardian angels. Russia and China are just selfless and disinterested partners handing Africa freebies while ‘the imperial core’ takes what they can.

Just as the user above observed, Hundeyin, can connect just about anything to imperialism. It’s the central theme of his videos and posts of late.

Mr. Hundeyin sees and seeks no middle ground whatsoever. Anyone who disagrees with him is either a pro-imperialist, or some other iterations on the name. Or in the case of the commenter above, an ‘Assistant Westerner’ or just downright, a ‘DUMBFUCK’.

This binary worldview is a dangerous regression to the ideological thinking that stunted Africa's development immediately after independence. Even those of who are his supporters, find it deeply troubling.

Mr Hundeyin has very well regressed fully to the way of thinking about Africa’s problem that defined the 60s, 70s and 80s. In a podcast, he would claim that Nkrumah was the greatest African of the last century. This of course, is a nonsensical claim. Mandela is the greatest African of the last century. Every African of his age can tell you this without giving it a thought.

That Mr Hundeyin can make this claim shows that he has become a full-fledged ideologue, or better still, an Nkrumaist, who now prefers ideological purity over tangible outcomes. Nkrumah’s vision of pan-Africanism was bold. His charismatic personality and his ability to make powerful speeches articulating his anti-western grievances, won him a lot of attention and a cult of personality.

But his actual governance faltered under massive corruption, economic mismanagement and authoritarianism. The coup that swept him out of office was received by celebrations all over Ghana. Mandela, by contrast, navigated a brutal reality to deliver reconciliation and transition and earned his place through sacrifice, not just rhetoric. And is rightly beloved all over the world.

The contrast is instructive: Nkrumah's Ghana went from being one of Africa's most promising states at independence to economic collapse within a decade, while Mandela's legacy endures precisely because he prioritized practical reconciliation over ideological purity

The rise of Captain Ibrahim Traore has helped shape the rise of these ideologues, or fellow Nkrumaists, who see Africa’s problems solely through the lens of imperialism. Clearly, Hundeyin’s ideas are not necessarily his own. He is just a lightning rod and amplifier of a mood and a hunger that already exist in a generation searching for moral clarity, identity and dignity in a world still shaped by the aftershocks of colonialism and the failures of the postcolonial state.

The rise of internet Nkrumaists betrays a symptom of something much deeper and a continental mood shift among politically active youth. With the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the West’s moral authority is in decline globally, and in Africa especially.

China and Russia, on their own, are exploiting this vacuum, not just with economic deals and military aid, but with cultural and media narratives. Then, there’s the role the Internet plays in enabling rapid identity consolidation and allowing discourses to be reframed across the continent in days.

This is less about Hundeyin’s personal ideas than about his role as a megaphone for an archetype that is reshaping the political imagination of a generation of young Africans far faster than sober policy debates can keep up.

These Nkrumaist ideas are childish and superficial at best, not because they lack an underlying truth, but because:

• They reduce Africa’s problems to a single cause, which is intellectually lazy and strategically disabling.

• They trade one dependency for another — a shift from the West to Moscow, Beijing, or Ankara — without acknowledging that these powers have their own imperial logics.

• They valourize symbolic defiance over institution-building. As history shows, rhetoric cannot substitute for governance.

• They erode self-criticism, making it taboo to hold African leaders accountable if they are aligned with the “anti-imperialist” camp.

This is exactly the ideological hardening Lee Kuan Yew witnessed when he visited Africa in 1966: a generation so invested in its defiance that it neglects the slow, unglamorous work of actually making states function. And it is why Africa needs more Mandelas than Nkrumahs; those who are willing to do more than give evocative speeches.

In the end, when we reduce all complex problem to imperial manipulation, it almost becomes impossible to investigate the real sources of our governance failures and the poor policy choices that actually determine outcomes.

But there is another way forward.
History has shown us that the most transformative gains for African nations rarely come from total rejection of the global order, but from mastering it to serve our own interests.

When Nigeria secured the cancellation of $18 billion from the ‘imperial core’s’ Paris Club debt in 2005, it was not because we stormed out of the system in righteous fury, it was because skilled negotiators, led by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, leveraged global debt relief momentum, undertook credible domestic reforms, and aligned Nigeria’s goals with those of creditor nations. The result was immediate fiscal breathing space, restored creditworthiness, and a real shift in Nigeria’s economic trajectory, all achieved within 18 months.

That example is not unique. Countries that have built strong institutions, diversified economies, and engaged strategically with all powers — West, East, and South — have carved out genuine sovereignty. It is a slow, unglamorous path. It does not generate viral speeches or romantic portraits of defiance. But it delivers.

If the current generation of politically active African youth is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 1960s and 70s, it must hold onto one truth: empire is not a single flag. Every great power, past or present, pursues its own interests. There are no freebies on offer anywhere. Real independence comes not from trading one patron for another, but from building the capacity to say “yes” or “no” to all of them on our own terms.

Until that capacity exists, neither Washington nor Moscow, neither Paris nor Beijing, will be our “guardian angels.” They will simply be competing landlords in a house we have not yet secured for ourselves.

Let’s hope that Hundeyin does not catch wind of this newsletter otherwise he’ll accuse us of being, well, imperialists!!

We wish you the best of the weekend.

The SimplVest Team

Till Next Saturday,

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