The energy of the world is shifting south

Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth, promising to send shiploads of bananas to feed her subjects after ‘following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain’. Now that you rival Burkina Faso in the number of times you’ve changed your leaders recently, I’m going to move out of the sunshine, take a swig of cold beer and show some sympathy once more.

For a long time, those of us the British Empire left behind when you pushed off a few decades ago sniggering into your pith helmets sometimes wondered if we’d made a mistake. ‘No you can’t have a passport,’ you’d say, even though it was the Queen’s grandpa who told our ancestors to display our loyalty and come out here in the first place. We were divided in our hearts, or, as the Boers often joked, we were soutpiels – salt penises – because we had one foot in Africa, one planted in Britain, with our tackle hanging down in the Mediterranean sea. Now that you’re the sick man of Europe once more, it’s helping us to lift up one leg and choose which continent we really come from.

The IMF ticks you off more than us, your pound is in greater free fall than Malawi’s kwacha or Mauritanian ouguiyas and it turns out the Tories under Boris diverted so many billions in dodgy Covid contracts that tiny Eswatini’s monarch Mswati III can barely show himself for shame before his many wives. The last time I was in Sussex there was a three-day waiting list for a cab because all the drivers had fled back to Europe, whereas in Kenya I snap my fingers and a squadron of boda boda motorbike taxis roar up.