The United States has once again cast itself as a self-appointed global sheriff, announcing the dramatic capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. President Donald Trump made the announcement via social media and a subsequent press briefing, as reports of explosions and military activity emerged over Caracas in the early hours of January 3, 2026.
The operation, which Trump and his administration have labelled a “fight” against “narco-terrorism” and corruption, has ignited a firestorm of reactions across the globe. The backlash was swift, particularly from Latin America and long-standing U.S. adversaries. Colombia, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico, among others, condemned the move as a violation of sovereignty and international law. Russia’s Vladimir Putin said he was “deeply alarmed”, aligning with broader scepticism from capitals wary of American overreach. China, for its part, denounced the strikes as a “gross violation of international law”.
But there was also jubilation following this operation. Perhaps the most notable of it was seeing Venezuelans in Miami and Caracas erupting in street celebrations, waving flags and expressing “anticipation” mixed with cautious hope for a post-Maduro era. One has to understand them, for, honestly speaking, Venezuela under Maduro has been in tatters, marked by economic repression, human rights abuses, electoral fraud, and waves of citizens exiled or fleeing as refugees. They see this operation as justice served. Similarly, many Americans allied to President Trump, including U.S. Congressman Mark Harris, have praised the “surgical strike” as a display of military prowess, thanking President Trump for holding the “criminal and drug lord” accountable. It is precisely here, however, that the celebration demands a pause.
The illusion of American justice
This spectacle of American interventionism, wrapped in the language of justice, sits within a long and familiar history of Western exploitation that has structurally predisposed the Global South, including Africa, to cycles of dependency and disposability. The colonial scramble that fractured African societies into extractive units did not end with independence but evolved. In the postcolonial era, debt regimes administered through institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank replaced direct rule, while U.S.-led interventions helped preserve the same global hierarchy. What is presented as exceptional enforcement today follows a well-worn path.
Indeed, here in Africa, the euphoria has spilt across social media, with many Africans whose countries have borne the brunt of authoritarianism and corruption, much like Venezuela under Maduro, half-jokingly wishing that President Trump would extend such operations to their own nations. There has been much awe about America’s power and its apparent ability to “effortlessly” capture Maduro and his wife in full view of a standing military. The question being asked, often without irony, is why such decisive force should not be extended elsewhere, especially to countries weighed down by misrule.
In my own country, Kenya, I have read and heard numerous reactions along these lines. Members of the opposition, jokingly or otherwise, have called on President Trump to stretch his hand further and capture President William Ruto, whom they have elevated onto the same rusted altar on which Maduro once sat. These sentiments are understandable, but they are also deeply troubling and intellectually incoherent. This incoherence is rooted in the psychological scars of colonialism, if well evaluated. The psychopathology of the colonised mind has been explored by several minds, among them Frantz Fanon, who, in The Wretched of the Earth, argues that colonialism not only exploits resources but also reorganises desires. The colonised subject, stripped of agency, comes to internalise the coloniser’s power and fantasise about wielding it rather than dismantling it. As he writes: “The look that the native turns on the settler’s town is a look of lust, a look of envy; it expresses his dreams of possession—all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible.”
Reading through this lens, African reactions to Maduro’s capture are not mere frustrations but a dangerous regression: the desire for a U.S. intervention to “fix” local tyrants reproduces precisely that same envious gaze Fanon describes, which is begging the imperial “settler” (here, American force) to impose order, thereby inviting a recolonisation that Fanon warns must be violently rejected for true liberation. Fanon insists that decolonisation cannot be outsourced or gifted by the oppressor; it “is always a violent phenomenon”, in the sense that it demands self-assertion, political responsibility and the rejection of imposed authority. To cheer Maduro’s capture is to applaud the hangman while ignoring the noose around Africa’s own neck, forgetting that U.S. “justice” has historically treated the Global South as disposable pawns in a game of resource chess.
Political frustration often seeks dramatic expression, and despair can make even the most dangerous ideas sound appealing, but wishing for Trumpian force on Ruto is the ultimate absurdity: it’s like a colonised mind begging for recolonisation, ensuring Africa’s chains remain self-forged. Fanon’s warning here is surgical. Imperialism, he writes, “leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
Neo-colonialism by other means: Why foreign “liberation” fails
History teaches us that the fall of a hated ruler at the hands of a foreign power rarely marks the beginning of genuine liberation. More often, it signals the opening of a deeper and more enduring crisis, one whose costs are paid by ordinary citizens. It is a deliberate extension of imperialism by other means. Kwame Nkrumah, in his Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) warns that “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.” From Cold War interventions that turned the continent into a proxy battlefield, to contemporary neoliberal “nation-building” enforced through sanctions, conditional aid and selective military strikes, Western powers—led by the United States—have consistently weakened institutions while entrenching dependency.
What makes this pattern especially troubling is that the motives behind such interventions are rarely concealed for long. In the case of Venezuela, President Trump has admitted openly that the United States intends to “run the country” until a transition is deemed acceptable. He has also been explicit about plans for major American oil companies to enter Venezuela, invest billions, rebuild infrastructure and profit accordingly. There is little ambiguity in this language.
Perhaps the only difference between Trump and some of his predecessors is his bluntness and his disregard for diplomatic euphemism. What he has stated openly reflects what has long underpinned American interventions elsewhere. America’s interests come first. Democracy and justice remain useful vocabularies, but they are rarely the organising logic.
It is therefore difficult, and indeed alarming, to watch some Africans applaud the operation in Venezuela and go further to wish for its replication at home. Such reactions suggest a troubling amnesia about the consequences of foreign interference and the costs that have followed previous promises of American “help”. To forget this history is not just naïve but dangerous.
To understand the gravity of what celebrating foreign intervention entails, we need only look to Africa’s own history.
Warnings from Africa’s history
Consider the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Republic of the Congo-Léopoldville) in the early 1960s, a freshly independent nation brimming with potential after shedding Belgian colonial rule. Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic prime minister, embodied Pan-African aspirations, seeking Soviet aid to quell secessionist movements in mineral-rich Katanga province. The United States, fearing communist expansion and loss of access to uranium vital for its nuclear arsenal, viewed this as a threat. Under the guise of stabilising the young democracy, the US orchestrated Lumumba’s overthrow and execution in 1961, collaborating with Belgian forces and local allies. This intervention was sold as preventing chaos, but it installed Mobutu Sese Seko, a pro-Western strongman whose kleptocratic regime plunged the country into decades of sectarian violence, lawlessness and economic ruin.
Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) provides the analytic clarity often missing from such episodes. Rodney demonstrates that underdevelopment is not a natural condition nor a tragic failure of governance, but a deliberate historical process in which external powers restructure economies to serve metropolitan needs while disabling local capacity for autonomous growth. The U.S. orchestrated this move as a deliberate effort to ensure that Congo’s vast mineral wealth—uranium in the past, and cobalt and coltan today—continue to supply Western industrial needs. By eliminating leaders who pursued independent paths, imperial powers created a cycle of dependency, leaving nations vulnerable to repeated exploitation. The parallel with Venezuela is striking: just as Congo’s strategic minerals made Lumumba a target under the guise of anti-communism, Venezuela’s vast oil reserves have made Maduro’s dramatic capture appear under the banner of anti-corruption and anti-narco-terrorism. These resource-driven interventions, disguised as moral crusades, serve as a stark warning to Africa that challenging the global economic order can still carry deadly consequences.
The Angolan Civil War (1975–2002) is another tragic tableau, where decolonisation was overshadowed by superpower rivalry. After Portugal’s withdrawal following a long independence struggle, three factions competed for control: the Soviet- and Cuban-backed MPLA, the US-supported FNLA, and UNITA, which initially received Chinese support and later US backing. The United States framed its involvement as a fight against the spread of communism in southern Africa. The conflict lasted 27 years, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives and displacing millions. It spilt into Namibia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, fuelling the Second Congo War and generating refugee crises that entrenched ethnic tensions and economic instability. In the post-Cold War period, Angola’s oil wealth enriched a small elite while the majority of its people remained mired in poverty.
The intervention in Libya in 2011 stands as a more recent and vivid example. NATO, led by the United States under the Obama administration, justified a bombing campaign as a humanitarian mission to prevent a purported genocide in Benghazi, backed by a UN resolution. Gaddafi’s forces were overrun, rebels seized power, and the world watched the dictator’s brutal demise. President Obama even walked to the press in the White House Rose Garden, framing the operation as a “victory” for the Libyan people. Liberation seemed complete, and, indeed, many Libyans celebrated. Soon after, Libya splintered into militia fiefdoms, with the failure to integrate these armed groups resulting in assassinations, kidnappings, and bitter ideological clashes. By 2014, rival governments had emerged: the UN-backed GNA in Tripoli and Haftar’s forces in the east, each drawing in foreign proxies—Turkey, Qatar and Italy supporting the GNA, while Russia, the UAE, Egypt and France backed Haftar. ISIS exploited the resulting vacuum, arms proliferated across the Sahel, and conflicts spilt into Mali and beyond, including a coup led by a U.S.-trained officer in Mali. Today, Libya remains a failed state, wracked by daily violence and refugee crises, while the United States is largely absent, quietly avoiding responsibility for the catastrophe it helped set in motion.
The cost of believing in foreign saviours
Rodney demonstrates how imperialism produces structural underdevelopment: “Africa helped to develop Western Europe in the same proportion as Western Europe helped to underdevelop Africa.” This insight is essential for understanding Libya’s fate, where NATO’s intervention—presented as humanitarian action—replicated the patterns of colonial exploitation. Western powers prioritised access to Libyan oil and strategic resources over local sovereignty, reversing any potential for endogenous development and leaving behind a fractured society dependent on external power. Rodney further elaborates this process in his analysis of colonial capitalism. “Colonialism,” writes Rodney, “was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called ‘mother country’.” In Libya, post-intervention chaos allowed Western corporations to secure oil fields, transforming instability into profit and reinforcing underdevelopment as a calculated outcome, not an accident.
The pattern extends to Somalia, a country long enmeshed in war and economic devastation, much of it a consequence of U.S.-led “nation-building” operations. Rodney’s analysis clarifies that such interventions are modern extensions of colonial underdevelopment: “The tendency of capitalism in Europe from the very beginning was one of competition, elimination and monopoly. Therefore, when the imperialist stage was reached, the metropolitan capitalists had no intention of allowing rivals to arise in the dependencies.” This relates to Somalia’s plight by illustrating how U.S.-led operations, from the 1990s Black Hawk Down era to ongoing drone strikes and proxy support, have eliminated local agency and fostered dependency, ensuring the Horn of Africa’s resources and strategic position serve imperial interests rather than empowering Somali self-determination.
Africa, of all continents, should be quick to recognise this pattern. But our collective memory seems strangely dim. Perhaps we are too easily seduced by the illusion that someone else can step in and fix what we have failed to fix ourselves. Perhaps the aim of foreign powers—to capture the hearts and minds of Africans—has clouded our judgment, leading many to see external intervention as a cure rather than a complication. But history does not lie: when foreign powers fall upon a nation under the banner of salvation, the aftermath rarely delivers freedom.
One lesson to take away from all these is that true liberation cannot be outsourced. No celebration of someone else wielding power on our behalf, however dramatic, should blind us to the dangers of surrendering our destiny.
The capture of Nicolás Maduro may thrill some, but Africans must ask themselves: what will follow when the foreign “sheriff” departs?
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