Cashew Nuts For Lukashenko
- 14.05.2025, 8:30
Why the dictator started looking at Africa.
Lukashenko continues to conquer Africa. He actively offers his African friends to buy our equipment, invites African youth to Belarus for studies, makes big plans for cooperation.
After Lukashenka's hot voyages to Zimbabwe, Kenya and Equatorial Guinea, the state propaganda even began to talk about Belarusian expansion in the Black Continent.Here, for example, is Zimbabwe. The Belarusian delegation headed by Vice Prime Minister Viktor Karankevich paid a visit there in April, after which we heard that thanks to domestic agricultural machinery the grain harvest in this country has increased 3.5 times over the last few years!
Hey, if domestic machinery had done such miracles on its own land, perhaps there wouldn't be so many complaints about potatoes! I'll be honest: I'm happy for the Zimbabweans. For such a poor country that has been suffering from hyperinflation for years, this is critical. But what's in it for us? Or, more precisely, Lukashenko?
Of course, PR, an opportunity to get into mining (and there are a lot of them in Africa), to sell arms to someone, but also to solve psychological barriers inside ourselves: what kind of isolation are you talking about? What sanctions? Not only Russian governors visit us, but also presidents!They come, more often in transit, like those chain tourists, which the director of the hotel "Minsk" once spoke about. Lukashenko has long invited Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa to visit him. As a result, last year, Emmerson's wife first came to Minsk to visit the dictator, and now he himself.In the same way, on the way to the parade in Moscow, the president of Guinea-Bissau Umaru Sisoku Embalo paid an official visit to the Belarusian capital. The man who first swore before the people and his wife not to go for a second term, and then changed his mind. And even postponed this election to make his first term as president longer. Does that sound familiar?Belarus established diplomatic relations with Guinea-Bissau 20 years ago. However, as recognized by the state company BelTA, these relations remain in embryo. Then why did it take so long to warm them up?However, they say, there are prospects. We could buy fish and build joint ventures for the processing of marine products.
But Guinea-Bissau did not become famous for fish. This state is known first of all as one of the largest hubs of drug trafficking. Most people there live literally at the bottom, so this criminal business, paradoxically, is almost the main branch of the local economy.
If not to go into a conspiracy theory, it is worth noting that Portuguese Guinea, as it was called in the colonial period of its existence, about 90% of its exports are based on cashew nuts. We'll give you our potatoes... Well, not now, of course, but as soon as we grow new ones and feed our own, we'll bring them to you in sacks. And you give us nuts. Lukashenko will more often share them with his press secretary Natalia Eismont, as at the summit in Dushanbe in 2021. The paradoxical thing in this situation is that Lukashenko chooses the poorest African countries of all possible for friendship. But that is not the main thing, is it? The main thing is that both there and here is such a similar democracy.
Vitaly Babin, "Belsat"