News out of Liberia alleging that an agribusiness company took advantage of the Ebola outbreak in that country to double the size of its oil plantation cannot but give us some food for thought.

Often, when one party deals a rotten hand to another, that transaction is facilitated by an unequal relationship, a lopsided interface, an asymmetrical partnership.

In our day, we used to call that the partnership between the horse and its rider. Or the co-operation between the mouse and the cat.

For all the evidence you need, don’t go any farther than the sad history of Africa.

At the point of our encounter with foreigners we were, over and over again, the weaker party. Our weaknesses were legion: We were criminally ignorant of the world outside our immediate environment; we were technologically backward, superstitious, naive, trusting and gullible.

To cap it all, we had a terrible leadership deficit, people and systems that either fell prey to the invaders’ machinations or were all too easily bribed with trinkets, more or less like you cajole children by offering them candy and toffees. Those who were brave enough to resist were simply pummelled into submission.

After half a century of fictional independence, precious little has changed. Our ignorance of the world has deepened even as the world has qualitatively improved in terms of knowledge of what we possess that is useful to others that we do not fully appreciate.

Superstition is our basic science. Just look at the way people around this region were shanghaied into flocking to a charlatan in Loliondo who claimed a miracle cure, which boiled down to drinking from “a cup.”

The Tanzania government, which was guilty of giving credence to this dangerous fallacy, has never apologised to its own people, who lost loved ones who saw, incredibly, a messiah in that cheat.

As for leadership, the less said about it the better, politics in Africa has become such a byword for incompetence that we have created a culture that dictates that we place the least qualified people at the top of our countries, simply because people of integrity and capability will not soil themselves with the muck.

With rulers who can only think of enriching themselves and their families and retinues of sycophants, it is hardly surprising that our resources are attracting the kind of foreign “investors” who are hardly any better than the slave raiders of old.

A few centuries ago, the African commodity sought after was human beings, apart, of course, from ivory, timber and copper. Now it’s things like timber, minerals, oil and gas. But by far the most precious items are the land and the climate that sustain the flora and fauna of the African continent.

We already know that our rulers, who place little value on their people, are so easily buyable that it’s possible to quote a price for a great many of them. To be fair, not all of them are like that, but the good ones are few and far between. Simply put, Africa is governed very badly, by very bad people.

Now, if we know, or suspect, that a scourge like Ebola can be exploited to grab our land, what will stop the marauders from inventing schemes and technologies that will unleash Ebola-like afflictions that will destabilise huge swathes of the continent’s land for the benefit of overseas brigands helped by their local foremen?

The accusation out of Liberia is that the restriction on assemblies was precisely the device that helped the land grabbers as communities could not come together to challenge any action taken by foreign interests.

It’s a novel application of the tactic of “divide and rule” provided by a serendipitous crisis that was itself made worse by the fragility of our health delivery systems.

Laboratories are known to have dabbled in experiments whose aim is to create strains of disease that target people of a certain skin pigment.

I am not sure they will go the whole hog and put that into action for an apocalyptic result, but I have no way of divining what evil minds can do. Do you?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]