Our latest print issue is finally here, and a familiar character is on the cover: US president, Donald Trump. He is not featured because his nature is a singularity; the symbolism he represents earned him that spot. With every new international policy, Trump’s return to the world stage, as an even louder and more unhinged figure than before, comes as an omen of a global unravelling whose implications run deeper than a mere act of preserving America’s democracy. His hostility to Africa, his disdain for multilateralism and his transactional leadership style signal what this moment represents: not the rise of one man but the crumbling of an entire worldview as we once knew it.

With all these on the horizon, our editorial house, The Republic, then asks: What does a multipolar world mean for Africa and more importantly, who benefits from the confusion?

We are told we now live in a world of multiple centres of power but that has not guaranteed the absence of multiplying crises, layered inequalities and increasingly incompatible ambitions. The myth of globalization from our preceding years has been shattered, not by the poorest but by the powerful. What has taken its place today is a global arena rumbling with naked self-interest, digital authoritarianism, climate change vulnerabilities and neocolonial economic arrangements dressed up as development.

Africa is now aggressively courted by the so-called global giants: China, the US, Europe, Russia, Gulf states—everyone but itself. We are framed as a battleground, marketplace, experiment and sometimes, an object of pity. Yet, no one has asked us this ideal inclusive question: What kind of world do Africans want to build?

This issue of The Republic is our intervention against that silence.

Our newest magazine investigates a plethora of urgent topics, ranging from examining US-Africa relations in the shadow of Trump’s second term to dissecting China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In the editor’s foreword, our founder and editor-in-chief, Wale Lawal, captured the rationale behind this issue’s striking title: ‘We have chosen to title this issue “Who Dey Fear Donald Trump?” not merely to provoke, (though it may) and certainly not merely to entertain (though satire remains one of our continent’s sharpest tools of critique). We have chosen this title to assert a distinctly African disposition toward power: unimpressed, unafraid and un-fooled.’

In essence, we want to uncover, as a collective unit with you included, what the true intentions of these global powers are, and the real cost involved.

We go even further. In an essay on African cooperation in the age of anti-globalization by Abel B.S. Gaiya, for instance, we question whether institutions like ECOWAS, now 50 years old, still offer relevant framework or whether they too must evolve or perish. We also look at foreign aid as a tool of diplomacy and domination.

However, it is not only about governments and geopolitics. Amid this environmental fracture, this issue also challenges climate discourse through a lens grounded in Africa and the global South. It brings gender and climate justice together with an insistence that essentialist narratives around African women must give way to deeper, more intersectional truths.

This is the unglamourous work that must be done. We must think beyond the binaries of East versus West, North versus South, aid versus autonomy and introduce a fresh global dialogue rethinking the real nature of power itself in an Africa-inclusive way.

What emerges from these fiery pages is a loud refusal. A refusal to be triangulated. A refusal to be grateful for crumbs. A refusal to accept that Africa’s fate must always be negotiated elsewhere. On a gentler note, alongside that refusal is a proposition: that Africa, far from being marginal, holds some of the most generative ideas for a world in flux and that includes ideas about sustainability, solidarity, sovereignty and freedom.

We publish this issue not just to mirror a broken world back to itself but to name the cracks and elevate the thinkers, artists, diplomats and citizens who are daring to rebuild.

This spirit of reinvention also guides our newest leap. The Republic is now bringing original fiction to print for the very first time. Critically acclaimed novelist, Chigozie Obioma joins us as our inaugural fiction editor, curating a new space for literary imagination as part of our blazing political and cultural inquiry.

Because the fire is already right here staring at us in the face and now, the conversation has moved beyond whether Africa will be consumed…but whether we will rise to reshape the world that comes after⎈