Five days ago, the Islamic State Organisation published a new video documentary from its West African Province (ISWAP), titled “Fight Them, Allah Will Punish Them Through Your Hands”, a title picked from a well-known verse in the Glorious Qur’an.

There has been a lot of analysis of the content of the video itself, especially on Twitter (including my personal by the great Hugo Kaaman here), so this is not going to be focused on the video itself and the visuals of it, but rather on what can be learnt from it on a bigger picture level.

Why Now?

The first thing to understand is that this video- which was essentially a montage of combat footage- was not just propaganda production to demoralise their enemy and attract new recruits, it was also a statement of confidence in how far along the current iteration of ISWAP is.

For years the Islamic State Organisation refrained from publishing combat footage documentaries from ISWAP, partly because several bets it had staked its West African subsidiary on, nearly crippled the group, and it needed less attention and not more to help it recover.

Chief amongst these ill-advised bets was the killing of Shekau. Then came cannibalising ISWAP to properly standup IS-Sahel Province(ISSP) and open a second front, then a third front in Northwest and Southwest/North Central Nigeria respectively. This, right in the middle of a fierce counteroffensive campaign by the Lake Chad basin countries, against the group.

The last two years have been a period of regeneration after the previous three years of securing survival, and over the last six months, ISWAP has begun to see the fruits of that regeneration play out in the field, in their current campaign.

The confidence derived from believing - with reason - that ISWAP is now dominant in the battlespace, is one key reason why this video was published; and why it contained so many teases, and yet did not show one fifth of what the group has been doing on the ground. It barely featured the extensive use of IEDs to harass and choke the Nigerian and Cameroonian armies, for example, and does not include footage from ISWAP’s defeat of last year’s Chadian offensive into the Lake Chad islands, Operation Haskanite.

Tactical/Operational Level Improvements

ISWAP today is less of the DIY combined arms force majoring in conventional combat that it was in 2018-2019, when it had lots of armoured vehicles to support assault operations and could mass light artillery in the form of gun-trucks and mortars to provide fire support.

Today, ISWAP is more of an infantry focused insurgency that nonetheless, is able to bring some gun trucks for fire support, while utilising quadcopter drones for battlefield reconnaissance support, and to drop bombs (literally, although this is a still emerging capability).

ISWAP’s mastery of infantry tactics, especially when weighed against the trinity of “shoot, move, communicate”, is still rudimentary, but when the Nigerian Army units it is facing are operating at the same level of rudimentary mastery of small unit tactics, then the gaps become irrelevant, and it is able to effectively leverage its operational art and rack up wins.

One major tactical improvement that I believe will profoundly shift the trajectory of this conflict, especially if the Nigerian Army cannot find an antidote to it, is ISWAP’s ongoing investment in nightfighting capabilities.

A majority of assaults by ISWAP in recent months have occured in lowlight conditions, late evening and just before dawn, but also in the deep of the night. This has been made possible by the acquisition of night vision goggles and sights(NVGs), which have not yet proliferated as much as peak Islamic State times in Iraq/Syria, but it seems that direction is where the Islamic State Organisation now wants ISWAP to head to.

Anecdotal evidence I have come across in real life, indicates that ISWAP is currently trying to put NVGs in the hands of all its small unit leaders, and in the long run put them in the hands of assault units. The recent documentary, and previous A’maq News Agency (for the uninitiated, Islamic State’s news agency) videos, confirm that ISWAP with the help of the wider Islamic State Organisation is really trying to do just that.

Already the Nigerian Army units in Southern Borno are struggling to get a handle on the current level of ISWAP’s night time assaults, however should NVGs become more commonplace in the group’s employ, it is hard to see how that struggle doesn’t become a rout.

This is because, combined with ISWAP’s current tactical doctrine of quickly massing infantry against weaker Army Forward Operations Bases (FOBs), NVGs become a near superweapon - an actual working wunderwaffe if you will- especially as the Nigerian Army’s night fighting capability in the battlespace, is nonexistent.

As the Assadist regime’s military and auxiliary militias learnt in Syria, there’s really not much you can do at rifle range, against an enemy that can see well at night, while you lack that capability.

On the operational level side of the things, the last six months has seen ISWAP implement a campaign of overstretching the Nigerian Army, by forcing it to respond to atrocities against Christian communities in the north of Adamawa State, which creates the space for it to collapse weakened Army strongholds in Southern Borno and Southern Yobe.

The goal for this plan has been to deplete the Army in Northern Borno/Northern Yobe, which would make it easy for ISWAP to clear out those areas and consolidate territorial control.

Approximately six months in, and the jury is still out on this plan, as while it has weakened the Nigerian Army units in both the southern and northern parts of the theatre, ISWAP is not anywhere close to fully pushing the Army out of Northern Borno, and consolidating territorial control there.

Nigeria Has A Weird Case, ISWAP Is Still Around?

In the boom-bust cycle that has dominated the timeline of the insurgency in the Lake Chad region since 2011, the Nigerian side has always been able to bust Boko Haram and ISWAP’s boom cycles, by throwing everything including the kitchen sink at them.

However, it has never been able to degrade ISWAP, especially when compared to Boko Haram, , to the point where it is no longer a serious threat.

The Nigerian Army’s longterm solution to the challenge posed by ISWAP, has been to contain it and try to deny it access to concentrations of resources, by creating forts/garrison towns that it named- Super camps.

That solution ossified the Army’s initiative from the jump, as rather than do a strategy of ‘deny, contain, then degrade’, the supercamps initiative stopped at the contain part of the process. This meant that the resources to actively degrade ISWAP’s military and administrative capabilities, were never put together and ultimately never deployed.

This strategy was never going to contain a group such as ISWAP, not with its functioning and expanding pipeline to the wider Islamic State Organisation, so it only succeeded in helping the group buy time as pressure on it slackened off over the years.

There has not been a greater enabler of ISWAP’s regeneration and current capability advances, than the Nigerian Army and the wider Nigerian security sector. This is as a result of the frankly bewildering way the Nigerian national security establishment continues to engage ISWAP, a whole decade after the establishment of an Islamic State “province” in the Lake Chad region.

ISWAP’s logistics and people moving pipelines north to Libya, west to IS-Sahel Province (ISSP), and east to Sudan, are still very intact and have not been seriously threatened at any point, by the Nigerian security services.

In previous years, the US drone and intelligence presence in Agadez and Dirkou (in northern Republic of Niger), placed constraints on the ability of the Islamic State Organisation to transfer men and resources to its ISWAP.

However, with the US withdrawal after the 2023 coup in Niger, the primary burden has fallen on Nigeria to track and interdict IS-ISWAP ratlines connecting Libya/Sudan with the Lake Chad region. Nigeria’s security services and military have proven unable to cut these logistics and communication lines.

In fact the IS-ISWAP ratlines have now expanded so much in scope, that IS - since early 2024 - is said to feel comfortable transferring fresh recruits from North Africa who do not yet possess trust for security work, or who are in theatres where IS is strategically avoiding open confrontation, to the Lake Chad area.

Logistics networks are now being built to expand ISWAP’s access to components for its fledging drone programme, to increase the access to night vision sights, and to deepen the bank of components for the kind of military industrial complex IS was building in Iraq and Syria before its khilafah project was defeated in those areas.

ISWAP does not currently suffer a scarcity of recruits, as the local populations under its control and in adjoining areas, are very willing to volunteer to serve in its standing military and the general reserve militia. A lot of the security work associated with IED emplacements in the Damboa to Biu axis, have been carried out by volunteers in the civilian communities adjoining ingress and egress routes for local army bases.

The main challenge has been the lack of a deep bench of educated enough human capital to replace losses in technical roles, but a concerted and focused technical education effort with IS help has been helping reduce this gap.

Intelligence collection wise, ISWAP’s human intelligence networks in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa , even in the heart of military formations are quite extensive. They spare no effort in recruiting civilians associated with military formations, including bartenders and prostitutes working establishments soldiers and airmen frequent in Maiduguri.

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Going Forward

The outlook going forward is bleak, specifically because even if the current ISWAP boom gets pushed into the bust phase of the boom-bust cycle, ISWAP continues to iterate faster than the Nigerian Armed Forces, even as the military’s containment policy fails.

Currently, and unless it overplays its hands, ISWAP does not need to win, it just needs to not lose too much, and preserve its capacity and ability to regenerate. The Nigerian side does not want to lose, but it is incapable of creating the conditions to win either(for political reasons), which establishes a dynamic that over the long run favours ISWAP and disadvantages the Nigerian military.

The last iteration of this boom-bust cycle, that is 2018-2019, provides a good framework to analyse what today and the coming months can look like.

In 2018-2019, ISWAP did not lose, because ISWAP at a fundamental level could not have won as it did not have the manpower and resources to take on the Nigerian Armed Forces in a head-on conventional campaign and defeat it, in Borno. This still holds true today.

That being said, the Nigerian Armed Forces did not end up losing Borno and Yobe completely, only because ISWAP did not win. They did not break the back of that campaign through some careful application of improved tactics, although the Air Force’s sortie rates were impressive, but rather the campaign came to a halt because ISWAP ran out of runway to continue it.

But in the almost six years since that time, ISWAP has iterated through learning across iterations, constantly reshaping its force structure to better fit the tactical challenges it needed to confront at particular times. The Nigerian Army on the other hand, confident in its strategy of containment and denial, and constrained by ostensibly political chains from developing a programme to capitalise on the success of said strategy of containment and denial, ossified behind the trenches of its supercamps.

Over the period since 2019, ISWAP has learnt how to better evade airstrikes, from when the Nigerian Air Force became the lead offensive force in Borno. It has conducted and learnt the limits of an IED focused campaign. It has taken company sized units, split them into smaller squad/section sized units and conducted a campaign of ambushes on Army and CJTF patrols. It has built platoon sized units out of the smaller squad/section sized units and iterated through a campaign of raids on CJTF militia outposts and civilian communities.

Today, ISWAP is able to mass an battalion sized infantry force for an assault on a major base like Rann or Damboa, by moving that force across terrain in small units able to use concealment and evade the Air Force’s sporadic aerial reconnaissance .

The current doctrine of utilising infantry-centric assaults with fighters utilising motorcycles for mobility, and only the barest minimum of heavy equipment in the form of guntrucks, works as intended, because the Nigerian Air Force component of Operation Hadin Kai does not possess enough aerial recon platforms to maintain persistent coverage of the battlespace, and thus be able to detect the insurgent units as they move in small detachments across the terrain.

It also works because the Nigerian Air Force component can only generate a limited amount of combat sorties for planned strikes, and usually is only able to show up in support of Army units under attack, after ISWAP fighters have pushed into close quarters battle with the defending soldiers, which in turn prevents the Air Force from being able to drop bombs, so as not to kill the soldiers along with the insurgents,.

A third reason it works, is that Army units in FOBs and so-called Supercamps, do not conduct frequent and or continuous patrols of the empty spaces outside their immediate fortified perimetre. Taken together with the lack of persistent aerial surveillance, and with the Army’s strained ability to produce accurate human intelligence within the civilian communities in the areas adjacent to its bases, leaves the soldiers in these FOBs and Supercamps “blind” and unable to “see” ISWAP movements to the contact line until they actually establish contact.

The Nigerian military’s major advantages have traditionally been in airpower and a deeper bench of trained officers for tactical leadership, but while the advantage in airpower looks likely to remain for the foreseeable future (especially with more strike aircraft expected in service soon), the Air Force will probably not be able to achieve reconnaissance and strike persistence over the core states of Borno and Yobe, anytime soon.

Also airpower can only blunt ISWAP, as we have seen locally and even in Iraq and Syria, ground forces are still needed to defeat them and hold the terrain to prevent a resurgence. In fact indiscriminate or non-precise airstrikes, which given the strained intelligence collection capabilities is what the Nigerian military has to rely on, can and do create a situation where airpower helps ISWAP recruit more fighters and supporters, and helps it mentally strengthen its hold over populations in areas it controls or exercises a competitive presence.

As for a deeper bench of trained officers at the tactical level, the more IS can bring down veterans from its various other theatres of operations down to ISWAP, as it is already doing, the more that advantage the Nigerian military possesses will be eroded.

Plus the more those IS veterans educate local ISWAP cadres and fight alongside them, the deeper the skilled pool becomes for the Lake Chad group.

Finally, should ISWAP continue to expand its access to night vision capabilities, and develop and train specialised units to fight at night as OG Islamic State did in Iraq and Syria, the balance on the ground will tremendously shift.

Not to be an alarmist, but the Nigerian Army today barely has any answer for ISWAP’s current tactical evolutions. Throwing diffused enough night fighting capabilities, and dedicated night raiding and assault units, into the mix, is not going to look great for the Nigerian Army units that have to face ISWAP on the ground.

If that is combined with a recon and strike battlefield drone programme built around quadcopters, as we saw OG Islamic State do in Iraq way before the Russians and Ukrainians expanded and iterated on the possibilities of small drones, then at that point, Abuja will either have to put up and go all in with its war against ISWAP, or shut up and lose.

If you live in Nigeria, or you have relatives/friends who live in Nigeria, you are aware that the last eighteen months have been a very economically painful time for us folks living here. From an anecdotal standpoint, the decline in economic activities has been near apocalyptic.

It’s a fairly common occurrence to see or hear of factories closing down because they cannot afford to remain in production, inter and even intra state travel has become a luxury that people can only afford if they absolutely have to pay that price.

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Food and medicine are now luxuries that many people simply cannot afford, so it has become common to see families skip meals, and resort to all kinds of alternative self-help remedies when there’s an illness because they can no longer afford malaria or flu treatments.

The picture looked pretty grim over the last eighteen months, far worse than the eight years of former president, Muhammadu Buhari, but the general perception rather than 2025 might be an improvement - remember I only speak from anecdotal observations- is firmly rooted in a forecast that things are on course to get exponentially worse.

In talking to industrialists, merchants, smugglers, commercial drivers, civil servants, economists, finance guys, political operators, petroleum products dealers, soldiers etc, this is the most commonly held expectation of 2025 which I encounter.

With that in mind I decided to look up on the IMF’s website, what data the world’s foremost usurer for failed/failing economies has on its site, that could help me better understand the larger picture of Nigeria’s economic outlook in this new year.

Let me say that I was not prepared for what I found.

Before I continue, let me preface by saying that I am not an economist, finance guy or in any way an expert on interpreting economic and financial data, so take my observations with the seriousness you would take the opinions of an armchair football coach.

That being said:

The first shocker for me was how badly the IMF’s data shows the Nigerian economy has completely cratered in the eighteen months that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been in power. In GDP nominal terms, i.e a country’s economic size/production of goods and services measured in value of US dollars. I knew it was bad, but seeing the numbers made me realise that I was not insane to perceive it as that bad.

According to the IMF, we ended the year 2024 with a GDP nominal of $199.72bn, which down from $363.82bn at the end of 2023, which means in the year 2024, the Nigerian economy shrank by $164.1bn.

This means that Nigeria’s economy basically halved within a 12 month period.

I don’t know what technical term professional economists would call this, but at my surface level understanding of numbers and how economies work, a wipeout of $164.1bn from an economy that was $363bn just a year prior, is an obliteration.

An economy that loses half its nominal productive value within one year, is very very unhealthy, nigh apocalypse levels of unhealthy.

Nigeria’s economy shrank by 164.1 billion dollars or nearly 50% in 2024 to drop to $199.72bn, from $363.82bn in 2023.

Some people - particularly partisans of the current administration - might want to argue that the depreciation of the Naira means that at current exchange rates the Nigerian economy looks smaller without actually shrinking.

However in 2016 when the Naira was wildly unstable going from roughly N200 to a dollar, up to N400 to $1 before settling at the N360/$1 it would hover around for the next six years, the IMF’s data shows that our GDP nominal dropped from the $492.44bn we ended 2015 on, to $404.65bn. Which frankly is nothing half as dramatic as the obliteration the IMF’s dataset captures in 4K resolution for 2023-2024, where we have shrunk from $363bn in the space of one year to $199bn.

If put in the context that prices for crude oil and natural gas, our two largest exports, have been high for two years running, so our economy should have been much more liquid in capital going by historical antecedents, it becomes much clearer that foreign exchange rates is not a sufficient explanation for this hollowing out of Nigeria’s economy.

For comparison, Egypt’s economy is now $380bn in GDP nominal, or nearly twice our economy’s size, this is happening in a context where FDI inflows into Egypt have severely reduced due to uncertainty over the Israeli genocide in Gaza, plus Egypt’s main source of foreign exchange - the Suez Canal - has suffered a severe drop in patronage from transiting ships due to rising insurance costs and security risks associated with the Yemeni Houthis’ campaign against ships in the Red Sea, since late 2023.

Faced with the challenges in investment and Suez Canal transit earnings caused by the Israeli genocide in Gaza, plus preexisting pressures on the Egyptian Pound, Egypt’s economy shrank by roughly $13bn from $393bn in 2023 down to the current $380bn. Nigeria with high oil and gas prices, no genocide on Gaza and similar preexisting pressure on the Naira, however completely cratered by a whopping $164.1bn in the same 12month period.

South Africa is now Africa’s largest economy at $403.05bn or twice the Nigerian economy plus give or take another $5bn in spare value change. And our we shrunk by the entire Moroccan economy plus an extra $7bn, which left us at our current position of $199bn only a tad bigger than that same Moroccan economy at $157bn or war-torn Ethiopia at $145bn.

The most striking thing for me in going through this dataset, was seeing that the IMF actually see the Nigerian economy shrinking by a further $5bn next year, and does not see it rebounding to 2023 levels in this decade at all - in fact it only sees Nigeria getting back to $268bn in 2029, about $69bn more than 2024 and almost a hundred billion dollars less than 2023.

This to me reads like the IMF is probably laughing at the funny assertions by the current administration that through its efforts we are on our way to become a $1trillion economy by 2030 and retorting with “Well actually, y’all is economically doomed for the rest of the 2020s”, a reading that in reality doesn’t seem to be off at all.

Our political elites, all of them, especially the ruling administration seem to have their heads buried up their asses when it comes to the current economic collapse and the implications it has for our immediate, mid and long term futures. Rather everybody to a T is focused now on the 2027 elections as their first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth priorities.

The current administration, and the National Assembly are in a manner of speaking acting with criminal negligence, if one was to go by the shenanigans contained in the N49trillion/$31.6bn 2025 Federal Government budget, that has a N13trillion/$8.4bn deficit to be funded by borrowing, in addition to a pretty heavy preexisting debt load.

Add to the situation with this vague and compartmentalised budget, the impromptu financial packages rolled out for the military’s general and flag rank officers, that the President announced recently. They are not captured in the 2025 budget but they will somehow be resourced and funded, because of their utility in keeping the general and flag rank officers of the Armed Forces happy.

When you take together, the political class’ disregard for the state of the economy, their collective focus on the 2027 elections at the expense of everything else, the multiple budgets we ran simultaneously last year, the “fantastically” engineered 2025 budget, the packages rolled out to keep the leaders of the military happy, and so on and so forth; you realise why the IMF is currently very pessimistic about Nigeria’s economic growth. And as a Nigerian, living in Nigeria, you also realise that this is a “we are not going to make it” situation, we are stuck with.

To round this up, I particularly give credence to the IMF’s data and implied analyses, because of its role as usurer (lender in polite company) to failing and failed economies, a club of which Nigeria is now a member of if you look on our streets, specifically because there’s no one that knows your economic and fiscal situation better than the person or institution that has a very vested interest in borrowing you money and making sure you pay back. For countries, that institution is to an extent the IMF.

You can download and go through the IMF’s dataset HERE

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In Other News:

Last year was a particularly horrible year in Nigeria, an annus horribilis if I may, and I personally, was not left unaffected by it. The end of the year came with its own rolling bounds of challenges, one blow after the other that frankly knocked out any mental capacity in me to write out my thoughts much on anything, and maintaining this newsletter which I actually love to work on, was not something I was in the right frame to do. And I being the very terrible communicator that I naturally am, didn’t communicate that I was not in a great position to write. And for that I apologise.

I have had lots of things I wanted to opine and talk about, from the fall of the Assad regime, JNIM’s flirtation with Northern Ghana, Russia’s hard choices regarding its African operations going forward, Nigeria and Niger’s fraternal and currently combative relationship, and ISWAP. However, life has well, pretty much been “life-ing” in a not so great way, and I have just not been able to be in the space to put those thoughts down to paper so to speak.

I will try to gradually write what I can, when I can, and I am grateful that some of y’all still stick around to read my thoughts and opinions.

Seriously, thank y’all.

The dramatic collapse of the Malian military in 2012, in the face of an offensive by a coalition of Al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghrib’s (AQIM) Saharan Emirate, the Movement for Jihad and Monotheism in West Africa (MUJAO) the mostly Tuareg Malian jihadi Ansaruddeen group, and the Tuareg separatist National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA from its French acronym), left a deep gash - a perpetual fear - in the security psyche of West African and Western states.

This fear was that an insurgency tied to a transnational jihadi network, could overwhelm the capacities of a state in the West African portion of the Sahel, and use territory it controls to organise attacks on other states in the region, or Europe.

It was in that context that France intervened in Mali with Operation Serval in 2012, and then doubled down with Operation Barkhane in 2014, with Paris taking the lead on what was a multinational effort to defeat the emerging Al-Qa’ida-linked (and subsequently also Islamic State) insurgency in the wider Sahel region.

Parallel to the French intervention campaigns, the US began a long running background programme to train, advise, arm and support specialised direct action units across the whole of West Africa, especially the key frontline states of Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, Chad and Niger.

The European Union on the other hand, came in with a number of security assistance programmes that cost money, ate time, and ultimately achieved nothing.

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The French-led international effort to combat jihadi insurgencies in the Sahel was tolerated rather than welcomed by local militaries and security services, especially in the frontline states of Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and even Chad, specifically because it was French led.

France’s neocolonial policy of Francafrique is still a very fresh memory, and French meddling in local politics to bolster the governments of corrupt, unpopular and ineffectual “democratic” presidents who coincidentally gave no pushback when France overstepped the bounds of partnership and reverted to colonialist dictation to ostensibly sovereign West African states, only served to increase resentment of France.

However France’s political fumblings were still tolerable until it became clear that militarily it was overpromising and severely under delivering. This further alienated local militaries who were partnered with the French Armed Forces in fighting the insurgencies.

Exposure to US training and capabilities further soured local militaries on France and French-led efforts, as they considered the US to be fundamentally superior to France, one that could be a better partner if it would divest from France in the Sahel and actually take the lead.

This was something that Washington was not willing to do.

So by the time the wave of coups hit the region and local military regimes were in the market for new security partners to help train their regime security apparatuses and simultaneously fight jihad insurgencies, the US due to its own policy leanings was out of contention, which left Russia and Turkey as the frontrunners.

While Turkey was willing to sell drones and armoured vehicles, and even willing to utilise private security contractors to provide training to local praetorian guards, it was not interested in taking the role France was kicked out of, which is significantly enabling and supporting the fight against local Islamic State and Al-Qai’da affiliates.

Russia however, was interested in exactly that role.

Thus by December 2021, the first elements of the Russian paramilitary organisation, Wagner Group, were arriving in Mali. By 2023, regional intelligence services estimated that Wagner had over 2,000 fighters on the ground in Mali, backed by a small air wing of attack helicopters and reconnaissance drones.

In Burkina Faso, Russia’s security and military presence has been restricted mostly to arms sales, strategy advisers, and helping the Ibrahim Traore military regime to train a new specialised security unit for his personal protection, plus standing up specialised direct action units for the counterinsurgency campaigns.

A max of 300-400 Russians mostly from the “Bears” 81st Volunteer Spetsnaz Brigade - a paramilitary unit affiliated to Russia’s GRU military intelligence - are at any time deployed in Burkina Faso.

The performance of Russian forces in Mali, has cooled the appetite for the regime in Burkina Faso to commit to a significant investment in Russian forces deploying on its territory to join the fight against Jamaa’tu Nusratul-Islam wal-Muslim (JNIM) and Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP).

Meanwhile in the neighbouring Republic of Niger, the initial lean - after their military coup last year - towards requesting Russian advisors and paramilitary combat forces, has also cooled off into a ‘wait and see’ attitude. This change in attitude has been informed by an analysis of the effectiveness of Russian forces in Mali, and Russian training strategy in Burkina Faso.

While Niamey is eager to troll its brother and larger neighbour Nigeria , and also blackmail the EU in particular with shows of cultivating a security relationship with Moscow, there is for now a clear consensus in the ruling regime that building their security strategy around a partnership with Russia, may not be the best decision.

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The Malian military had bought into the hype that Russian paramilitary forces with their free rein in the field, their attached air support, and their aggressiveness were going to steamroll JNIM and ISSP.

This hype ignored that Wagner’s lone African success story, in the Central African Republic, happened in a context of barely organised rebels who were more focused on plunder than in waging war.

In Mozambique were Wagner had to fight a better organised and much more committed opposition in 2019, it lost and left the country in disgrace after seven months of operations.

Yet, the insurgents Wagner fought in Mozambique in 2019, were rookies compared to the seasoned fighters and commanders in JNIM and ISSP, or even the separatist Azawad movements in the north of Mali.

In the two years Wagner has been active in Mali, it has failed to meaningfully degrade the capabilities of JNIM or ISSP or the Azawad separatist coalition. Rather it has largely raped, massacred and looted communities amongst the Fula and Tuareg ethnicities that are considered insufficiently pro Bamako.

The inevitable result of this strategy of ‘no hearts, no minds’ has been to fuel the growth of JNIM especially, but also ISSP, and to a far lesser extent the Azawad separatist movement, which has resulted in JNIM being now in a position to stage major assaults on the capital Bamako, for the first time in almost a decade.

Asides from the war crimes and massacres of civilians that have accompanied Russian boots on the ground in Mali, there has been nothing of significant military impact that Bamako can show for its investment in deploying the Kremlin’s expeditionary paramilitary forces to fight for it.

The Russians and their Malian Army partners have been unable to meaningfully defeat any of the actors that increasingly pose existential threats to Mali.

A much vaunted offensive to restore Bamako’s control over parts of the north outside its authority, fizzled out when a combination of Azawad separatists and JNIM funneled a joint Russo-Malian assault convoy into an ambush that set off a two day battle, in the area of Tinzaouaten close to Mali’s border with Algeria. At the end of that battle, 80+ Russians were dead, as well as nearly 50 Malian soldiers.

Just yesterday 21st November 2024, another half dozen Wagner troops were ambushed and killed in Mopti region, in Central Mali, by fighters from JNIM, as the jihadi group expands its war against a Malian State that is arguably being weakened by its partnership with Russian paramilitary groups which are not fit for purpose.

Regional states are worried that as JNIM grows stronger in Mali and Burkina Faso, and as these two countries investment in Russian security interventions continue to provide diminishing returns, the risk of collapse of these two states increases, which will leave the region to deal with a security crisis that there’s very little confidence it can contain.

Attrition from combat, is ensuring that specialised direct action units trained by the US in the past continue to get degraded, while similar units trained by the Russians so far are largely not fit for purpose for a variety of reasons.

Everyone, including the junta in Mali that is increasingly desperate to contain the JNIM threat in particular, are interested in Nigeria picking up the slack and backfilling somewhat for the gap created by expulsion of French forces and reduced cooperation with the US, by both Mali and Burkina Faso. But, a combination of regional politics and Nigerian disinterest, means that this unlikely to happen.

Ultimately, the choice to pick Russia as their preferred security partner has ensured that the regimes in Mali and Burkina are in a morass, unable to meaningfully degrade their core security threats especially JNIM and ISSP, who are now becoming existential crises for these regimes and the states they rule.

This also leaves the wider region in the quagmire of an insurgency contagion that is continuing to spread out of these countries to their neighbours.

In this episode:

A Race To Lose Men and Equipment- Fulan Nasrullah

A Peace Plan For Ukraine - Gen Mick Ryan

A US Strategy for Ukraine.. Finally- Gen Mick Ryan

Russia’s North Korean Connection- Dr Andrew Monaghan

Globalisation: Why It Went Into Retreat- Prof Michael Lind

A RACE TO LOSE MEN AND EQUIPMENT

On Monday, 11th November, 2024, I took part in an exchange on Twitter (here and here) about the sustainability of Russia’s way of war in Ukraine, in which I argued that Russia can sustain the levels at which it is fighting in Ukraine, despite the atrocious levels of losses in men and equipment it suffers.

In this belated episode of The Relevant Reads, I want to further expound on why I see the Russo-Ukrainian War, as a race to lose men and equipment that I don’t see the Ukrainian side winning.

On the eve of the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as tensions heightened and the US Government declassified intelligence stating Russia had mobilised up to 200,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, I formulated a hypothetical picture of how ideally the Ukrainians would choose to fight what was certain to be an overwhelming Russian invasion.

I speculated that in the initial stages the Russian Armed Forces utilising an overwhelming advantage in firepower would sweep across all of Eastern Ukraine up to the east banks of the Dnieper river, while the Ukrainians seeking to conserve resources and spare their eastern cities destruction. would conduct a fighting withdrawal of their main forces across the Dnieper, but would leave behind an extensive insurgency apparatus.

I also assumed that both sides would fight a pitched battle for only one major city, which is Kyiv the Ukrainian capital. In my thinking the Russians, simultaneously with their invasion across the east, would move either through Belarus or through Chernihiv Oblast to bring the fight to Kyiv, motivated by the political significance of taking Ukraine’s capital, and the historical significance of Kyiv being the birthplace of Russian civilisation and the site of the first ever great Russian state, Kievan Rus.

The Ukrainian insurgency force would make Russia’s hold on Eastern Ukraine tenuous, buying time for Ukraine to build the mass necessary - with American support - to retake the territories it had to forfeit during the initial invasion.

I was wrong in my assumptions of how the invasion would play out.

The Ukrainian side despite its relative weaknesses on paper, stood its ground and fought. It believed - despite the objections of basically everyone else - that Russia’s vaunted invasion force, was a potemkin army that it could at the very least halt with its own resources, and it could definitely beat if supported by the US and NATO.

Ukraine’s defenders stopped the Russian operation to take Kyiv, beating a Russian force with such terrible logistics that Ukrainian attacks on its logistical trains put it in a position that it would have completely collapsed if it didn’t withdraw, which it quickly did.

The subsequent Russian refocus on the Donbass was itself slowed and on many occasions halted in pitched, grueling battles at places like Bakhmut, as the Ukrainians - bolstered by NATO support - killed tens of thousands of Russian first, second and third line troops, destroying thousands of tanks and artillery systems.

Almost three years later, Ukraine’s belief in its abilities stand true.

Despite the overwhelming fire and manpower Russia has thrown into this war, it has so far failed to resolve the conflict on its terms. It has barely managed to increase territory it holds from the onset of the full invasion in 2022, with most of its advances this year being the retaking of territory recaptured by Ukraine during the 2023 Ukrainian Summer Counteroffensive Campaign. As a matter of fact Ukrainian forces this year conducted an offensive into Kursk Oblast of Russia, and as at the time of writing are still holding a significant amount of territory in Kursk.

Today I firmly believe that if this was a war that could be determined by which side is the better killing machine, if this was a war between two strategic level peer competitors at the conventional level, Ukraine’s forces would absolutely dogwalk the Russian Armed Forces. But it isn’t.

The Russian Armed Forces, are stymied by institutionalised corruption, a lack of NCOs, a military culture that discourages tactical innovation, a dysfunctional operational command and control system and other things on which much has been written by better qualified Russian and Western experts.

In a hypothetical conventional war between two strategic-level peer competitors, that would be determined by which side was the better killing, these deficiencies in the Russian Armed Forces would be a key determiner of the outcome of the conflict.

However the war in Ukraine has evolved - mostly by Russia making the political decision to stay in the war despite its initial setbacks - into a race to cause the other side to lose men and equipment, to the point where it no longer possess the ability to replace both easily. Thus the the balance of determination for this conflict has shifted from quality into quantity and expendability, to the disadvantage of Ukraine.

A War Of Attrition

The calculation that seems to be underpinning how Russia has chosen to fight the war once its initial invasion was blunted, is who would run out of capacity to replace men, equipment and resources faster, over a protracted period of time. This type of war plays into Russia’s strengths but not into the doctrine of the Ukrainian Armed Forces that has been largely designed to be western-oriented, with more focus on precision, lethality and less of an emphasis on mass, attrition, and expendability/replaceability.

The key determinants of an attritional war, and I am of course open to be corrected on this if I am wrong, such as the one Russia has chosen to fight in Ukraine, are: availability of manpower, strength and volume of industrial capacity (especially military industry), access to energy resources, access to key raw materials for industrial production, and food.

At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russia had a population of 140m people vs Ukraine’s 38m-40m. Russia possessed a much larger military industrial capacity than Ukraine. Russia with its massive oil, gas and coal reserves was much more energy secure than Ukraine was. And Russia’s deposits of mineral resources meant it was also better positioned in this aspect than Ukraine. In fact the only area where Russia and Ukraine were sort of equal was in food production, as both countries are net food exporters and were food secure.

However this all meant that on paper, while Russia is optimised for a protracted war of attrition against a smaller country like Ukraine, it was not the same for the Ukrainian side against a country like Russia.

In reality however, the picture looked different enough to offer the Ukrainians a realistic possibility of victory even in an attritional war.

The known political vulnerability of the Putin regime to popular discontent should it choose a path of total war which would see it mobilise millions of Russian youth, meant that it could not afford to do so. This limited how much of the Russian population reserve it could afford to forcefully mobilise, which has forced it to rely on volunteers, most of whom only sign up because of the massive sign-on bonuses and salaries they could earn.

It was also not a stretch to imagine that the rot of corruption that hollowed out the Russian military and intelligence services, leading to their abysmal performance in the planning and execution of the invasion of Ukraine, would also have hollowed out Russia’s military industrial complex (MIC), significantly impacting on its production capacity.

Russia’s pipeline and refining network, can be made vulnerable to long range precision strikes launched from Ukraine, and since Ukraine’s allies in 2022 to 2023 were preaching the mantra of whatever it took - conventionally of course - to defeat Russia they were fully in, Kyiv seemed to have calculated that it would get the necessary volume of cruise missiles to knock out or at the very least seriously degrade Russia’s energy industry. This would have the knock on effect of starving the Russian invasion force inside Ukraine of energy, while simultaneously starving Russia of revenue from oil and gas sales.

Ukraine’s allies in the US, UK and EU, in a bid to significantly degrade Russia’s military industrial capacity, from 2022 placed sanctions on the sale of equipment and components that can be used by Russia’s military industrial complex (MIC) to produce weapons for use in Ukraine. This was in addition to deployment of the nuclear weapons equivalent of sanctions designed to cripple Russia economically and technologically.

The calculation that seemed to have prevailed in Kyiv, was that Ukraine could kill enough Russian troops that would not be easily replaced, while destroying tanks/aircraft/artillery that also wouldn’t be easily replaced. Meanwhile a combination of sanctions and well-placed missile strikes, would kill-off Russia’s ability to leverage on its energy resources to power its war machine.

This calculation and the assumptions underpinning it, were in my view completely realistic if one did not count in the willingness of Vladimir Putin and the hardline community in Russia’s establishment to resolve the Ukraine question through the blunt application of violence, and if one overestimated both the military industrial capacity of the West and the commitment of the American people to backing a war in Ukraine.

This would be in addition to overestimating the support of the rest of the world for an isolation of Russia, which would be critical in order for it to be effectively starved of access to manufacturing inputs and equipment its MIC would need to manufacture new weapons and equipment for combat in Ukraine. Also, isolating Russia would also be necessary in order to starve it of markets for its oil and gas exports.

Any half-serious observer of the US/Europe defence manufacturing and procurement world, knew as far back as 2017-2019 during the counter Islamic State group campaign that US defence manufacturing was sufficient for multiple small wars, but was not optimised for a major war of attrition as we have today in Ukraine.

In the same vein, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was partly possible because of widespread antiwar sentiment in the US, which made many people who voted for him see him as the antiwar candidate.

At this point let me point out that my personal understanding of this Ukrainian theory of victory has been largely informed by, and developed around, conversations with two Ukrainian defence attaches stationed abroad, some of the international volunteers in Ukraine, and Western, Middle Eastern and African diplomats working on the Ukraine file for their foreign ministries. These are in addition to the reading of the published analyses from think tanks and experts on the military affairs of Russia, and or Ukraine.

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Russian Adaptation

Manpower

In the face of the political constraints on its ability to mass mobilise its significant population, Russia has pivoted to using partial mobilisation of reservists, combined with recruitment of contract volunteers mostly from ethnic minorities and economically depressed boondock regions, in addition to recruiting paramilitary mercenaries, and even foreign fighters, to take up a term of service in ground combat positions.

This has given it the leeway to offset the political limits surrounding its ability to draft large amounts of Russians to fight in Ukraine.

Adaptation In The MIC

Russia has been conducting a significant anticorruption campaign at least since late 2023/early 2024, which has been clearing out corrupt functionaries in the Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) associated with former defence minister, Sergey Shoigu, whose 12 year stay at the helm of the ministry, was riven with fantastic levels of corruption. This anticorruption campaign has also touched on the Russian MIC.

In addition, the effects of western sanctions on Russia’s MIC have been blunted through Russia’s substitution of western components for Chinese ones, and for local manufacture of these components where possible (a programme which has been off to a slow start).

This strategy of import substitution has been going on in tandem with a very extensive sanctions busting campaign, which is seeing western origin components, routed through a web of countries and customs jurisdictions, and hidden amongst civilian goods, since most of these components are dual use products, such as microchips in washing machines, refrigerators and smart TVs.

It should also be taken into account that the Russian military industrial complex has increased its capacity, by building new production lines, reactivating mothballed production facilities (as part of the Soviet-origin system of reserve), while expanding existing ones. All of which has been possible by the massive influx of money into the MIC since the decision was taken to double down and fight a protracted war in Ukraine.

The cumulative effect of these steps taken to expand the capacity of Russia’s MIC, has been to see Russia’s ability to produce new tanks rise to 1,200-1,500 in addition to refurbishing hundreds more older Soviet-era tanks from storage, plus produce between 3m-4m artillery shells per year.

Adaptation In The Energy Sector

Ukraine’s ability to degrade Russian energy and industrial production, has itself been castrated by its NATO allies not supplying it with very long range cruise missiles (such as Tomahawks or JASSM-ER) to strike deep within Russia, and the US/UK/France/Germany constraining its ability to use existing long range cruise missiles such as the Anglo-French Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG system, to strike targets inside recognised Russian territory, due to - in my view - justified fears of nuclear war.

On the energy front, Russia has also adapted to western sanctions on its energy and shipping, ensuring that it can continue to earn billions of dollars to fund its war in Ukraine. It has done that by deepening oil and natural gas sales to China using existing pipeline infrastructure. This has been in tandem to setting up a fleet of up to 1,500 ‘ghost’ ships, that is ships mostly not registered on international databases, to move its oil and expand its market share of crude, refined petroleum products, LNG and LPG in countries from Brazil to India.

Biden Out, Trump In. Negotiations?

With Joe Biden on his way out, and Donald Trump on his way in, there’s a sense that a chance to end the war in Ukraine is opening up.

Already prior to the US presidential elections, there was clear fatigue amongst Ukraine’s backers from Berlin to London to Washington DC, for a continuation of the war. The Starmer Labour govt in London, has dialed back the enthusiasm for continued support for Ukraine, with Keir Starmer himself not bothering to visit Kyiv in solidarity, as his Tory predecessors (Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak) did.

Plus the talks of negotiations to end the war, did not start in Kyiv, but rather in Brussels and Washington.

The conditions for Russia to engage in negotiations to produce a mutually agreeable peace with Ukraine do not exist, but for them to exist would require a significant increase in Anglo-American and Franco-German commitment to resourcing Ukraine’s military that I do not quite see happening. I also think that even if these two poles within NATO find the political will to commit to that increased level of commitment to providing aid to Ukraine, the industrial capacity to do so does not yet exist and will require massive capital investments into industrial production that will only begin to bear fruit probably two years down the line.

All this is to say that in my analysis, Russia will in the short-term only engage in negotiations to gain the objectives it has not yet won on the battlefield. I said as much on Twitter last Monday, but an article in Politico Europe which posits that there’s secret relief in Europe’s capitals that Trump may bring the war in Ukraine to an end, puts it even more bluntly in the quote below:

And now, for all the overt hand-wringing over the U.S. election and what it means for Ukraine, some European quarters— even Kyiv, for that matter — are now secretly relieved by the prospect of Trump bringing the war to an end.

After all, if he’s successful, European leaders and American hawks will have an alibi, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will have cover from likely angry front-line Ukrainian soldiers. They’ll all blame him for the broken promises, for the loss of the Donbas and Crimea’s continued annexation — because that’s what it will take to ink a deal. That, and an agreement that Ukraine won’t be joining NATO — neutrality will be a firm concession Moscow will demand.

Some call this an ugly deal. And it is.

The article titled “Trump Threatens To Be Good For Ukraine, Actually” was written by Jamie Dettmer, Politico Europe’s Opinion Editor, and can be read in full here.

It also goes on to say that:

Bu there’s no other alternative. Short of a “forever war” or Western powers becoming combatants themselves — or at least putting their economies on a war footing to supply Ukraine with much more than they currently are — that’s the cold hard reality.

Where I disagree with the Politico Europe piece, is the framing of Russia’s objectives in Ukraine which it must be given in order to make a deal, as being restricted to getting the Donbass, Ukraine foreswearing joining NATO, and continued annexation of Crimea.

I believe that Russia will not give up its claim to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, in addition to the two Donbas oblasts (Dontesk and Luhansk) and Crimea. This will be tied to Ukraine surrendering its sovereignty by acceding to permanent neutrality and undertaking significant demilitarisation of its armed forces.

The evidence for this perception of mine, lies in Vladimir Putin’s speeches and interviews - plus those by other senior Russian officials - even going back to before the full scale invasion.

Couple those speeches and statements with the Kremlin’s decision to continue fighting rather than work on securing a peace deal after the initial invasion was blunted and the cost of doubling down on waging this war became clear; and it becomes quite obvious that unless Russia suffers a strategic defeat in Ukraine, it will not agree to terms to end this war that does not include the aforementioned territories, and at least a partial surrender of Ukrainian sovereignty.

Russia’s goal in Ukraine is to win, and the closest we can determine what its theory of victory is, is that it is either an outright collapse of the Ukrainian state at the end of this war, or a soft capitulation by Ukraine’s establishment via a negotiated peace treaty.

With demographic problems (8 million people estimated to have fled the country since 2022), the war continuing to eat up available manpower, its dwindling economic base, and spending fatigue in its supporters’ camp, plus the decreasing availability of ammunition and equipment that its forces are facing, Kyiv is not in a great position and everyone can see it.

That includes Russia, which has every incentive to believe it can outlast a weakening Ukraine and achieve its goals if it continues to drag out this war, and no pressure to find a mutually acceptable peace agreement with Kyiv.

The announcement by the White House on Sunday, 17th November, that President Biden was easing restrictions on Ukraine’s supply of the ATACMS short range ballistic missile system allowing Kyiv to use it to hit targets inside Russia, is definitely an important development as it allows Ukraine to hit up to 300km (187 miles) inside Russia, with the longest range ATACMS variant.

However this will not shift the strategic picture to better favour Ukraine given the max range of the missiles and the limited quantities the US typically supplies, which are not enough to conduct a sustained campaign of missile strikes that would have serious impact on Russia’s ability to resource its war in Ukraine.

Instead I would rather we look at it through the prism of the operational demands of breaking the back of the expected second Russian counteroffensive to reclaim the salient in Kursk that Ukraine is currently holding.

Russia has massed around 50,000 troops for that counteroffensive, of which 10,000-12,000 are North Korean soldiers. Utilising ATACMS, Ukraine can destroy logistics nodes, railheads, bridges and also strike marshaling points for Russian troops and equipment, relevant to the counteroffensive to retake the Ukrainian Kursk salient.

A second way I would rather we look at this Biden ATACMS announcement, is politics. Biden could either be escalating to give Trump something to deescalate with, without reducing the current level of support to Ukraine, or Biden could be escalating to tie the hands of Trump and give the pro-Ukraine camp on Capitol Hill a cudgel to beat the Trump admin with, should President Trump try to reduce Ukraine aid (as was done to him during his first presidency).

All in all what Ukraine needs is not so much limited ATACMS supplies, but more 155mm shells, more tanks, more AFVs/IFVs/MRAPs, more mine clearing equipment, and more men.

Unless Western governments put their defence industrial bases on a war footing for the weapons and equipment that Ukraine needs, the strategic picture remains one in which Russia attrits Ukraine to the point the choice becomes one in which Kyiv either surrenders part of its sovereignty at the very least, or it ceases to be an independent state.

Currently Russia, each year, produces 3m-4m rounds of artillery ammunition, North Korea also produces around 2m rounds of 152mm alone , per annum, and the figures for Pyongyang are based on peacetime manufacturing rates.

So far South Korea’s National Intelligence Service believes North Korea has so far supplied more than 9million rounds of artillery across all calibres to Russia, with Pyongyang also seemingly supplying artillery tubes and whole systems such as the Koksan 170mm self-propelled howitzer to Moscow.

Iran produces millions of rounds of artillery ammunition across all calibres including 152mm and 155mm.

This does not include Russian production of short range ballistic missiles, and North Korean and Iranian supplies/production of such systems, of which the US estimates that North Korea and Iran have supplied Moscow with a cumulative number that is in the low thousands so far.

The entire EU on the other hand is on track to produce up to 600,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition, with claims of 1m generally derided as padding of the facts. That 600k EU 155mm figure is roughly the same as what the US is aiming to produce by the end of this year.

With both Russia and North Korea increasing their production capacities for artillery ammunition and short range ballistic missiles, they are on track to far outpace what the US and EU are aiming to produce or can potentially supply to Ukraine under the current plans of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group - the umbrella body for coordinating planning relating to aiding Ukraine.

Finally, if the stated goal of Ukraine’s partners is to ensure the continuous existence of a Ukrainian state, which is free and sovereign, and preferably within its full 1991 borders, then the European members of NATO especially need to expand their defence industrial base enough to not only enable Ukraine’s armed forces keep up with attrition but to actually possess a superiority in volume and quality of fires over the Russian military on the ground in Eastern Ukraine.

Other Relevant Reads

A US Strategy for Ukraine.. Finally- Gen Mick Ryan

In September retired Australian major-general, Mick Ryan wrote a piece that looked at the Biden admin’s strategy for supporting and directing the flow of support to Ukraine. Over the last couple of days I reread it and did some thinking on what the final Biden strategy holds going forward.

As the Trump admin comes on board in January 2025, I believe some of that plan will still hold. I am in the camp of those that believe that even if Mr Trump personally leans towards cutting off aid to Ukraine, bureaucratic inertia plus Congress will slow down any movement by his administration on that front.

You can read Gen Ryan’s article through the embed below:

Futura Doctrina

A U.S. Strategy for Ukraine…Finally

The only time Ukraine and the West will be able to seriously claim a true victory is when, and if, the fighting ends in an acceptable peace. This means the United States and its partners need to look beyond the current battlefield. They need to determine what grand strategy they should pursue to shape the longer-term cour…

Read more

2 years ago · 117 likes · 4 comments · Mick Ryan

A Peace Plan For Ukraine - Gen Mick Ryan

Gen Ryan also looks at what a possible Trump peace plan for Ukraine could look like.

The first standout point he makes in this piece for me, was his analysis that although Ukraine may have believed that the Kursk incursion would give it some leverage in negotiations over territory with Russia, by holding Russian territory at risk and changing the trajectory of the war, those objectives have not been achieved. Plus Ukraine may not any or much of that Kursk territory by the time negotiations begin.

You can read the article in full below

Futura Doctrina

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?

In the past few days, speculation about a potential ‘Ukraine solution’ from the incoming Trump administration has accelerated. There have been other plans supposedly developed in the past, including a May 2024 proposal written by retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg…

Read more

a year ago · 119 likes · 12 comments · Mick Ryan

Russia’s North Korean Connection

Dr Andrew Monaghan a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote this piece that examines Russia’s decision to turn to North Korea in the context of the bigger picture that is Russian Gran Strategy.

Rather than the rather ad-hoc manner many people have examined the budding Russo-DPRK alliance, Dr Monaghan points out that it sits firmly in the grand strategy prism in which Russia seeks to position itself in what it sees to be the shift in international affairs with the balance of power leaning towards the Asia-Pacific over the Euro-Atlantic region.

You can read that frankly very interesting piece in full HERE.

Globalisation: Why It Went Into Retreat

Prof Michael Lind, a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, also a columnist for Tablet Magazine, in this piece reflects on why he believes globalisation has gone into retreat, and the reasons fueling that retreat

His essay, which I recommend you read a few times is available HERE.

PS: I have decided to only write for free here twice a week, instead of the thrice I was aiming for initially. I had hoped to write short, concise pieces, but I realised since I started writing again that I love putting down words, which means writing ends up conflicting with my comments in my real life.

So for now I will only be writing one episode of The Relevant Reads for Mondays, and an edition of The Relevant Information on Fridays.

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During the weekend, I published the third edition of The Relevant Information News, titled “2027 Is Our Last Chance”, in which I urged you the reader, to understand that a second Tinubu term at the helm of affairs of this country will most likely kill off any viability this country ever had of succeeding. If you missed that piece, you can find it embedded below.

A few associates and friends of mine read that piece and messaged me their thoughts, privately. One associate through their private comments reminded me of the very reason why I ultimately decided to set up a Substack and start writing a newsletter, which is the disappearance of hope amongst the everyday forgotten Nigerian. What they said is reproduced below with permission

I don’t buy into the argument that people will forget. These are unprecedented times. No one forgets pain like this.

In years past there was hardship, but the common man knew that he could rough things up and God Will Provide.

A bricklayer gets N3,000 daily and he is satisfied because that’s enough for foodstuff so he could ‘afford’ to forget some of his immediate pains in exchange for (a pack of) spaghetti on election day.

But now? fewer houses are being built so even less income (than the N3,000 daily). And the income is no longer enough (given the stratospheric price increases in basic goods).

It is really dire.

These are unprecedented times in our nation’s history. Speaking as someone who was alive for Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) years, and whose family today suffers the fallout from what SAP did to this country; who was wise enough during the Abacha years to understand the political and economic impact that military dictatorship had on our growth; and who had prepubescent children of his own by the time Buhari’s ineptitude was stumbling into office; these are unprecedented times.

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I travel frequently across the country and I engage with ordinary people, satisfying my natural and professional curiosity to understand what people think, feel, experience and express, and over the last eighteen months it has felt like my engagements with regular people has become like having a front row seat to the disappearance of hope from the Nigerian psyche.

For the first time ever that I can remember, people no longer have any hope in this country’s present, and neither is there any hope left in its future.

The Nigerian mind has always inherently believed that this country possess a lot of repressed potential, that would blossom beautifully if the chains weighing it down were removed. There has always been that widely held belief that some day, one day, Nigeria will make it. Somehow E go better.

No matter how unrealistic that hope might have seemed, the Nigerian psyche almost from birth, was programmed to believe that there’s a silver lining to this darkness of a cloud.

That hope made the analogical bricklayer in my associate’s telling, content to brave the rough living of today and manage the provisions that his analogical N3,000 daily wage would pay him.

And now it’s gone.

Every regular person outside the upper and middle class bubble that I interact with during my extensive and frequent travels, are people existing at the bottom of the Nigerian socio-economic ladder, already lacking any form of survival safety nets.

Now even the little comfort of “e go better” and a bit of purchasing power that ensured that they could afford to buy new clothes, shoes, eat poor quality but affordable food, use low end Chinese smartphones to connect with the world or build digital microbusinesses and so on, has been taken away.

What I see in increasing volume day after day, is poor people already surviving on poor quality but relatively affordable food, unable to afford to eat. People increasingly unable to afford even low-end dumb phones, losing their connections with the world, and the economic opportunities that come with being on the internet.

I see fathers ashamed of their inability to feed their families, despite how hard they work. I see mothers in despair that not only are they no longer able to buy the extra comforts for their kids to be happy, they and their husbands can no longer even afford to ensure their children are able to eat to their stomach’s content.

I see single mums facing homelessness, panicking over what to do because despite how hard they are working - many in so called good jobs - they are struggling to juggle exponential increases in school fees, house rents and food prices.

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I see grown men, grown women, hardworking people, deathly terrified of falling ill because they cannot afford the literal cost of healthcare, combined with food, rent, transportation and so on.

Nobody I talk to thinks e go better, not today. Not anymore. People are just clinging on to survive one day to the next, with no hope for what that tomorrow will bring.

All of this, one hundred and ten thousand percent of this, can be laid at the feet of an administration that has acted with reckless abandon, focused solely on securing its hold on power, even if it comes at the expense of the very people that they rule over.

If there was a point to this suffering, if there was actual planning on how this suffering would be a stepping stone to Nigeria not only recovering from the disaster that were the Buhari years, but actually climbing on the road of accelerated development, I would be telling people to be patient and bear it for the time it would take.

However, there is no point, there is no national interest planning, there is nothing that points to this being a situation where the President and his team are inflicting necessary suffering on the Nigerian people, in order for the country’s economic growth engine to be kickstarted.

What there seems to be, is a state capture-style plan like with the Guptas in South Africa, but in this case our Guptas may be the Lebanese-Nigerian Chagoury clan and the Tinubu Organisation.

There is OVH Energy Marketing taking over NNPC Retail, after NNPC claimed to have bought OVH, with OVH’s people allegedly now the ones dominating the new company.

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There is Tony Elumelu’s - the President’s friend - Transcorp Power taking over Abuja Electricity Distribution Company.

There is Aliko Dangote’s refinery getting choked out of selling his product in the local market. That situation has by default forced Dangote Refinery to sell to foreign buyers, led by international commodities trading companies like Trafigura and Vitol can buy his stockpile of refined petroleum products, and - allegedly - certain Nigerian companies can buy those same products, do ship to ship transfers just outside our territorial waters and then land in Lagos claiming they are bringing in imported diesel and petrol.

Coincidentally Vitol happens to be one of the two companies that Oando (owned by Wale Tinubu, the President’s nephew) divested its equity in OVH Energy Marketing to, shortly before NNPC Retail supposedly acquired OVH.

There are all sorts of little things that over time add up to a consistent picture of the economics of the country being set on fire and hacked to pieces to support the President’s structure, at the cost of the welfare and hopes of the Nigerian people.

My worry, and one major reason why I started this newsletter, is that Nigerians who are everyday losing hope, do not fully understand the deliberateness of the destruction of their purchasing power.

The fact that so many people are working hard, with jobs or businesses, and yet can no longer afford to do something as basic as eat two meals in a day, is not an error or some mistake, it is the side effect of deliberate decisions taken by this administration.

That major cities and towns across the country are undergoing involuntary shutdowns, with city centres empty during peak business hours, is not some flawed policy at work, rather it is what our President and his organisation have decided will be the new normal. For their own agenda’s sake, and agenda that prioritises the naked control of power over everything else.

The big question some of the people who read the previous newsletter and spoke to me privately keep asking, is can this administration be stopped? Can its grip over the country’s neck be pried open before it chokes Nigeria to death?

I say yes.

There has to be a civic mobilisation against the 2027 elections, to ensure that this experiment we did not sign up under this administration, does not get to wiggle its way into a second term.

Nearly a decade ago, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), lost control of the Presidency and the National Assembly, when the All Progressives Congress (APC), won the 2015 general elections. That loss ended 16 years of the experiment of PDP rule, a loss that happened because Nigerians were frustrated at the government’s inability to tackle insecurity originating out of the Northeast in the form of the Boko Haram insurgency.

Because of how shaken we were as a people by the previously unheard of phenomenon of bombs going of in mosques and churches, and anti-government armed men seizing control of villages, towns and cities, we welcomed the APC’s victory, even if we didn’t vote or we are completely apolitical. People just wanted the madness to stop, and a measure of sanity and security to be restored.

The collapse of our army, bombs flying everywhere, and Boko Haram driving from Damasak in Borno all the way to Michika in Adamawa - a distance of over 300km- soon met allegations of fantastic corruption plaguing the Goodluck Jonathan, further\ increasing the sense of existential dread we felt.

Given General Muhammadu Buhari’s military background and carefully laundered reputation, plus his alliance with Bola Ahmed Tinubu, we thought that the APC would fix the insecurity problem, tackle corruption, and solve our underlying economic problems. These were widely held hopes even amongst those that didn’t vote for the APC or don’t vote at all.

We were all wrong.

The Buhari administration was an eight year unmitigated disaster, one that coasted along on massive borrowing, like a degenerate gambler borrowing from multiple payday loan apps, to fund his losing streak on Bet9ja or Baba Ijebu.

The insurgency in Borno was contained not because of the policies and directions of President Buhari and his political apparatus, but despite them.

The institutional capacities of the Nigerian Army, Air Force, the Defence Intelligence Agency, and the Defence Headquarters, were who came up with the plans, utilised the meagre resources allocated to them, and did the hardwork to contain the insurgency.

Despite their flaws, and Lord Knows they are plenty, the Armed Forces over the eight years of Buhari, gradually degraded and contained the ability of the insurgency to exploit gaps in our military posture to expand their operations.

This combined with the joint operations of the State Security Service and Military Intelligence to hunt down urban terror networks responsible for organising bomb attacks in cities outside the Northeast, plus work done on shutting down the insurgents’ external financial logistics by the EFCC, National Intelligence Agency, and even the efforts of folks like Hon Aliyu Gebi (former chairman of the House of Reps Committee on Internal Security, senior adviser to both of Buhari’s Ministers of Interior), ensured that the insurgency got starved of oxygen and was contained.

All of this happened despite the Buhari administration, not because of it.

Moreover, by the time the Buhari administration left office, armed conflict stopped being the preserve of the Northeast, and instead had spread across the Northwest, North Central, and Southeast. Thousands of people were displaced by bandit militias’ attacks in the Northwest, states like Benue were devastated by terrible attacks by a myriad of armed groups, and the Southeast reeled from an underground insurgency by various factions of IPOB.

And in all these, the Buhari administration was effectively missing in action, with the Armed Forces, Police and State Security Service, left to figure out how to manage the little resources allocated to them to tackle these burning fires that were spread across multiple states and regions.

The Tinubu candidacy for the 2023 elections, was packaged and sold as the competent version of the APC, one that was definitely different from and much more capable than those ‘semi-literate’ Buharists.

We were told the man himself is a genius political operator who has also ensured that he is surrounded with the most capable technocrats, and unlike Buhari who had no idea what to do once he got into office, his structure is well-prepared and had plans ready to get the ball rolling on day one.

Of course, after the disaster that was Buhari, Nigerians were not so gullible, but bloated egos, selfishness, inefficient mobilisation and disorganisation amongst the opposition’s ranks, ensured that with some creative politicking, the Tinubu candidacy was able to become the Tinubu presidency.

The last eighteen months of the Tinubu presidency has in turn proven to be an even worse disaster than the cumulative eight years of Buhari, a record that even I had thought was impossible to beat.

The complete hollowing out of the real economy, the economy of actual living people, not numbers and statistics by acclaimed suit-wearing experts that doesn’t buy crayfish in the market, has been astonishing to see and experience.

The cost of living has become so crazy, that the very cost of just surviving as a regular Nigerian not working for some multilateral organisation, multinational corporation, international NGO, and also not a political player surviving on fantastic corruption; is now at apocalyptic proportions.

To put it succinctly, if you live in Nigeria, earning in naira, at regular man income, you are fucked. There’s no nicer way to express the catastrophe that the last eighteen months have been for your existence.

For an administration that claims to be competent at economic policy and to be making the decisions it has made since it assumed office based on competence, it is ironic that no other administration since the Babangida years, has overseen the destruction of small and medium enterprises (especially in manufacturing) at the scale this one has.

Rising energy costs both in fuel and electricity, plus the collapse of the naira which has pushed up importation costs of key manufacturing inputs, has ensured that what little small and medium manufacturing we have, is either shutting down, or is on its way out.

The result of this has been people being put out of work, and families losing what was often the only source of income, plus foreign exchange earned from exports to neighbouring countries drying up.

The administration can speak as much English it wants, and its propagandists on social media can tell us how Tinubu’s plans for us are the best thing to happen to this country since the invention of sliced bread, but the reality remains that what we are undergoing is not only not economic progress, it is economic regress. Degrowth instead of growth.

Economic regression/degrowth has the terrifying but inevitable side effect of increased insecurity, as people desperate to survive - which as everyday passes is becoming more and more Nigerians- are very amenable to taking up crime as an occupation, or joining up with non state armed groups including bandit militias and the various flavours of insurgencies we have, who are willing to provide them with a living wage.

In the past we have seen this happen in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa, where impressionable and desperate people, voluntarily joined Boko Haram and ISWAP in order to survive, and then stayed long enough to get indoctrinated into becoming fervent believers.

Even more recently I have noticed this happening in parts of the Northwest where displaced people of Fulani ethnicity who are desperate to survive, join bandit militias, not because they necessarily want to rape and loot and plunder, but rather because the only clear path of economic mobility available to them has been joining such a group.

In a few cases, we have observed some soldiers quit the military because the apocalyptic rise in the cost of living has rendered their salaries ineffective and useless, and on quitting the military either leave for Sudan to fight for the Rapid Support Forces there, or become private security for illicit mining operations in Kaduna, Niger and Zamfara States. Illicit mining operations that are themselves in bed with all manner of bandit militias.

This is the reality we are going to have to contend with for the next thirty months give or take, until the next scheduled transfer of power in 2027.

The Tinubu Organisation (what I call the President and his political structure), is aware that they were immensely unpopular when they assumed office in 2023, and are currently widely reviled, propaganda claims of being beloved by the people to the contrary.

However they have deliberately chosen to not correct their course, because of two key reasons. Firstly is their confidence that come 2027, they can manoeuvre the political and electoral mathematics to their favour; secondly is that in order to ensure their politico-economic dominance long after Tinubu himself is no longer on the scene, they need to see through the policies that they are implementing, which are responsible for the unraveling of Nigerian society as we know it.

The Tinubu Organisation believes it can shape the political and electoral terrain to its favour, because of how it came into power in the first place. In my first newsletter (embedded below), I briefly shined a light on what that means.

In one section, I said:

If we are talking reality, in short form, elections in Nigeria are won through the frontdoor - i.e gathering required threshold numbers, winning prescribed constitutional geographical percentages, ensuring your paperwork is in order - and also through the backdoor. The backdoor is where voter bribery, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing (in the old days), lawfare to overwhelm the competition pre-election, and judicial manipulation post election, all come into play.

Of the four main candidates in the 2023 election, only one (the current president) had a solid numbers mobilisation game in four of the six geopolitical zones of the country. The Atiku campaign lost the numbers game in the Southeast and South South , through its own unforced errors, when Peter Obi defected to the Labour Party- unannounced - with his base, and Nyesom Wike was snubbed for the Vice Presidential ticket in favour of Ifeanyi Okowa.

The Obi campaign simply couldn’t get the numbers it needed in Northern Nigeria, and Kwankwaso was too financially under-resourced to mobilise voters outside Kano State.

The split of Peter Obi from former vice president Atiku Abubakar, with whom he contested the 2019 election as his vice presidential candidate, already narrowed the chances of Tinubu losing the 2023 election. But other faulty assumptions made by both Atiku and Obi, only served to further choke the chances Tinubu would lose.

Atiku Abubakar and his faction of the PDP, at the last election idealistically relied on the hope that Nigerians were tired enough of the APC to deliver the frontdoor of electioneering to his candidacy by voting for him against the other names on the ballot.

The campaign of Peter Obi, the former Anambra governor and the Labour Party candidate, on the other hand, relied on his popularity amongst a specific section of the youth, coupled with the APC running a Muslim-Muslim ticket against accepted political practice, which it believed would rally the Christian vote around it.

The Tinubu Organisation understood then as it understands now, that in order to effectively win the election, especially as the incumbent party (or president now), you must succeed at both the games of the front and back doors. In the last election it ruthlessly applied itself to ensuring it did just that, ensuring it got enough votes to cross the required threshold in the states of the Southwest, Northeast, Northwest, and North Central, with the backdoor being utilised to clear the way in some states of the South South and Southeast.

Today, they control the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC), that famously ‘independent’ body that is above being corrupted. They control the entire directing mechanisms of the national security architecture, and they boast a far larger war chest - one that is still growing - than any other potential candidates. The have the backdoor fully locked down in their favour.

Their weakness lies in the frontdoor, the actual voting public, and despite their ability to provide financial and material incentives to get out the vote, they are aware of how universally reviled and hated their administration is across the country.

However as they are currently politicking ahead of 2027, this administration counts on two things:

The First

Is that the general apathy of Nigerians who are being beaten down by a daily struggle to survive, would translate into a lack of interest in voting, which would allow their own mobilised loyalists and mercenary voters to dominate the polls. They are especially confident that apathy will keep the coast clear for them to dominate the polls with their mobilised loyalists and voting mercenaries, because of the weakness of active opposition and resistance to their policies since they assumed office, despite how badly the people are suffering from them.

Even the #EndBadGovernance protests that worried the administration, turned out to be tepid compared to the #EndSARS protests four years ago, with only specific protests in Northern Nigeria becoming any cause of concern by taking on a pro-military coup/pro-Russia colouration ( incidents which were organised by the junta in the Republic of Niger to spite Tinubu).

The Second

Is that they can adequately settle the players and groups that control large and small voting blocks across the three northern regions, and the Southwest, and thus mobilise voting mercenaries, while the opposition would fail at mobilisation and also remain divided between the various parties and candidates, like in the 2023 election.

I am normally an apolitical person, who personally does not care much for electoral politics beyond an analytical standpoint, and who has always hidden behind the veil of professionalism to avoid getting too entangled with political operators outside the policy realm.

However today I believe that it is absolutely necessary for the future of the Nigerian people, that should the Tinubu administration not change the directions it has chosen to take this country in, it should be resisted, mobilised against and must be made to lose the 2027 presidential election.

It has done more damage to this country than what fourteen years of Buhari and Jonathan combined did, in just eighteen months. It has, in such a small amount of time, managed to shatter the one thing that no other administration or regime before it has ever managed to do; the unbreachable wall of hope that Nigerians typically possess.

If it has managed to do so much damage in just eighteen months, a year and a half, I dread what six and a half more years of it being in power would do. And since the earliest opportunity we the people will get to completely rid ourselves of it is in 2027, then we absolutely cannot risk allowing it to win the elections scheduled for that year.

The eight years of Buhari, plus the last year and half of Tinubu have been time wasted, time in our developmental journey which we will never get back. To put it in context from March 2014 to June 2024, India increased its electricity generation capacity from 248,000MW to 446,000MW, and of that number, renewable energy alone has increased from 75,519 MW in March 2014 to 195,013 MW in June 2024.

Nigeria on the other hand took from December 2015 to December 2022 to grow our installed power generation capacity from 12,132MW to 13,097MW, with the capacity to transmit around 8,100MW. However in reality due to the fickleness of our grid we can only regularly transmit around 4,000MW.

In the eighteen months since Buhari left and Tinubu took over, our grid has been collapsing even more frequently than we were used to, with the whole of Northern Nigeria thrown into more than eight days of darkness just a week ago as the grid collapsed again.

We cannot afford to waste the four years from 2027 to 2031 under a continuation of the Tinubu Organisation who have in their first term clearly demonstrated that they have no plan for the development of this country, rather they only care about securing their hold over power, even if it comes at the expense of the viability of the country itself.

They do not care if our best brains, skilled workforce and our professional class are being hollowed out by the Japa (escape through emigration for you non-Nigerians) syndrome. They do not care that our manufacturing base is being choked to death by their economic policies. They do not care that Nigeria cannot continue to borrow at excessive rates to fund vanity projects awarded as infrastructure contracts to enrich their structures.

As exemplified by President Tinubu’s personal campaign slogan “E mi lokan” (a yoruba phrase that translates as “it’s my turn”), they care solely about power for power means. And unlike the Buhari administration which was out of its depth, the Tinubu Organisation is very deliberate and calculated in what it does, usually.

As the world changes, and global and major regional powers seem to be preparing for a global conventional war over causes as diverse as Ukraine, Taiwan, the Middle East, or the South China Sea, we need to prepare too for the future and our place in it.

We cannot afford to allow the Tinubu Organisation to not only waste the years from 2027-2031, but to continue on its path of setting Nigeria back, at a time when our very survival will depend on how quickly we can recover from the economic stagnation and then regression that has characterised the years from 2007 till date.

In order to ensure that Nigeria stands a chance of surviving and thriving in the future, the Tinubu Organisation must lose the 2027 elections, and in order for that to happen, Nigerians irrespective of ethnicity, religion, region and class, must create a coalition of the willing and work together to mobilise as many people and resources as possible, to ensure that Nigeria wins and Tinubu loses.

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Firstly, I would love to begin by extending my apologies to you, my loyal subscribers and readers for missing the last two Relevant Information newsletters. I was indisposed healthwise and had to deal with that situation. I am grateful for your support and appreciate that you have stuck around despite my short absence. Thank you so much.

And now back to regularly scheduled programming

Donald Trump is all but certain to be reelected president in the United States, as at the time I am writing this edition of The Relevant Reads, he has blown current vice president, Kamala Harris, out of the water holding 266 Electoral College votes to her 188, and needing just four more to officially cement his victory.

The GOP now has 51 Senate seats, compared to the Democrats’ 41, beating the 50 seats threshold to own their majority. Of course, JD Vance becoming Vice President of the United States, would ensure that in case where there is a tie on legislative votes, Trump’s VP would be able to use his vote as President of the Senate to break the tie into a majority for his agenda.

The House of Representatives is not yet solidly determined, and might not be determined for a week more, but the GOP have 201 seats as at time of writing, needing 17 more seats to gain control of the House. The Democratic Party on the other hand currently holds 173 seats, needing 45 more seats to gain the 218 slim majority threshold. Increasingly it looks like the GOP could for the first time in quite a while, take full control of all three branches of the United States Government.

With a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, a Republican Senate, a Republican Presidency, and what looks like it could end up being a Republican House too, total lock on the Executive, Judiciary, and Legislative branches. A United States of Nigeria if you will, where one party has a lock on everything.

And predictably, quite a number of people are already beginning to freak out, even though the Donald is not yet in office.

First on my list of freaked-outers are the folks from the Trans-Atlantic alliance defence and security communities, who are realising that their predictions of a Trump defeat and a Harris landslide, were nothing but fanciful dreams.

Trump’s victory has forced the conversation within the Trans-Atlantic security and defence communities about European strategic autonomy, and Europe’s ability to defend itself in the absence of NATO, back to the forefront.

Phillips O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at University of St. Andrews in Scotland, on his Substack delves into what Trump’s victory will mean for Tran-Atlantic Alliance Europe, and advocates that Europe must prepare itself for the probability of American commitment to European security weakening under the Trump administration. You should read his highly informative piece below.

On his Twitter handle, Mr O’Brien re-upped a piece he had written earlier for Foreign Affairs, titled “Planning For A Post-American NATO”, which I read and found educating and would recommend you guys check out. You can find it HERE.

Investor and driving force behind the Magnistky Sanctions, Sir William Felix Browder, KCMG, tweeted the below tweet, linking to a report by Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA):

The article was written by Edward Lucas, a former senior editor at the Economist, and longtime foreign correspondent in Russia, Germany and the Baltic states, who is now a senior advisor at CEPA. It was written in January and in it Mr Lucas argues for more than $300bn in Russian financial assets abroad to be seized and used to fund Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s invasion. You can read it HERE.

Edward Lucas also has a new piece out posted on CEPA’s website today November 6, 2024, titled Trump Cards: A Survival Kit (How Europe Should Prepare for Four Bumpy Years). It’s a relatively concise article, that raises some interesting points, I will point out that personally I disagree with its framing of Europe’s challenger - Russia - from the perspective of nominal GDP , and with its profered solution being European countries increasing their defence budgets to 5% of their GDP.

Europe’s problem is not that there’s not enough money, rather it is a crushing lack of capacity. Germany’s defence budget was miles above Ukraine’s in 2014 and also in 2022, but a stunning lack of actual capacity means that if it had been the Germans getting the short end of the Russian stick in 2022, they would have been pounded to dust. Anyways, you can read Mr Lucas’ arguments HERE

Gen Mick Ryan, has a feature on the website of the Lowy Institute, and Australian think tank, titled “Trump May Surprise Us On Ukraine”, and I cannot recommend it enough. You can find it HERE.

Finally on the security and defence community’s fears of what Trump 2.0 means for European security, I present you a policy memo by Matthew Burrows on the Stimson Center’s website, titled “Could Trump Be Good For Europe?”. Mr Burrows argues that there’s a possibility that Trump could be the trigger that sparks a renew desire in the European part of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance, to renew itself and rebuild its capacity.

You can find Mr Burrows policy memo HERE.

Back home in Nigeria, Bloomberg has a good report that vaguely shines a light on export of refined petroleum products from the Dangote Refinery.

Despite multiple attempts by Aliko Dangote to get local authorities and fuel distribution cartels to purchase refined petroleum products from his refinery, the refinery’s sales graph remains flatlined, as his target market silently boycotts and undercuts him with imports of allegedly substandard gasoline and diesels.

However international trading companies such as Trafigura, are loading refined petroleum products from Dangote’s refinery in this interesting twist that Bloomberg reported on, which you can read HERE.

This week, African social media was on fire with reports, videos and explicit images of Baltasar Ebang Engonga, the head of Equatorial Guinea’s anticorruption and financial intelligence agency, engaged in sexual gymnastics with various women. The women have largely been identified as wives, daughters and sisters of many Equatoguinean ministers, generals, and other prominent figures.

A nephew of the Equatorial Guinea’s longserving president, he was rumoured to have fallen out with his cousin the Vice President (who is also son of the president), which led to him being investigated on charges of corruption and embezzlement and his collection of over 400 consensually shot sextapes being discovered and leaked.

The African Report has a great backgrounder on him which you can read HERE.

Finally, to wrap up this edition of The Relevant Reads, I leave you with this piece from Drop Site News (you absolutely should subscribe to their incredible reporting), which argues that railing-at-the-sky old man and current genocide excuser, Bernie Sanders could have won if he and his ideas had been allowed to run in 2016 or 2020 or even today in 2024.

Drop Site News

Bernie Would Have Won

Here’s a warning and an admonition written in January 2019 by author and organizer Jonathan Smucker: “If the Dem Party establishment succeeds in beating down the fresh leadership and bold vision that's stepping up, it will effectively enable the continued rise of authoritarianism. But they will not wake up and suddenly grasp this. It's on us to outmaneu…

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a year ago · 278 likes · 19 comments · Krystal Kyle & Friends

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Israel is losing but Netanyahu won’t back down on his war aims, so says a piece published on the website of the Royal United Services Institute(RUSI), Britain’s oldest defence think tank (probably one of the oldest in the world too). The article was written by Alex Wolf, a post-doctoral fellow at Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan.

I haven’t previously read anything by Mr Wolf, and it appears this was his first time writing for RUSI, but his analysis was superb and I largely agree with his conclusions.

He outlined Israel’s war aims in both Gaza and Lebanon, and how it has fared so far a year since the current war started.

You can read it HERE

The EU Parliament’s largest grouping - the centre-right European People’s Party - seems to be normalising the so-called far right (I prefer their proper name- fascists - but that’s just me) by cooperating with them to set and pass policy, breaking the much vaunted cordon sanitaire Europe’s political class claimed to have placed around cooperating with fascists. This is happening despite most of Europe’s centre-right and centrists politicians continuing to pay lip service to the idea of opposing the ideas with the far-right.

But as we saw with French president, Emmanuel Macron’s cooperation with the the fascist National Rally of Marine Le Pen to ensure he got a prime minister to his liking, although the leftist New Popular Front coalition won the largest vote in the snap parliamentary polls he called in June this year; Europe’s center-right politicians prefer to ally with literal fascists aka the far-right and adopt their policies, even when there are less insane options on the left, like the Greens or Socialists willing to work with them.

Politico Europe, has a long piece out that delves into the new marriage between the EPP and all kinds of far-right movements from Giorgia Meloni’s(Italy’s PM from the fascist leaning Brothers of Italy movement) crew in the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, to Viktor Orban’s(Hungary’s PM) new Patriots for Europe bloc, in the European Parliament; despite working with the Greens and Socialists to give Ursula von der Leyen a second five year term at the helm of the EU.

You can read the Politico piece HERE

Veteran journalist and scholar, Dr James M. Dorsey dissects why Israel’s limited retaliation to Iran demonstrates that the US can stay Netanyahu’s hand, despite how much folks are inclined to believe otherwise.

Dr Dorsey’s premise aligns with my specific reading of why Israel conducted such an underwhelming strike, especially as its operational ethos seems to be designed around loud, impressive and overwhelming action.

On a bigger picture note, America utilising its various levers of dominance to impose its will on Israel over Iran, is another clear indication that the genocidal war being waged on the Palestinian people by the regime in Tel Aviv, is being done with the full approval of the United States.

Dr Dorsey’s piece is embedded below

If there’s one thing Western mainstream media can be counted on to do, it is to serve as court stenographers and to whitewash the reputations of functionaries in their governments seeking to build a publicly loved career post government work, or just wanting to feel better about their moral cowardice while in actual positions of power.

Politico has a magazine feature out on US Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, which she (with Politico’s help) paints herself in the colours of the mythical impartial professional, while the administration she is a part of oversees a genocide in Gaza.

For those as fascinated as I am by such pieces, you can read it HERE

Recently retired Australian Army officer (major general), Mick Ryan, has a very insightful article on his Substack which I read last week on North Korea’s entry in the Russo-Ukrainian War. He does a really brilliant job breaking down what that would mean for the Russian side, in terms of force deployment, logistics and even command and control.

His article is embedded below

Futura Doctrina

North Korea’s Entry into the Ukraine War

It has become increasingly likely that North Korean combat troops will appear in Ukraine soon. According to Ukrainian and South Korean government sources, around 1500 North Korean special operations troops are currently preparing in Russia to deploy to Ukraine…

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a year ago · 69 likes · 8 comments · Mick Ryan

Still on Ukraine, Kyiv Independent is reporting that the Pentagon has informed Kyiv/Kiev that the US will not impose new limitations on Ukraine’s use of American weapons if North Korea enters the war. What that actual translates to in reality, remains to be seen, seeing as it is the White House and not DOD that actually has the final say on imposing or removing any limits, on US weapons supplied to Ukraine.

But Kyiv Independent’s piece which also talks about the destruction of the town of Vochansk in Kharkiv/Kharkov Oblast is available HERE

Closer to home in South Africa, the African Report has a really educating feature (paywalled) out on someone that usually flies below the radar, a key backer of ex South African president Jacob Zuma, Louis Liebenberg, a White South African business man with a particularly colourful past, currently facing trial on 42 counts of fraud, racketeering, money laundering among other crimes.

That feature can be accessed HERE

Sudan War Monitor has a piece out on how Russian cargo planes have helped both sides in the ongoing War in Sudan. You can find that feature embedded below.

Sudan War Monitor

Mercenary aviation: Russian cargo planes helped both sides in Sudan's war

Five days ago on the scrubland of North Darfur, at the edge of the Sahara Desert, a Soviet cargo aircraft crashed and burst into a ball of fire, leaving no survivors. Items recovered from the wreckage, including identity documents, indicated that the airplane and its crew had ties to Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and the United Emirates (UAE…

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a year ago · Sudan War Monitor

In Ethiopia, ACLED’s Ethiopian Peace Observatory published a weekly update that as always, shines a much appreciated light on the slow rolling collapse of Africa’s second most populous country.

A particularly interesting development for me was the bit about Amharan nationalist Fano rebel militias now clashing - in strength - with the Ethiopian National Defence Force in eastern parts of Amhara Region, which are mostly populated by ethnic Amharan Muslims, who are the opposite of the constituency associated with the Fano groups, that is, Amharan Orthodox Christians.

The Fano ideological current, has usually been linked to Amharan Orthodox Christian nationalism, so to find that Fano rebels might be getting stronger in Eastern Amhara where the anti-Abiy Ahmed rebellion has been relatively weak, might point towards a greater buy in to some form of ethnic secularised Amharan nationalism bhy Muslim Amharan communities in that area.

ACLED’s update can be read HERE

Ken Opalo, in his Substack publication, An Africanist’s Perspective, breaks down what an Harris or a Trump victory would mean for US policy in Africa. It’s a really superb piece of analysis that I am actually excited to recommend you go read.

One thing he recommended - that I totally agree on - was that the US should decouple its African policy from Europe (specifically France,), and the Middle East (specifically the UAE). I would go further and say that the US should decouple its Nigeria policy in particular from the UK, especially in the security realm.

France and the UAE are various levels of spoilers on the African scene, the French from a superiority complex that still refuses to engage with African states especially its former colonies, as sovereign and independent peoples that do not have to tow its preferred lines.

The UAE on the other hand is trying to build an 18th century colonial empire, where it extracts resources from African states it sets on fire by arming one side or the other in local political disputes in return for access to minerals and other raw materials, as part of its post oil economic future.

While the problem with the US tying its policies on Nigeria to the UK’s institutional knowledge and alignment, is that the UK has no clue anymore what it is doing in Nigeria itself. So where the US should be doing what veteran US diplomat Johnnie Carson has recently called for and deepen its strategic relationship with Nigeria, it is relying to a great extent on the UK that itself has no clue what it wants its own strategic relationship with Nigeria to look like.

You can read Ken Opalo’s fantastic piece which is embedded below

An Africanist Perspective

Harris or Trump? What the outcome of the 2024 U.S. presidential election portends for America's Africa policy

Thank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe in order to receive timely updates…

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a year ago · 8 likes · Ken Opalo

To round off this edition of The Relevant Reads, I want to share two pieces that those with a love for history and strategy would love.

The first is from WarOnTheRocks and is titled “Attrition’s Apostle? Reading Vegetius In An Age Of Protracted Warfare”. If you are a military strategy nerd, you likely have heard of Publius Vegetius Renatus and his De Re Militari, or its original name Epitoma Rei Militaris so you already know the direction the featured WarOnTheRocks piece is heading towards.

I cannot recommend it enough, and you can find it HERE

And finally Engelsberg Ideas, has a new essay out titled “How The US Origin Myth Triumphed Over History”, you can find it HERE and its a really interesting read if you are trying to understand the American establishment psyche in particular.

I hope you enjoy and learn from these reads and as always, comments, critiques, and criticisms are appreciated and much welcome. Even in criticism there is something to be learnt.

If you enjoy what I write so far, you should share this newsletter with your friend and encourage them to subscribe. That helps my audience grow and supports my writing.

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Topic: Nigeria’s Binance Mistake or The Gambaryan Gamble

I hope y’all had a great weekend and got in some rest for this week’s activities. Today’s edition of The Relevant Information shares my thoughts on the Nigeria vs Binance saga, specifically the eight months imprisonment of Tigran Gambaryan and possible implications for the country.

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When midlevel Binance executives, Tigran Gambaryan and Nadeem Anjarwalla landed in Nigeria in February 2024, they had no inkling that rather than the compliance related exchanges they were promised would be held with Nigerian regulators, their visit was about to be a detention saga.

But detention it was to be, as security services quickly detained the men and transferred them from their hotel rooms, to a guest house supposedly belonging to the Office of the National Security Adviser(ONSA). A court order was soon obtained to hold both men in their personal capacity as crimes supposedly committed by Binance were investigated and charges prepared.

To cut a very long story short, in March, Nadeem Anjarwalla, who holds  Kenyan, British and Pakistani citizenship, like a proper African/South Asian, allegedly bribed his way into an escape out of ONSA’s custody in an episode that would make the writers of Prison Break fall over in laughter. This triggered the Nigerian government into moving Mr Gambaryan into Kuje Prison and charging him personally to court for alleged crimes Binance supposedly carried out.

And now in October, the Nigerian government dropped all charges against Mr Gambaryan, after pressure from s high up as the US Secretary of State, Congress and the Director of the FBI. The poor ex-US Internal Revenue Service investigator has been medically evacuated from Nigeria, and we can now call an end to this saga, or so we wish.

From where I sit, I believe that unless Mr Gambaryan is a firm believer in the doctrine of turning the other cheek, this story is far from over. He was arrested and detained over crimes that it would be hard to argue in any sane jurisdiction he bore personal responsibility for, after he had arrived in Abuja in good faith to engage with Nigerian regulators on how Binance could better comply with local regulations.

He was remanded to a prison, and detained in conditions that anyone who knows what a Nigerian prison is like, would be hard-pressed to defend as not inhumane, cruel and unusual punishment.

Oh and he contracted malaria and pneumonia while in prison. Malaria for us Nigerians might not seem like the biggest deal, but if you have ever seen a Westerner from a clime unaccustomed to being ravaged by malaria, go through it, you would would pity Mr Gambaryan. His wife and others claimed he had developed mobility issues from a herniated disk.

Why do I point out these facts? Well, Gambaryan is an American and US courts have recently been very open to allowing civil suits by Americans and foreigners alike against foreign states, go forward, and in that regard the entire saga with Mr Gambaryan leaves us exposed.

Our only saving grace, might be that the US State Department held off on designating him wrongfully detained, with the implications in US law and policy framework as that would carry,  as was demanded by several members of Congress.

Should Mr Gambaryan not be inclined to the doctrine of forgive and forget, we might end up in another PI&D/ type mess of a situation before foreign courts, or end up probably coughing up millions of dollars in settling judgements against us, as was recently ordered in the case of Louis Emovbira Williams.

If Gambaryan is vindictive enough to seek to punish us via US courts for his arrest and imprisonment over Binance’s alleged crimes, we would have no one but our government’s 'anyhowness' to blame.

Let me go all in and say that the way this administration has handled Binance has been completely unnecessary, and counterproductive to the greater good. Although it may have served the narrow minded interests of a few.

The first thing to understand is that the entire premise of Binance being used by currency speculators to manipulate the Naira’s exchange rates, is complete hogwash. Trading on Binance is not responsible for failed government policies, or the inability of an administration to tackle our fundamental economic challenges.

Now if you want to really understand how nonsensical that entire premise is, unless you were born yesterday (which hopefully you weren’t), you will recall that prior to Binance being founded in 2017, Nigeria had suffered a crushing foreign exchange crisis from 2015 right into 2017 when the naira stabilised at around N360 to a dollar.

We managed to hold the naira at that level until Covid delivered us back-to-reality slap, by burning through dollars earned from crude oil exports (of course we export nothing else of signifcant value) to fight the market. We did not correct our economic fundamentals, we did not carry out serious programmes to encourage manufacturing exports. We did nothing but throw billions of dollars into a forex market dumpster fire, while borrowing even more dollars at crazy interests rates to fund corruption-laden infrastructure projects of no utility.

Binance had absolutely nothing to do with our disastrous economic and political choices. In fact, I am of the opinion that Binance and crypto trading by small time traders, actually have helped us contain the economic pressures our youth would have otherwise had to face.

Binance especially, but also plaforms like Coinbase and Kraken, provided young Nigerians’ robbed of any hope of economic mobility by our governments, a means to earn some income that helped them literally survive. The Buhari Administration - clueless in nearly every aspect - was wise enough to largely leave Binance et al alone, even despite Emefiele’s attempted crypto ban.  

But again that is neither here nor there when we are talking about the own-foot-shooting way in which this administration is handling the Binance file.

In 2023, shortly after the President appointed his first batch of national security and defence service chiefs, I recall having conversations with two people separately, one a close friend, the other more a professional colleague so to say, both national security establishment functionaries.

Both conversations were about Binance in particular, and cryptocurrencies in general. My friend in particular was interested in really understanding how Binance and other cryptocurrency exchange platforms work, and the possible intersections between them and the fiscal plus economic crisis we could all see was going to hit the country circa 2024.

This conversation had come about because my friend had learnt that people in the new administration were off the bat pushing for the security agencies to clamp down on Binance, specifically as a hostile actor attacking our economy, but the security services were not quite yet convinced that this was the case.

The professional colleague on the other hand had been semi-formally tasked to prove that Binance was responsible for the Naira’s problems, our forex liquidity issues.

This person was on their part, not quite sure how to reasonably reach that conclusion, seeing as one could easily prove that currency round-tripping by the elite, including some of the very people and groups now in government has had more of an outsized impact on the country’s economic stability.

And they, like myself, also believed that while there are regulatory gaps that definitely need to be closed, Nigeria’s national interests especially in the face of economic instability, was best served by figuring out a way to cooperate with Binance and incentivise it to make investments in the country. Such investments could even be tailored to serve the administration’s political objectives PR wise. When they raised these concerns and suggestions, they were quickly shut down.

Binance’s legal troubles in the US, which were mostly borne out of US-China strategic competition (Binance’s founder is Chinese and its opaque ownership is believed to be largely Chinese too), soon provided an alleged convenient cover for the administration to tack on facilitating terrorism, as one of the things it would hold the crypto exchange liable for.

But in reality, our local insurgencies, whether jihadi or non jihadi are largely funded through direct taxation of illiterate rural dwellers, ransom payments, minerals extraction, and other physical economy means that do not intersect with the virtual digital world of Binance. Cash is king, and nowhere more so than in real life rural Nigeria.

And for the ISWAP, Boko Haram factions and Ansaru, that receive some funding from abroad; that money mostly gets moved through vetted physical bureau de change outfits via a sort of hawala system, where one outfit physically collects the dollars, dirhams or riyals abroad, and a local affiliate of theirs delivers an equivalent value in physical naira or CFA francs.

Plus in some cases, these groups  move cash via trusted couriers, to minimise the risk of interception in transit.

Now an argument could be made that a group like the Simon Ekpa faction of IPOB uses Binance and other cryptocurrency exchnages to move money, given their prolific digital presence and online fundraising.

However, a practical approach would have been to liaise with Binance et al and work with them to crackdown on such terror financing. The big sticks of fines, arrests of actual liable executives, prosecutions etc, would only come into play if Binance had proven uncooperative.

That was not the case as Binance soon as it got wind of Nigerian government complaints, first reached out formally and informally to find out how to work through whatever issues it may face, and then placed restrictions to assuage Abuja’s concerns, on Nigerians utilising its platforms.

Some of those restrictions included limiting P2P naira transactions, and capping how much naira could be offered for USDT in P2P transactions, in order to not inadvertently trigger any run on the Naira.

Whatever legitimate concerns the administration had, or whatever policies it wanted tweaked in its favour through the backdoor, they could have gotten those concessions and or ensured regulatory compliance as the case may be. And this could have been done, without arresting and putting in Kuje Prison for nearly eight months, mid-level Binance executives who were not the guys setting and directing  policy for the company.

The asinine manner in which this saga unfolded is best represented by the comments of a foreign diplomat in conversation with me, after the visit of two US Congressmen (a Republican and a Democrat) to Mr Gambaryan in June 2024, where said diplomat quipped that there’s obviously no point to the entire thing, unless one counts pissing off folks in Washington at a time Nigeria needs all the friends it can get, exposing the country to future litigation in more powerful jurisdictions, and increasing the risk profile of Nigeria when it comes to FDI inflows.

That last bit about increasing the risk profile of Nigeria as a destination for FDI inflows, hits close to home for me, as part of my personal extracurricular activities, I sometimes receive requests for information from foreign investors directed by diplomats, past clients and mutual associates, soliciting advice on their planned or ongoing investments in Nigeria. A common refrain I hear a lot nowadays, is worries about the potential for their staff or executives to get detained without any warning, and also without an apolitical due process.

For a country in the throes of probably the worst economic crisis in a generation, a crisis that itself broke the record of the Covid era economic crisis, which in turn broke the 2015-2017 economic crisis record; the last thing we should be doing is exacerbating our problems by piling regulatory uncertainty and unnecessary future litigation risks atop insecurity, poor logistics infrastructure, mass emigration of professionals and skilled labour, and a basically nonexisent electric grid.

But here we are.

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On this first edition of The Relevant Information Newsletter

• Welcome (and I Hope You Stick Around)

• Tinubu’s Bianca Ojukwu Manoeuvre

Welcome (And I Hope You Stick Around)

So I finally did it, I started a personal newsletter to share my thoughts and analyses on things happening in Nigeria, after years of being advised to do so, while politely demurring.

I have always looked at writing/public commentary from the prism of the Arab proverb that sort of says that “to write is to open up your brain and the level of your knowledge to inspection by your readers”, and in doing so I felt - and I still feel - that my brain or my knowledge is not worthy of being inspected by an audience of well informed, professional, and much more experienced people, in the topics that I opine on.

I really do not think I know and understand enough to justify me talking about things in public. Especially as there are more qualified people to opine.

So why did I finally do it?

The world as we knew it over the decades that I have been alive, is changing, and our hopelessly clueless ruling elite in Nigeria, seem to be oblivious to these changes, and are conducting themselves like it is still business as usual.

The collapse of oil prices in 2015-2017, shutting down our ability to finance their rapaciousness, did not clue them in. COVID and the social upheaval that followed when enlightened young people, tired of the bleakness of the boots of the Police, rose up and took to the streets under the banner of #EndSARS, did not succeed in clueing them up.

The rise of US-China rivalry, the Russo-Ukrainian War, a literal Israeli genocide against the  Palestinian people,  bankrolled and supported by the US/UK/EU and their allies in a cynical bid to settle the Middle East question to their advantage before the next World War; also seems to have failed to wisen up our ruling elite so far.

At the same time as the world is changing, we are dealing with a very uncertain and unstable situation back home in Nigeria, that seems to defy any useful prediction models.  The reality is, Nigeria is gradually collapsing in on itself, and we the Nigerian people are individually and collectively being brought to our knees.

The thing with reality is it doesn’t matter what your political or religious beliefs are, it is still going to serve you exactly what you get. So although some people who are members of the ruling APC might be inclined to call me a wailing wailer, reality is, what reality is.

And our reality is that whatever the National Bureau of Statistics or the Central Bank claims the inflation rate is, folks can feel that the real inflation rate is much higher. Nigerians today are united in lamenting how hunger is ravaging the land, how people’s wealth has been obliterated by government’s economic policies, and how purchasing power no longer exists.

A popular joke I have heard in English, Pijin and Hausa, is that today in Nigeria, if you were to save money in the morning, by evening, it will be the one saving you.

In the security realm - which is where I am much more familiar with professionally - rural Northern Nigeria is convulsing with the pains and turmoil of active security collapse. It is a complete farce to argue that there is a Nigerian State and a government in the countryside of the Northern region.  

And this is not to shit on the many soldiers, NSDC corpsmen, airmen, SSS operatives and Policemen, who are everyday doing the best that they can, within the limits they are facing.

However anyone who trades, travels, operates or frequently engages with the countryside across all three regions in Northern Nigeria, knows that it is the Wild West out there. Infested with armed groups who are terrorising people. Lawless. Brutal.

Day after day I come across people saying that they don’t understand what is happening in this country, and where we are heading. It doesn’t help that our ruling elite are continually trying to assure us that our eyes are not seeing what our eyes can clearly see.

So, to help folks make sense of what is happening in Nigeria’s politics, national security, global events as they affect us, and just national affairs generally, I decided to follow the constant advice I have been getting, and start The Relevant Information.

This is going to be my personal newsletter - hosted on Substack - where I intend to opine, comment, and provide analysis on these topics in two FREE newsletters weekly - Mondays and Fridays.

I will also drop an embedded newsletter , The Relevant Reads, on Wednesdays (don’t worry it’s also free and you are automatically subscribed), where I will share and talk about articles, reports, analyses from other places that I am reading that week. And there may be a free weekly pod, The Relevant Information Podcast, if I can figure out the modalities of producing it (my voice, hired readers or AI reading?).

If you love my content enough to want to support my work, I may turn on paid subscriptions at some point down the line, so watch out for that.

BUT don’t sweat it at all.

Paid subscriptions/pledges if they do get turned on for content, WILL ONLY BE FOR A SEPARATE paid embedded newsletter, not The Relevant Information Newsletter, not The Relevant Reads and definitely not The Relevant Information Podcast.

So for those of you who like the content but not enough to fork out cash for it, or perhaps you are also Nigerian and have on a very tight financial belt, you have nothing to worry about.

Finally, welcome and I really really hope you stick around. You can also support by sharing this post to your friends, liking our Facebook Page

And now, back to regularly scheduled programming.

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Tinubu’s Bianca Ojukwu Manoeuvre

On Wednesday October 23, 2024, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu reshuffled his cabinet, firing some ministers, and nominating new ones, subject to confirmation by the Senate.

Amongst the new nominees was the widow of late Biafran seccessionist leader Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Bianca Ojukwu, who was named as the new Minister of State for Foreign Affairs.

This development had people on social media, especially on Twitter (I refuse to acknowledge the name X), discussing the possible political reasons behind the President Tinubu’s decision, and as to the impact her appointment would have on his reelction chances in 2027.

One side of the debate loudly proclaimed that by appointing Bianca Ojukwu as a junior minister in his cabinet, the President made a genius move that would gain him broad regional support in the Southeast, because of her status as the Ojukwu’s widow.

Some of the people who think this was a genius political move to shore up the President’s position in the Southeast, have even gone so far as to say that by appointing her to his cabinet, he may even seriously undercut the enormously popular Peter Obi, the candidate of the Labour Party in the last election, whose support base is in that region.

The other side of the debate has largely contended that her appointment is irrelevant, as Igbos (the predominant ethnic group in the Southeast for the non Nigerians reading), are not a people that are swayed by the political preferences of their elite.

Some on this side have even gone so far as to declare Bianca Ojukwu a political nobody, incapable of winning an election even within the Ojukwu clan. Which to be fair, is a harsh but fairly accurate description of her political capital.

From her previous stints as a High Commissioner to Ghana, Ambassador in Spain, and Permanent Representative to the UN World Tourism Organisation she has earned a reputation of competence. But politically she has not demonstrated a record of either mobilising voters, mobilising political elites behind her or even influencing popular thinking.

In 2018, she ran for the ticket of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) to represent Anambra South Senatorial District, the district her late husband’s hometown, Nnewi, falls under, in the 2019 elections. She never made it past the primaries.

APGA is the party under whose banner her late husband had contested for Nigeria’s presidency severally. In fact, APGA was not just a party Ojukwu ran for office under, APGA was Ojukwu’s party, and at one point was the party that most closely represented the streets of the Southeast.

There’s a good article here  that lays out the story of how she not only lost the primaries, but was never even a serious candidate for the ticket, not to talk of the general elections, beyond the hype of having been Ojukwu’s wife.

However what she lacks in terms of the actual power that comes with being a political force, she has somewhat replaced through the prestige, privilege, and access that being the daughter of the late Christian Onoh (former Governor of the old Anambra State), a man of many accomplishments, and the wife of the Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, has given her.

Her sister, Lilian Onoh was an Ambassador to Namibia and Jamaica, while another sister Nuzo Onoh (a celebrated writer) was married to Goeffrey Onyeama, the Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Buhari years- although that marriage allegedly ended acrimoniously.

If Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a consummate political strategist (he is), surrounded by a tight group of skilled political operators (he has such a group), then what would be his motives for appointing a political lightweight to hold the ministerial slot for Anambra State in his cabinet?

The President flanked by some of his closest advisers. Copyright SolaceBase.com

The answer to this question is two-fold. One part goes through his relationship with the current governor of Anambra, Charles Chukwuma Soludo, and the other has to do with the calculations for the 2027 elections.

The current Anambra governor and the incumbent President of Nigeria are known to be real life friends, and while Soludo is not in the APC (he is in APGA), he is in no way, shape or form any sort of opposition to the President. He comes from the same school of economic thought as the President does, and currently supports the administration as an economic adviser.

Like Bianca Ojukwu, Governor Soludo is not the typical Anambra politician, he is every bit an intellectual and elitist, who is not known for being tied to the grassroots.

However unlike Bianca, he had the money, the vault full of favours owed to him, political acumen and enough powerful supporters to ensure he became governor over the machinations of the traditional grassroots politicians in the state. Politically within APGA, where she serves as a member of the party’s Board of Trustees, Bianca Ojukwu has been noted as a firm supporter of Governor Soludo, for years prior to his becoming governor.

Soludo’s personal relationship with the President, played a role in Bianca Ojukwu’s cabinet nomination, but it was not the only factor.

Charles Chukwuma Soludo and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Copyright The Guardian Nigeria

The most important factor for why she was nominated is the 2027 elections, and it has nothing to do with the votes she can muster or the political heavyweights she could potentially mobilise. Rather, it has everything to do with her prominence. And elite status.

To understand this, one has to realistically study how the 2023 Presidential Election was decided. While it is popular on Twitter for activists and young people to say the President didn’t win the election legally, this flies in the face of reality. The reality is he won the election both through the frontdoor and also the backdoor, and not necessarily through the blatant rigging of the polls that supporters of Labour Party’s Peter Obi would like to believe he did.

If we are talking reality, in short form elections in Nigeria are won through the frontdoor - I.e gathering required threshold numbers, winning prescribed constitutional geographical percentages, ensuring your paperwork is in order - and also through the backdoor. The backdoor is where voter bribery, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing (in the old days), lawfare to overwhelm the competition pre-election, and judicial manipulation post election, all come into play.

Of the four main candidates in the 2023 election, only one (the current president) had a solid numbers mobilisation game in four of the six geopolitical zones of the country. The Atiku campaign lost the numbers game in the Southeast and South South , through its own unforced errors, when Peter Obi defected to the Labour Party unannounced with his base, and Nyesom Wike was snubbed for the Vice Presidential ticket in favour of Ifeanyi Okowa.

The Obi campaign simply couldn’t get the numbers it needed in Northern Nigeria, and Kwankwaso was too financially under-resourced to mobilise voters outside Kano State.

The Tinubu campaign on the other hand  barely managed to scale through via the frontdoor. in the three Northern zones and the Southwest, placed where political leaders control or strongly influence large voting blocs.Its scaling through in those regions was ultimately possible because of the political and economic alliances it made, however its core weakness lay in the Southeast and South South.

In the Southeast and South South, political blocs with grassroots and street power barely exist, and if the people dislike you (as they largely do the APC coupled with a very unpopular candidate nationally), your entire hope lies on winning through the backdoor.

But in order for the victory gotten via the backdoor to survive post election scrutiny, you need to be able to imbue it with legitimacy. To do so, you require legitimate institutions, credible figures e.t.c to either rally around it, or be entirely silent.

And since what was required was 25% of votes cast in the Southeast and South South, this was a very easy sleight of hand to be pulled, minus the 'extraness' a certain governor did in delivering his South South state.

In the case of 2023, legitimate institutions pulled the strings that produced the numbers, and credible elite figures came out in support of the current President. This ensured that while accounts of Obidients on Twitter were railing that their candidate had been rigged out in his core base region, they could easily be dismissed by the various organisations (media, international observers, diplomatic missions etc) that bestow Third World elections with credibility and political legitimacy.

In 2024, the current administration has presided over the most dramatic economic decline witnessed by the young people, who make up the majority of voters. It is easily the most unpopular administration since the 1999, in fact dislike of it is one thing this otherwise fragmented country, unites on. But like every group of people who come into power, this government intends to retain the Presidency in 2027.

For the Northern regions and the Southwest, perhaps there’s a strategy to reach deals with regional and local elites, and spend massive amounts of money to ensure that they manage to scale through in those areas.

For the South South and Southeast, they solely need to clear the prescribed constitutional bare minimum through any means necessary, and have it legitimised by local elites who can be used to discredit platformless youths dissatisfied with the results.

While Bianca Ojukwu may not be as politically relevant as some people think is necessary to win the Southeast, she carries a credible enough name and possesses the elite credentials to lend the needed credibility and legitimacy to claims of support that justifies the ticket getting that constitutional bare minimum, in a region that hates the candidate.

And lest we reduce the entire game to her and her appointment, remember, she is just one person, one appointee.

All is after all fair in love, war and Nigerian politics.

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