In the early hours of Saturday, 29 August 2026, gunfire erupted in parts of the parts of Niamey, the capital city of Niger Republic. Presidential Guard troops under the direct command of Niger's military ruler, General Abdourahamane Tiani, were deployed to deal with the gunmen, whose identities were then unknown. The areas where gunfire was heard include sectors adjacent to the Presidential Villa, the paratrooper barracks, and Air Base 101, which is located within the perimeter of the Diori Hamani International Airport.

Initially, many in the Niger Republic believed local jihadi terrorist groups operating in the Sahel had infiltrated the capital to cause mayhem; however, it soon became clear that renegade young officers were attempting a military coup.

The video below, recorded by a local citizen, captures the sounds of automatic gunfire during the pre-dawn firefight between the Presidential Guard and the mutineers on Saturday morning:

For several months, soldiers deployed to Tillabéri, Ouallam, Téra, and Dosso— all towns located less than 200 km (124 miles) from the capital—have been suffering heavy casualties at the hands of jihadi terrorists belonging to Islamic State- West African Province (ISWAP), Islamic State – Sahel Province (ISSP), and the al-Qaeda-aligned Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM).

There has been great anger among the deployed troops who feel that the military junta has not provided them with adequate support. The disgruntled young officers— including those from special forces units— who participated in the coup were stationed in those frontline towns being decimated by jihadi terrorists.

By the late hours of the morning, it had become clear that the coup d’etat had failed. The putschists abandoned their attempt to seize the Presidential Villa after encountering stiff resistance from the Presidential Guard troops. Under the withering firepower of the Guard troops, the putschists retreated to their strongholds in Air Base 101 and the nearby paratrooper barracks.

When I began this article on Saturday morning, the military junta was still attempting to resolve the crisis peacefully. Junta officials were attempting to negotiate the surrender of the putschists, likely because they recognized that the mutineers’ grievances were genuine and, more importantly, that the renegade military units had abandoned sensitive positions on the battlefront against the jihadists in order to carry out the coup d’état.

Below is a video of troops loyal to the junta patrolling the streets of Niamey in armoured personnel carriers in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday:

Of course, I expect the usual clueless commentators in alt-media to echo the claims of Niger state television, which began laying the blame on France without providing any shred of evidence.

The same Niger state television had previously claimed that neighbouring Nigeria, and Benin Republic were “sponsoring terrorists” even though both countries are also battling jihadi terrorists on their own soil. The military forces of Benin and Nigeria even coordinate their anti-terrorism campaign with the armed forces of Niger. But then, the Tchiani-led military junta needs scapegoats to deflect blame from their inability to solve their security problems.

Hilariously, the ruling junta and its entire media apparatus ceased accusing Algeria of “sponsoring terrorists” as soon as ENAFOR— a subsidiary of the Algerian petroleum company Sonatrach— agreed to invest its technical and financial resources in extracting crude oil from the northern desert of Niger, at Kafra, near the shared border between the two countries.

But then, these are tidbits that fly over the heads of most alt-media commentators, who don’t even think evidence is necessary to prove any allegations levelled by the ruling juntas of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso.

Most alt-media commentators don’t even know that Malian junta officials have also ceased their own absurd allegations against Algeria.

Below is a short video clip of Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune receiving a visiting delegation of Malian junta officials on 24 August 2026:

As shown in the video clip, senior Malian junta official, Major-General Abdoulaye Maïga, even saluted the Algerian leader. It goes without saying that all Malian state media outlets have been instructed to cease their propaganda against Algeria. Alt-media commentators in the West are yet to get that memo.

The campaign to demonize Algerian government began when it insisted that the Malian junta honour the terms of the peace agreement previously reached with the Tuareg secessionists. The junta’s repudiation of that agreement in January 2024 was what drove the secular Tuareg separatist fighters into an alliance of convenience with their bitter jihadist enemies in the JNIM. The fact that the multi-ethnic JNIM terror group is led by the anti-secessionist Tuareg jihadist Iyad Ag Ghali also helped smooth the path toward the formation of the loose rebel alliance.

Given that Algeria is a staunch ally of Russia and its second largest trade partner in Africa after Egypt, it is no surprise that the Kremlin repeatedly applied pressure on the ruling juntas of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali to make peace with Algiers.

Finally, Algeria’s recent decision to break with longstanding African Union (AU) policy and officially recognize the Sahelian military juntas as “legitimate governments” was highly instrumental in thawing tensions between Algiers and the regimes on its Southern border.

Again, these are important pieces of information that elude many alt-media commentators, who don’t require any evidence to immediately jump to the conclusion that external actors are responsible for every negative event that occurs on the African continent.

As usual, confirmation bias will drive alt-media pundits to hurriedly accept all claims of external involvement in the failed coup d’etat in Niger. After all, we are dealing with highly superficial individuals who cannot tell the difference between a Nigerian (citizen of Nigeria) and a Nigerien (citizen of Niger Republic), and yet remain 100 percent convinced that they are experts on Africa.

Many alt-media pundits have still not retracted their triumphalist claim that the coup d’etat in Gabon on 30 August 2023 was an anti-French revolution. In reality, that particular coup was merely an exercise in reconfiguring the ruling Francophile Bongo Dynasty that remains in power to this day. Military members of the Bongo Dynasty had toppled the ailing President Ali Bongo and other civilian family members because their incompetence and unpopularity threatened to collapse nearly 60 years of dynastic rule in Gabon.

My analysis of events in Gabon published in 3 September 2023 was later validated by a secret video recording leaked in November 2025. The leaked footage showed an apologetic Brice Nguema urging previously detained civilian Bongo family members not to be resentful of their treatment, explaining that his junta had acted for the good of the ruling Bongo Dynasty.

In the minds of many alt-media commentators, African countries are always passive subjects trapped inside an ongoing geopolitical struggle for influence. These commentators interpret every action taken by African political figures as either aligned with the “good” Russia-China axis or the “bad” US-led NATO axis. There is little interest in learning the history and political culture of the individual country (or African subregion) in order to gain a nuanced understanding of current events unfolding on the continent.

At a time when alt-media pundits were wrongly predicting an imminent military invasion of Niger Republic by “puppets of USA and France”, I made the following prescient prediction in early August 2023, which turned out to be spot on:

There is no doubt that France and USA desperately wants ECOWAS to intervene in Niger. Both countries are frustrated and disappointed that a military intervention has not already begun. But the fact of the matter is that the final decision to intervene does not rest with those NATO countries. An actual ECOWAS intervention would depend a lot on the domestic political situation both in Nigeria and in Niger Republic. Until then, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan and Macron would have to read the tea leaves like everybody else.

I also wrote the following about Nigerian President Bola Tinubu who was then the chairman of ECOWAS :

Unless, Tinubu can find a way to neutralize domestic opposition, it is doubtful he would be willing to order the Nigerian Air Force circling the skies and troops of the Nigerian Army at the border to enter Niger. It is as simple as that. Officials of France, EU and USA have mostly been reduced to following Nigeria’s meandering political system instead of calling the shots.

The consistent point I have made through the series of articles I wrote after in the July 2023 Niger coup d’état is that local political actors in my subregion (West Africa) have their own agency. Neither France nor the United States had the kind of unlimited powers of influence conferred upon them by alternative media commentators, most of whom did not even know that a country named Niger Republic existed prior to the July 2023 coup d’état.

The attempted military coup d’etat that occurred on 29 August 2026 comes as no surprise to anyone who understands the history and political culture of Niger Republic. Three years ago, on 13 August 2023, I published an article, which contained the following line:

Of course, if the coup leaders follow the standard trajectory of Niger history and fight among themselves for power, then that could also cause enough political instability…

Yes, I predicted that another coup d’etat would follow the one that brought the Tchiani-led military junta to power because in many African countries, coups beget coups. It is a vicious circle, which often has nothing to do with external powers like France and United States, but personal ambitions of individual army officers, ethnic tensions within a country or even disgruntlement over the incompetence of the ruling junta that had come to power in an earlier coup.

Anyone who is astute in African history knows that the vast majority of coup d’etats on the continent are not motivated by any political ideology. Ideology played no role in the March 2003 coup d’état in the Central African Republic, where the pro-French civilian President Ange-Félix Patassé was overthrown by the similarly French-aligned figure, Army General François Bozizé.

Another good example are the twin coup d’etats that took place in Burkina Faso in 2022. Contrary to claims made in alternative media, there was no genuine ideological basis behind the first coup that deposed the elected Kaboré government in January 2022 and the second coup that overthrew the succeeding military junta led by Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Henri Damiba in September 2022.

The deposed civilian President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré was no “puppet” of France. In fact, he had a rocky relationship with France, which reached its peak in November 2017 when Kaboré angrily walked out in the middle of Emmanuel Macron’s speech, following the French leader’s dismissive remarks on neocolonialism. A surprised Macron laughed nervously and cracked a joke about Kaboré walking out to go fix the room’s air-conditioning system, which was not working.

Watch the video below:

Five years later, President Kabore was displaced by the virulently anti-French military regime of Lieutenant-Colonel Henri-Paul Damiba, which was in turn displaced by another virulently anti-French military regime led by Captain Ibrahim Traore, eight months later.

That, of course, begs the question— what justifies one anti-French military regime violently displacing another anti-French military regime? Are these coups really about “restoration of sovereignty” and “anti-imperialism” or about seeking power for its own sake?

Without equivocation, let me reiterate my contrarian view of the current military ruler of Burkina Faso, which was fleshed out in a previous article:

Many alternative media commentators in the West hold a romanticised view of Captain Ibrahim Traore, but he is neither an idealist nor a fiery radical like Thomas Sankara. Like his counterparts in other African countries, he is pragmatically seeking to expand the international relations of Burkina Faso.

Having progressed from expelling the French Ambassador in 2023 to completely severing diplomatic relations with France in 2026, the Traore junta has burned its last bridges with Élysée Palace. The temporary suspension of €482 million ($530 million) in French government funds earmarked for Burkina Faso can now be regarded as permanent.

For obvious reasons, the Traore-led military junta is seeking to add new sources of external funding. The pariah State of Israel— eager to hold onto friendly African states— may be willing to help out Burkina Faso in this regard.

This would also explain why the Burkinabe military ruler signed a five-year bilateral deal with the Trump Administration to support his country’s efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases.

Circling back to fresh coup attempt in Niger on Saturday 29 August 2026, I would never exclude the possibility of external involvement. However, there is no reason to believe at this stage that the botched putsch is anything, but an internal domestic matter.

In fact, I suspect that the recent decision by the Nigerien junta to release several JNIM terrorists and one Malian Tuareg separatist leader from custody may have been the final straw for the disgruntled Nigerien army officers behind the coup attempt.

In addition to fighting terrorists on its own soil, Nigerien armed forces have been providing cross-border artillery and air support to neighbouring Mali in its own battles against JNIM terrorists who operate on both sides of the international frontier separating the two countries.

Nigerien military ruler General Tchiani was acting at the request of the Malian junta when he authorized the exchange of 24 JNIM jihadists and the token Malian Tuareg separatist leader for 60 Malian troops captured by the loose rebel alliance of FLA and JNIM.

Below is a video of the released separatist leader Inkinane Ag Attaher on Friday, 28 August, reuniting with his comrades from the Malian Tuareg secessionist organisation, the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), after more than 16 months in Nigerien custody:

Below is a wide shot video of Azawad Liberation Front on Nigerien soil, preparing to exchange some of the 60 Malian prisoners of war in their custody:

I don’t have a video of the release of 24 JNIM terrorists, who were also part of the prisoner exchange.

The coup attempt in Niger erupted less than 24 hours after the very JNIM terrorists responsible for inflicting heavy casualties on Nigerien troops were set free. Until, more information comes out, my working theory remains that the prisoner exchange was the immediate trigger for the putsch.

LATE SATURDAY EVENING UPDATE:

Having failed to capture military ruler General Tchiani in his residence due to strong resistance put up by the loyalist Presidential Guard, the putschists retreated to Air Base 101 and the nearby paratrooper barracks.

Russian paramilitary force deployed in Niger Republic was not involved in the fierce fighting between the loyalist and mutinous Nigerien troops on Saturday morning. This changed in the evening hours.

The 350 Italian military instructors providing counter-terrorism training to Nigerien troops remained uninvolved throughout the coup saga.

At the outset, the Nigerien military junta was alarmed that the mutinous officers had pulled frontline military units away from the battle against jihadi terrorists in the towns of Tillabéri, Ouallam, Téra, and Dosso to execute the coup in Niamey.

The junta’s initial strategy was to resolve the coup peacefully, hoping to avoid pulling loyalist military units away from the jihadi frontlines to confront the putschists holed up at Air Base 101 and the paratrooper barracks.

However, the window for a peaceful resolution closed in the evening hours of Saturday. As negotiations deteriorated and the mutineers refused to back down, the junta abandoned peaceful resolution in favor of a violent crackdown. The junta requested the assistance of the Kremlin.

Supported by Russian paramilitaries, the Presidential Guard and other loyalist military units pulled from jihadi frontlines launched a bloody counter-offensive to reclaim Air Base 101 and and the nearby paratrooper barracks from the mutineers.

Several mutineers were killed while others were captured alive. The video clip below shows some of the young putschists apprehended after Air Base 101 was stormed by loyalist forces:

Just before going to press, various countries— including Turkey, Algeria, Burkina Faso and Mali— issued official statements, condemning the coup attempt. Meanwhile, delighted jihadi terrorists of the JNIM, ISWAP and ISSP are said to be fighting harder on Saturday evening, encouraged by the absence of both mutinous and loyalist Nigerien troops from the frontlines far from Niamey.

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Jihadi terrorists in Nigeria for the umpteenth time slaughter loads of Muslims in their mosque for rejecting their Salafist revolutionary interpretation of (Sunni) Islam.

This atrocity will, of course, be ignored by US-based Zionist propagandists and AIPAC-controlled US politicians (e.g. Congressman Riley Moore) who pretend that jihadists exclusively target Christians— as opposed to actively targeting adherents of both Abrahamic faiths for different reasons.

For those who are new to the blog, you can read the previous articles listed below to understand what is actually happening in our neck of the woods:

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Despite being recognized by 46 out of 54 African states, Israel operates a paltry 12 embassies on African soil. For comparison, the nominal State of Palestine, recognized by 52 African nations, operates 26 embassies.

Because of its small diplomatic footprint on the continent, Israel usually has one ambassador representing its interests in multiple countries simultaneously. Simon Seroussi is both the resident Israeli Ambassador to Ivory Coast and non-resident Ambassador to Burkina Faso, Benin, and Togo.

As I am going to be explaining in a future deep-dive Substack article, the Israelis have been aggressive in investing money and other resources to keep African countries on side.

Of course, the results have not been as great as Israel had hoped. Friendly African nations continue to navigate the middle ground, preserving amicable ties with the Zionist state while publicly demanding respect for Palestinian self-determination. The governments of these African countries happily benefit from Israeli largesse, while maintaining their recognition of the State of Palestine.

Israeli frustration with that state of affairs has found expression in an analytical article published on the website of the Tel Aviv University-affiliated Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) :

The behaviour of the Traoré junta in Burkina Faso has undoubtedly astonished the “anti-imperialist” alt-media commentators, who know very little about African politics, but nevertheless speak confidently on the subject matter.

For those who have deep understanding of Africa and follow political events on the continent carefully, there were enough signs to show that Captain Ibrahim Traoré is not the “revolutionary” his admirers make him out to be.

Avid readers of my Substack will recall that in a previous article critiquing the US Congressional Report on the fake “Nigerian Christian Genocide”, I digressed a bit, dedicating some paragraphs to reporting the process of rapprochement between the Trump Administration and the military juntas of both Mali and Burkina Faso.

Here is a long excerpt from that article published in March:

[News] has arrived that the Traoré-led military junta in Burkina Faso has signed a five-year bilateral deal with the Trump Administration to support the West African country’s efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases.

News of rapprochement between Trump and Traoré may come as a shock to alternative media pundits who regularly claim the Sahelian states hate the “imperialist United States”. I have stated many times in the past that anti-French sentiment does not translate to dislike for the United States.

….

The military regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso have never sought to expel American ambassadors on their territory. Despite their public rhetoric, both military juntas had tried unsuccessfully to develop ties with the United States, which they view differently from France.

In May 2021, the military junta of Mali expressed an interest in buying US weapons, but the Biden Administration was not interested. By October 2021, the Malian junta had pivoted to buying Russian military equipment. In December 2021, Russian Wagner mercenaries landed in Mali after the military junta signed a contract and paid Yevgeny Prigozhin a handsome fee.

….

Unsurprisingly, the reaction of the Biden Administration to Russia’s shipment of advanced weaponry to Mali was apoplectic. The Malian junta had ignored repeated warnings from the US State Department not to purchase military equipment from Russia, which was under US and EU sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine six months prior. The next year, in July 2023, the Biden Administration imposed sanctions on Malian junta officials for “facilitating the expansion of Wagner in West Africa.”

With return of the highly transactional (and unpredictable) Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025, the ruling junta in Mali began to seek US investment and assistance to counter Islamist insurgents.

As a goodwill gesture, the Trump Administration dropped Biden-era sanctions against Mali junta officials. News reports now indicate that the United States is close to securing a deal to resume intelligence-gathering flights and drone operations over Malian territory to help the military junta fight jihadi terrorists.

Unlike his predecessor, President Trump does not see the presence of Russian paramilitaries on Malian soil as an impediment to working out a deal with the ruling junta on security matters and minerals such as gold and lithium. From Trump’s perspective, Biden’s policy of non-engagement with the ruling junta was foolish as it allowed Russia to gain a monopoly of influence in Mali.

Despite Mali’s current struggle against the rebel coalition of secular Tuareg separatists and outright jihadi terrorists, and the assassination of Defence Minister Sadio Camara, who had supported re-engagement with the United States, there are no signs that the Malian junta’s rapprochement with the Trump Administration has been discontinued. Burkina Faso’s separate agreement with Trump has similarly not been affected by the surge in jihadi terrorism in the Sahel.

Despite requesting the withdrawal of US troops, Niger Republic has managed to maintain amicable diplomatic relations with the United States, with the then-Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon presenting her credentials to junta leader General Tchiani on 12 May 2025.

From what I can see, the military juntas of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali are all interested in following the same multi-vector foreign policy pursued by other African countries. In the case of Burkina Faso, this policy extends to deepening pre-existing ties with Israel, which is the preeminent client state of USA.

It is important to note that Burkina Faso’s diplomatic relations with Israel is old, and has had its ups and downs. Burkina Faso established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1961, severed those ties in 1973 in solidarity with Egypt during the Yom Kippur War, and then restored the relationship in 1993.

Many alternative media commentators in the West hold a romanticised view of Captain Ibrahim Traore, but he is neither an idealist nor a fiery radical like Thomas Sankara. Like his counterparts in other African countries, he is pragmatically seeking to expand the international relations of Burkina Faso.

Having progressed from expelling the French Ambassador in 2023 to completely severing diplomatic relations with France in 2026, the Traore junta has burned its last bridges with Élysée Palace. The temporary suspension of €482 million ($530 million) in French government funds earmarked for Burkina Faso can now be regarded as permanent.

For obvious reasons, the Traore-led military junta is seeking to add new sources of external funding. The pariah State of Israel— eager to hold onto friendly African states— may be willing to help out Burkina Faso in this regard.

Of course, Captain Traore’s closeness to the Netanyahu regime would have no impact on Burkina Faso’s recognition of the State of Palestine, and its official policy of calling for an end to Zionist occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and West Bank.

Israel has already grudgingly accepted that sub-Saharan African countries will always maintain their dual policy of maintaining friendly relations with the Zionist state while vocally expressing sympathy for the Palestinians. What worries the Israelis the most is a repeat of the diplomatic catastrophe of 1973 that saw nearly all African states sever diplomatic relations, expel Israeli diplomats and shut down Israeli embassies across the continent.

These Israeli worries are reflected in the analytical article published by the INSS think-tank:

I completely understand the fears of the Israelis. In the 1960s, they spent a fortune helping newly independent sub Saharan states, building agricultural stations, water supply systems, public buildings, roads, housing estates, factories, flying schools, shipping companies, and airports. Hundreds of African students gained scholarships to study at Israeli universities. The Israelis trained the security services and military forces of Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Dahomey (now Benin Republic) and Ethiopia.

Despite all these calculated acts of generosity, those African countries could not help, but notice the eerie resemblance between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the darkest chapters of European colonial oppression on the continent. So, when Israel found itself at war with Egypt in 1973, most African states united to kick out Israeli diplomats from most of the continent. By 1976, only 4 African countries still hosted Israeli embassies. They were apartheid South Africa, Malawi, Swaziland, and Lesotho. The last three were minnow states bribed by South Africa’s apartheid regime to align with its foreign policy objectives.

Notwithstanding the reinstatement of diplomatic ties between various African governments and the Zionist state in the 1990s, Israeli government officials still feel insecure, sensing that the diplomatic standing of their country on the continent remains precarious.

These fears are reinforced by a pattern of public humiliations suffered by various Israeli foreign ministry officials on the continent. In February 2023, Israeli foreign ministry official Sharon Bar-Li was expelled from an African Union (AU) summit she was attending. More recently, in April 2025, Israeli Ambassador to Ethiopia, Dr. Avraham Neguise, was similarly expelled from a commemoration ceremony hosted by the AU for the victims of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

It will take more than the warm reception of Ambassador Simon Seroussi in Burkina Faso to erase the lingering unease felt by Israeli foreign policy experts specializing in African affairs.

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Moving on to the second report…

As expected, the Tuareg separatists are mostly confined to Northern Mali as they don’t really care about the rest of the country. The jihadists of JNIM are present in all regions of Mali. They are in Northern Mali, which has largely been abandoned by Russian paramilitaries and Malian troops. The JNIM terrorists are also present in Central and Southern Mali, where they are contesting the military junta’s control of both regions.

Having abandoned most of the North to reinforce defence of the densely populated South, the Russian paramilitaries and Malian troops have successfully thwarted attempts by JNIM terrorists to besiege Bamako by cutting all supply roads in and out of the capital city. A withering wave of Russian and Malian airstrikes, conducted with manned and unmanned aircraft against the recalcitrant terrorists, certainly helped keep at least two major supply roads fully open.

In my last report, I stated that ISGS— which views rival JNIM jihadists, Tuareg separatists, the Malian junta, and Russian paramilitaries to be their enemies—had expanded its territorial holdings near the Mali-Niger border, capitalizing on the chaos that followed last month’s blitzkrieg-style attacks by Tuareg separatists and JNIM terrorists. However, Malian troops and Russian fighters, equipped with surveillance drones, have since reversed some of the gains made by ISGS terrorists by recapturing the Malian border village of Labbezanga with the aid of Niger troops firing artillery from their own side of border. The fact that ISGS won’t work with the more powerful JNIM certainly helped.

As I predicted in my previous report, there have been recriminations in certain quarters of Malian society, with some claiming the “Russians betrayed Mali”. They cite the fact that Malian Army Brigadier-General El Hadj Ag Gamou had warned the Russians about the 25 April blitz attacks three days in advance, yet nothing was done.

Brigadier-General Gamou belongs to a small faction of Tuareg separatists who abandoned the cause of “Azawad Independence” in 1996, made peace with the Malian state authorities and and joined the government army. He was serving as military governor of the Northern Malian city of Kidal when it was overrun by the Tuareg separatists, who consider him a traitor. In addition to his role as a senior Malian Army officer, he also runs a separate pro-government militia comprising 700 members, 500 of whom are ethnic Tuaregs who rejected the secessionist movement.

The Russians, of course, have rejected all accusations of betrayal regarding the loose rebel alliance’s blitz offensive on 25 April. Because Malian junta leader Assimi Goïta fully trusts the Russians, negative commentary from lower-level junta officials will not affect bilateral relations with the Kremlin. In other words, the broader diplomatic and military partnership between Mali and Russia remains secure.

The recriminations did not only target the Russians; they also affected certain Malian Army officers and soldiers, who were denounced as “traitors” and arrested by the ruling junta. Subsequently, JNIM spokesman Bina Diarra issued a mocking statement, encouraging paranoid Malian authorities to keep purging their armed forces, noting that the internal division directly benefits his terrorist group.

Undoubtably, the purges would exacerbate low morale among Malian troops— a problem that existed long before the Russians entered the picture in December 2021. I discussed this problem in greater detail in the comment section of my previous report.

In last few days, Russian and Malian warplanes have been bombing the positions of secular Tuareg separatists and JNIM terrorists across the country. Unfortunately, bombing only SLOWS DOWN the loose rebel alliance. It has no effect in routing them.

The Kremlin has sent more ammunition, military aircraft, UAVs, radars and other essential military equipment to Mali, but what is really needed is more Russian paramilitary fighters as the current numbers are not sufficient.

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It has been slightly over a week since a loose rebel alliance of Tuareg separatists (FLA) and outright jihadi terrorists (JNIM) attacked several towns and cities in the Republic of Mali, which has never had full control of all its territories, especially in the North. The few some cities and towns in Northern Mali held by the military junta were those captured in 2023 by Russian paramilitaries, who braved sandstorms to fight the rebel alliance.

During a massive wave of blitzkreig-style attacks launched by jihadi terrorists and their allies, the Tuareg separatists, numerous Malian soldiers were killed. Among the most senior fatalities was General Sadio Camara, the Minister of Defence and a central figure in the ruling military junta. An unspecified number of Russian paramilitaries were also killed.

Those who are avid readers of my Substack will recall that in my article critiquing the US Congressional Report on the fake “Nigerian Christian Genocide”, I digressed a bit, dedicating a few paragraphs to reporting the process of rapprochement between the Trump Administration and the military juntas of both Mali and Burkina Faso. That development was a far cry from last year when both juntas condemned the United States over Trump’s blanket ban on issuing US visas to citizens of 25 African nations, including Mali and Burkina Faso. Both juntas subsequently reciprocated by banning Americans from their country.

I wrote the following about negotiations between the United States and Mali :

The military regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso have never sought to expel American ambassadors on their territory. Despite their public rhetoric, both military juntas had tried unsuccessfully to develop ties with the United States, which they view differently from France.

In May 2021, the military junta of Mali expressed an interest in buying US weapons, but the Biden Administration was not interested. By October 2021, the Malian junta had pivoted to buying Russian military equipment. In December 2021, Russian Wagner mercenaries landed in Mali after the military junta signed a contract and paid Yevgeny Prigozhin a handsome fee.

Unsurprisingly, the reaction of the Biden Administration to Russia’s shipment of advanced weaponry to Mali was apoplectic. The Malian junta had ignored repeated warnings from the US State Department not to purchase military equipment from Russia, which was under US and EU sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine six months prior. The next year, in July 2023, the Biden Administration imposed sanctions on Malian junta officials for “facilitating the expansion of Wagner in West Africa.”

With return of the highly transactional (and unpredictable) Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025, the ruling junta in Mali began to seek US investment and assistance to counter Islamist insurgents.

As a goodwill gesture, the Trump Administration dropped Biden-era sanctions against Mali junta officials. News reports now indicate that the United States is close to securing a deal to resume intelligence-gathering flights and drone operations over Malian territory to help the military junta fight jihadi terrorists.

Unlike his predecessor, President Trump does not see the presence of Russian paramilitaries on Malian soil as an impediment to working out a deal with the ruling junta on security matters and minerals such as gold and lithium. From Trump’s perspective, Biden’s policy of non-engagement with the ruling junta was foolish as it allowed Russia to gain a monopoly of influence in Mali.

Before he was killed by jihadi terrorists, General Sadio Camara had been a supporter of the rapprochement with the United States. He was one of several Mali junta officials removed from the US government list of sanctioned individuals by President Donald Trump. Going forward, I wonder what impact Sadio’s death— and the current political situation in Mali— would have on agreements already reached between the junta and the Trump Administration.

Meanwhile, Euro-American corporate media and individual French-aligned commentators have been gloating, claiming the debacle unfolding in Mali since 25 April is due to the removal of “superior” French troops and their replacement with “inferior” Russian mercenaries (which has since transformed into a government paramilitary force known as “Afrika Korps”).

On the opposite end, we have the “anti-imperialist” alternative media outlets and individual Russia-aligned commentators claiming that the loose rebel alliance is actually some kind of French intelligence-backed group that is sowing chaos in Mali as payback for the humiliating manner in which the French Ambassador, French military bases and French troops were kicked out of the African country.

As always the truth is far more complex than the simplistic nonsense presented by both sides.

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ADDRESSING MAINSTREAM MEDIA CLAIMS

Mainstream media and France-aligned commentators obviously are being disingenuous. French troops were stationed in Mali for nine years, starting in January 2013 and ending in August 2022, when the current ruling military junta expelled them.

In that nine year-period, French troops and allied multinational EU troops fought the jihadi terrorists and even suffered casualties in the process. However, the neither French troops nor other EU forces were able to permanently eliminate the terrorists because of the harsh desert terrain of Mali. This is what eventually led frustrated Malians to demand their expulsion.

In the early years of French military intervention, lots of military gains were made at the expense of the terrorists. The original Algerian terror grandees in Northern Mali were all killed, one after the other. However, as time went on, French military successes became fewer and fewer, and eventually dried up.

The terrorists “lavished” their better-equipped military adversaries with well-crafted “gifts”. French and Malian troops had everything thrown at them—Vehicle-Borne IEDs (VBIEDs), Wire-Controlled IEDs (WCIEDs), Pressure-Plate IEDs (PIEDs), Radio-Controlled IEDs (RCIEDs) and the classic suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest. Home-made rockets were fired at them too.

On 2 January 2021, Yvonne Huynh and Loic Risser joined the long list of deceased French soldiers who had been at the receiving end of terrorist’s wrath. Two years earlier, France had lost 13 soldiers in one fell swoop when the two helicopters carrying the men collided with each other as they tried to engage jihadi terrorists in motorcycles and pick-up trucks zooming across the desert plains in the pitch darkness of a moonless night. Among the deceased was Lieutenant Pierre Bockel, one of five sons of then-French Senator Jean-Marie Bockel, who had previously been a government minister during the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron.

Eventually, the French expeditionary force grew extremely risk-averse, refusing to engage the enemy at all during sandstorms, which are frequent in the desert plains of Northern Mali.

For the French, the low-visibility environments created by these sandstorms increased the chances of racking up higher casualty rates and losing helicopters to both accidental crashes and jihadi anti-aircraft fire. For jihadi terrorists, the sandstorms provided the perfect cover to advance rapidly and expand territory under their control.

In the early years of the French military intervention, sandstorms frequently grounded aircraft, yet French troops continued limited ground operations against the terrorists. However, after sustaining more than 50 fatalities, Macron’s expeditionary force in Mali lost the fortitude to continue combat operations while winds thick with dirt and sand particles swept the desert landscape.

Delighted jihadi terrorists scythed through the dusty haze of the sandstorms almost unopposed— capturing villages, towns, and cities, while terrorizing and murdering their civilian inhabitants. These actions made Islamic extremists feared and hated in equal measure.

The failure of French troops and the elected civilian government of Mali to secure the lives and properties of ordinary Malian citizens made both extremely unpopular. Already nursing a deep-seated resentment at France’s meddling in their country’s internal affairs, many ordinary Malians welcomed the May 2021 overthrow of the civilian government and its replacement with a military junta that expressed strong anti-French sentiments.

Emmanuel Macron’s condemnation of the military junta and his withdrawal of donor aid packages resulted in the expulsion of the French ambassador and the closure of all French-funded NGOs in Mali. Widespread perception that French troops and allied European forces were not “fighting hard enough” to defeat the terrorists set the stage for the expulsion of all French soldiers and the closure of their military bases in 2022. The multinational EU troops that fought alongside the French were also asked to leave Mali.

ADDRESSING ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CLAIMS

When it comes to reporting on complex events unfolding on the African continent, I find that most alternative media outlets often have no idea what they are talking about. I cannot tell you how many times, I have read pundits claiming that Algeria is “puppet state” of the United States— a ludicrous claim given that Algeria is one of the most consistent allies of the Russian Federation and before that, the Soviet Union.

70% of Russia's trade with Africa is just with four countries namely, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and South Africa. The People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria is the second largest trade partner of Russia after Republic of Egypt. After his removal from the Ukrainian theatre of operations, Russian General Sergey Surovikin was sent to Algeria to help facilitate the transfer a hefty shipment of advanced weaponry to the Algerian armed forces.

The Algerians received S-300 Air Defence Complexes and SU-35 jet fighters from Russia without any difficulties. By contrast, Iran had to file a massive $4 billion lawsuit in the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva to force Russia to supply in 2016, the S-300s that was originally purchased in 2007. Yes, the Iranians had to wait almost a decade to receive what they had paid for.

Currently, the Iranians are still waiting to receive the SU-35 jet fighters they had purchased. Although Iranian pilots are already training on Russian-supplied Yak-130 jet trainers to prepare them for the more advanced SU-35s, there is a sense of déjà vu in Tehran, a genuine fear that Russia may again delay delivery of the Suhkoi airframes.

Putin’s repeated remarks in 2011, 2025 and 2026 about Israel being “almost a Russian-speaking country” is not lost on the Iranians, who remember the Kremlin’s refusal to extend air defence cover to IRGC paramilitary fighters in Syria being bombed regularly by Israeli warplanes during the Syrian Civil War (2011-2024).

The Algerians have none of the fears of the Iranians. Recently, the Russians diverted a large number of SU-35 jet fighters from a cancelled Egyptian contract to their Algerian friends. This meant that Algeria did not even have to wait for Rostec Corporation to manufacture the ordered aircraft.

It is absolute nonsense to say that Algeria is a western puppet. It is the staunchest ally of the Russians in the African continent, ahead of Egypt and South Africa.

There are tensions between Algeria and Mali because of the refusal of the Malian junta to implement the peace agreement meant to eventually grant broad political autonomy to Northern Mali—the homeland of ethnic Tuaregs, who have been fighting for a separate country since the 1960s.

The Tuaregs never wanted to be part of Mali and demanded that the French Colonial Empire partition its artificial colonial contraption then called “French Sudan” into two separate countries. Charles De Gaulle refused and granted nominal independence to “French Sudan”, which subsequently became the “Sudanese Republic”— an associated state within De Gaulle’s supranational entity, Communauté Française. The “Sudanese Republic” merged with fellow associated state of Senegal to form the short-lived Mali Federation (1959-1960).

After the dissolution of the Mali Federation in 1960, the non-sovereign “Sudanese Republic” transformed into the independent Republic of Mali under the presidency of Modibo Keita. Meanwhile, disgruntled ethnic Tuaregs began an armed rebellion to seize control of Northern Mali and create an independent country for themselves.

Despite the military situation in the country, President Modibo Keita requested that France remove its network of army and air force bases across the territory of Mali. The French leader Charles De Gaulle was angered, but he complied with the request ahead of schedule. Modibo Keita also discarded the CFA Franc and printed his own national currency, the Malian Franc.

However, economic mismanagement, severe inflation crisis and inability to maintain its currency’s value would eventually force Mali to abolish its own currency and embarassingly readopt the CFA Franc in 1984. Yes, CFA Franc is a colonial currency, but it remains more stable than many African national currencies. For that reason, Portuguese-speaking Guinea-Bissau and Spanish-speaking Equatorial Guinea, which were never French colonies, gave up their own national currencies and voluntarily adopted CFA Franc. Yes, that really happened. I bet many people who read other alt-media outlets have never heard of that.

Without French troops, the Malian armed forces of the 1960s attempted and failed to stop the Tuareg separatist fighters from seizing large swathes of the desert plains that constitute Northern Mali. Several attempts to settle the separatist conflict peacefully in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s failed because successive Malian authorities (military juntas and elected civilian governments) would not grant Tuaregs either independence or wide-ranging political autonomy.

Neighbouring Algeria was inundated with Tuareg refugees fleeing the heavy fighting between Tuareg separatists and Malian troops in 1990. Then Algeria itself descended into civil war after the January 1992 coup d’etat that prevented a moderate Islamic Party— which had won the December 1991 Parliamentary Election— from creating a national government. An assortment of jihadi terrorists from other countries joined their Algerian terrorist brethren in fighting a shooting war with the Algerian military junta, which seized power after the coup.

The Algerian Civil War (1992-2002) presaged the emergence of jihadi terrorists in the Sahel Belt. As I have written previously, after the civil war ended, defeated Algerian jihadi terrorists crossed the international border and settled in Northern Mali, where they married local women and began to build jihadi networks. Their presence in the Sahel Belt marked the onset of jihadi terrorism in West Africa. The jihadi networks have since evolved into the ISIS-aligned and Al-Qaida-aligned terrorist groups that we see today.

Because they faced a common enemy in the Malian government, the Tuareg separatists and the jihadi terrorist groups maintained a kind of uneasy truce, punctuated with military clashes between them. The separatists have a secular agenda, which is to convert Northern Mali into a sovereign Tuareg nation-state. The jihadi terrorists oppose partition of any kind, envisioning a single indivisible Mali to be ruled as a revolutionary Salafist caliphate after the defeat and elimination of the secular republic.

In February 2012, the Tuareg separatists formed an alliance of convenience with the jihadi terrorists and began a massive offensive to capture areas of Northern Mali still under national government control. The Tuareg-led military offensive inflicted heavy casualties on government troops. The elected civilian government of Amadou Toumani Touré (a retired army general) was blamed for the catastrophe. Malian troops stationed in Southern Mali began a mutiny that led to the March 2012 overthrow of Amadou Touré’s government and its replacement with a military junta led by an army captain named Amadou Sanogo.

Amadou Sanogo’s military junta struggled to maintain law and order amidst widespread looting by mutinous soldiers in the capital city of Bamako and surrounding areas. Observing the political chaos in the Southern parts of the country, the Tuaregs seized the initiative and captured more government held territory in the North. Despite the disapproval of their on-again, off-again jihadi terrorist allies, the secular Tuareg separatists declared Northern Mali an independent country called “Azawad”.

Eventually, Captain Sanaogo and his fellow coupists were forced by ECOWAS to relinquish power to the Head of the Malian Parliament, Dioncounda Traoré, who was authorized by the 1992 Malian Constitution to act as interim national leader, pending new elections. In August 2013, veteran politician Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was elected President of Mali.

President Boubacar Keïta opened peace talks with the Tuareg separatists. As the Algerian-sponsored peace talks made progress, Tuareg separatists began to offer to cooperate with the government against jihadi terrorists, who were rampaging across Mali on their own, fighting both Malian troops and their former allies, the separatists.

In 2013, French military bases returned to Mali for the first time since 1961. As French/Malian troops advanced in Northern Mali, jihadi fighters started to abandon major urban centers to reinforce their rural desert strongholds. This allowed the Tuareg separatists to occupy the evacuated Northern cities and towns before the French/Malian troops could arrive to assert control over them. During this period, the Tuareg separatists cooperated with the French/Malian troops against the jihadists, but blocked the Malian government from exercising any administrative control over separatist-held territories.

In May and June 2015, Algeria brokered a peace agreement that seemed to satisfy many (but not all) Tuareg separatists. Unfortunately, the peace accords were never implemented as President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta wanted a peaceful settlement that excluded the Tuareg separatist’s minimum demand for broad political autonomy for Northern Mali.

Keïta was acutely aware that the darker-skinned ethnic groups that live in the South oppose any concessions to the caramel-coloured Tuaregs. His attempt in June 2017 to amend the national constitution to slightly decentralize government authority was foiled by massive protests across southern Mali. Even the slight decentralization plan that failed to meet the Tuareg’s minimum demand for broad autonomy was deemed unacceptable in the South, where 90% of the national population resides.

Despite those political setbacks, the Tuareg separatists continued to cooperate with French/Malian forces in their fight against both JNIM and ISGS jihadists. When ISGS terrorists began massacring Tuareg communities in 2020, the separatists coordinated military operations with the “less extreme” JNIM terrorists to push back the common ISGS threat. Despite these tactical collaborations, JNIM and the Tuareg separatists remained enemies.

The ousting of Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta in August 2020 was the beginning of the end of any peace agreement with the Tuaregs. By then, it had become clear that French troops and the multinational EU force could neither eliminate ISGS nor JNIM terrorists, who were both using the harsh desert environment to their advantage.

More importantly, the jihadist insurgency, which had been largely confined to Northern Mali when the French intervention began in 2013, had metastasized to the central and southern regions by 2020. As stated earlier in this article, most Malians living in South perceived French troops and allied European forces were not “fighting hard enough” to defeat the terrorists. So, when the ruling junta asked these foreign troops to leave the country, many Malian citizens cheered.

After the multinational EU force and French troops were expelled from Mali, Russian Wagner mercenaries were brought in as replacements. Many people across Francophone Africa had heard of the military successes of mercenaries thousands of miles away in Central Africa Republic. So, it was no surprise that a desperate Malian military junta signed a paid contract with Yevgeny Prigozhin to supply his mercenaries to work the same magic in Northern Mali.

But the fact of the matter is that the more serene climate and terrain of Central Africa is nothing like the harsh desert climate of arid Northern Mali, plagued by those notorious sandstorms that provided excellent cover for jihadi terrorists and their co-belligerents, the Tuareg separatists, to advance and seize more territory from the Malian junta.

Since their arrival in December 2022, the Russians have proven themselves willing to fight in poor visibility conditions of the sandstorms and absorb punishment in the form of military casualties. In 2023, Russians recaptured Northern towns and cities that had not been under the control of the Malian government authorities for decades. The biggest Russian victory was the November 2023 recapture of the Kidal, the symbolic capital of the Tuareg secessionists and birthplace of the original 1960s separatist uprising against the government of Modibo Keita.

Emboldened by the November 2023 military success of the Russians, the Malian junta finally cancelled the Algiers Peace Accords (2015) in January 2024 and began to make spurious allegations against the Algerians, who acted as mediators. Those unfounded accusations against Algeria have since been picked up and amplified by clueless alternative media outlets.

Following the revocation of the peace agreement, the Tuareg separatists ceased hostilities with JNIM terrorists in May 2024. They declared a truce, exchanged prisoners and pledged to work together against their common enemy, the military junta. The fact that the multi-ethnic JNIM terror gang is headed by a Tuareg jihadist named Iyad Ag Ghali helped facilitate the loose alliance of two groups with fundamentally incompatible end goals.

The combined forces of the rebel alliance scored their first success during the July 2024 twin ambushes of a military convoy transporting Malian troops and Russian paramilitaries to the rural district of Tinzaouaten near the international border with Algeria. As usual, the cover of the sandstorm was useful in the surprise ambushes that killed several Malian troops and Russians paramilitaries such as Nikita Fedyanin, Vadim Evsyukov, Alexander Lazarev and Sergei Shevchenko.

During the first ambush, Tuareg separatists used rocket-propelled grenades, improvised explosive devices and small arms fire to destroy several armoured tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and military trucks containing the Russian paramilitaries and Malian troops. Russian helicopters sent to combat the separatists were ineffective due to the poor visibility conditions created by the sandstorm.

While retreating from the area under Tuareg separatist assault, both Russian and Malian troops fell into a second ambush, this time orchestrated by JNIM terrorists, who trapped and killed even more Russians and Malian troops. The Tuareg separatists sent military reserves to the site of the second ambush and secured the capture of surviving Russian paramilitaries, including the famous former Wagner Commander Anton Yelizarov (alias “Lotus”), whom I have written about in the past. All the captured Russians were later released in a prisoner exchange.

In the aftermath of the twin ambushes, Burkina Faso and Mali sent military aircraft to carry out coordinated airstrikes on the Tuareg separatists and JNIM terrorists.

Without presenting any credible proof, Ukraine later claimed that it had helped the Tuareg separatists ambush the Russians. After a massive uproar in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, the Ukrainians tried to backpedal, but it was too late.

Despite admiting that it wasn’t actually involved in the ambush, Ukraine was subject to a series of diplomatic démarches. ECOWAS issued a statement condemning Ukraine. The government of Senegal summoned the Ukrainian Ambassador for a dressing down. The military juntas of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger Republic severed diplomatic ties with Ukraine.

Prior to the break in diplomatic relations, all three Sahelian states maintained a neutral stance on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger Republic mostly abstained from UN General Assembly votes condemning Russian Invasion of Ukraine, rather than voting against the UN resolutions to show solidarity with the Kremlin. Since severing ties with Ukraine, the Sahelian states have shifted to consistently voting against UN resolutions targeting Russia.

The deadly ambushes of July 2024 proved to be a foreshadowing of the unprecedented April 2026 blitzkreig-style assault launched by the loose rebel alliance across the entirety of Mali.

To illustrate the seriousness of the challenges currently facing the military junta, I have posted maps comparing the previous military situation in November 2023, when Russians scored their biggest victories, with the situation in April 2026, when they were forced to retreat from many areas in the North and Central regions of Mali.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

I will conclude this article by mentioning four key issues that Russian decision-makers would have to reckon with:

#1

The Kremlin has to pay more attention to the opinions of their Algerian allies, who understand the Sahel region far better than the Russians. Mali is not the same as historic Soviet allies in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea.

The Russians are making the same mistakes that the French before them made, which is ignoring the feelings of the Tuareg people, who have never ever been treated as full citizens of Mali. The same problem exists next door in Niger Republic (albeit to a lesser extent).

In a wide-ranging article I published in August 2023 about the political crisis in Niger, I explained that the Tuaregs and other ethnic minorities of mixed African and Arab descent, who inhabit the Northern and Eastern regions are being discriminated against by the darker-skinned peoples of Southern Niger, who constitute the majority of the national population. This is highlighted in Niger’s attempted expulsion of Diffa Arab minorities in 2006, which failed after a massive wave of protests.

The April 2021 election of President Bazoum, a Diffa Arab, caused consternation and uproar in Southern Niger, with many accusing him of being “a Libyan foreigner” or “a secret Algerian” because the cast of his racial features did not match that of the country’s black African majority.

Before Mohammed Bazoum could even assume office as the newly elected President, there was an attempted military coup on March 2021 by army officers of Southern Niger origin to prevent his inauguration. Ironically, the 2021 coup attempt was quashed by General Abdourahamane Tchiani. When Bazoum was finally inaugurated as the President of Niger, he rewarded General Tchiani by retaining him as the commander of the Presidential Guards.

Over time, the personal relationship between Bazoum and Tchiani deteriorated and the former asked the latter for his resignation in July 2023. To avoid getting sacked, General Tchiani staged his own coup against President Bazoum. That coup saved Tchiani’s military career, and he ended up as the head of the junta that seized power in Niamey.

Discrimination against Niger’s ethno-racial minorities persists today, though it is often obscured by the jihadist insurgency and the wave of anti-French, pro-Russian sentiment sweeping the Sahelian landscape. Having said that, Niger has made sporadic efforts in the past to combat social discimination against ethno-racial minorities and bring them into the political mainstream. This is best evidenced by the rise of Brigi Rafini, the country’s first Tuareg Prime Minister, and Mohammed Bazoum, its first ethnic Arab President.

In contrast, Mali has made no meaningful effort to integrate the local Tuareg community into the national fabric. Pacte National (1992), Algiers Accords (2006) and the Algiers Peace Accords (2015) are examples of peace agreements that successive Malian governments have signed with the Tuaregs, but refused to implement.

#2

It is important to realize that the size of the Russian paramilitary force is very small. We are talking less than 500 Russian fighters embedded with Malian troops. The Russians are brave warriors, but their military footprint in Mali is tiny. They have no chance of winning total victory unless the more reasonable Tuareg secessionists are separated from the unreasonable jihadi terrorist crazies. The Kremlin would have to join Algeria in pressing the Malian junta to revive Algiers Peace Accords (2015) with the Tuaregs. If the peace agreement is implemented, large swathes of Tuareg-held territory in Northern Mali will nominally come under the suzerainty of the ruling military junta. The Tuareg separatist would then ally with Russians and Mali junta to fight the jihadists, both JNIM and ISGS.

#3

At the moment, there is no peace process with the Tuareg separatists. The current strategy of Russian paramilitaries and Malian troops is withdrawal from several parts of Mali in order to reinforce the most important areas of the country. To shorten their besieged defence lines, Russian paramilitaries and Malian troops are abandoning most of Northern Mali to Tuareg separatists. The only holdouts still left in the North are the government-held cities of Timbuktu and Gao. Both were once part of the Mali Empire (1235–1610) and later on, the Songhai Empire (1430–1591).

With sparsely populated Northern Mali mostly relinquished to the Tuaregs, the Russians and Malian troops are now focussed on fighting the bigger threat—the JNIM terrorists currently contesting the military junta’s control over densely populated Southern Mali, which includes Bamako. The terrorists have reached the outskirts of the capital city and are now attempting to cut all supply roads.

#4

The Kremlin would have to brace itself for accusations of “betrayal” from certain segments of Malian society disappointed with the withdrawal of Russian paramilitaries from the North and parts of the Central region. There has always been an unrealistic expectation in Mali that the Russians came armed with a magic wand that would eliminate Sahelian terrorism, and crush a Tuareg separatist insurgency that began when Vladimir Putin was still a child growing up in the Soviet Union.

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Now to the sequel…

On social media, Trump has hailed as a success the US special forces operation to rescue two USAF pilots stranded inside Iran. From the triumphalist tone of his social media screed, it is clear that President Trump is still going ahead with his insane plan to insert ground troops into Iranian territory.

Yes, the rescue of the pilots was a success, but of the pyrrhic kind. In the last 48 hours, eleven aircraft —worth over $ 400 million— have been damaged or destroyed. Below is a list of them:

• 1 x CH-47 Chinook helicopter (Destroyed on the ground in Kuwait)

• 1 x A-10 Warthog plane (Shot down & destroyed near the Strait of Hormuz)

• 1 x A-10 Warthog plane (Shot in Iran, crash-landed & destroyed in Kuwait)

• 1 x F-15E Strike Eagle jet fighter (Shot down & destroyed in Iran)

• 2 x HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters (Damaged while flying in Iran)

• 2 x MH-6 Little Bird helicopters (Shot down & destroyed in Iran)

• 2 x Lockheed MC-130 transport planes (Shot down & destroyed in Iran)

• 1 x MQ-9 Reaper Drone (Shot down & destroyed in Iran)

Apart from the Chinook helicopter destroyed on the ground in Kuwait and the A-10 plane destroyed near the Strait of Hormuz, the remaining nine aircraft were damaged or destroyed while on flight missions inside Iran. Eight were damaged or destroyed inside Iran during the rescue mission to extract two USAF airmen who ejected before their F-15E jet fighter crashed.

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The Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) television station aired video footage of a crash site showing the wreckage of US aircraft :

Below are additional photographs of the vast crash site taken by Iranian civilians at the scene:

The Iranian state-owned Student News Network (SNN) also published some photographs of the wreckage as well:

Before the crash of the helicopters and the fixed-wing transport planes, several armed Iranian civilians made videos of themselves firing at them. Below is one example:

Taken together, the photographs and video footage contradict the official CENTCOM/Trump Administration narrative that US Special Forces destroyed the two Lockheed MC-130 transport planes on the ground after they became stuck in mud.

The soil is dry and hard. There is no mud for the plane wheels to be bogged down in. Destroying the planes on the ground with missiles or explosives would have left visible bomb craters in the soil—features which are notably absent from the photographs. Even if we allow for the use of incendiary grenades—which don’t create impact craters—it still fails to explain the deformation of the aircraft’s propellers or the lack of a large patch of soil blackened by the scorching heat of such a device.

A careful analysis of the close-up photograph of the deformed propeller blades supports the thesis that the transport planes were shot down as it flew over Iran. The bends on the blades indicates that the propellers were rotating at high speed when they suddenly impacted the ground, suggesting a plane crash not a controlled destruction on the ground.

Most likely, the MC-130s crashed after being targeted by small-arms fire from Iranian civilians while flying at low altitude or descending to land. Visible bullet damage to the wings supports the crash scenario over the official face-saving narrative provided by CENTCOM/Trump Administration that US troops intentionally scuttled the planes after they got stuck in mud.

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As I have stated previously, it is a consistent habit of the US government to underestimate its adversaries. Whenever you switch on US satellite TV channels, there is always an American pundit, journalist, politician, or government official referring to the Iranian government as the “Mad Mullah’s Regime”. This is quite ironic given that the Islamic Republic of Iran is actually led by highly sophisticated and well-read individuals, some of whom were even educated in the United Kingdom and the United States.

You may not share the religious sentiments of the Shia leaders of Iran, but they are nothing like the crazed Sunni jihadists that belong to terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaida, which have actually worked with Western intelligence agencies. Saudi-born Osama Bin Laden and Syrian-born Mohammed al-Jolani are well-known examples of Sunni jihadists who have worked with Western intel agencies.

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Circling back to Iran, it was a terrible mistake on the part of Donald Trump to internalize the cheap Zionist propaganda that has been going around that once you kill Ayatollah Khamenei and the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) then Iran will fall into chaos. For some reason, nobody cares that Iran actually has conventional armed forces that are much larger than the IRGC paramilitary force.

According to the Constitution of Iran, it is the conventional armed forces, which controls the vast majority of the country’s heavy armour and artillery guns that will take the lead in repelling any ground invasion by a foreign enemy.

Over the years, Iran repeatedly warned successive US governments that if attacked, it would destroy US military bases in the Gulf Arab states and shut down the Strait of Hormuz. Yet, Trump Administration officials were taken aback when Iran actually acted on these threats following US-Israeli airstrikes on 28th February that killed more than 200 Iranians, including 168 school girls, many Iranian military leaders, Ayatollah Khamenei and several members of his family.

The Trump Administration had expected Iran to retaliate with some strikes on Tel Aviv and perhaps a token attack on a US base in Qatar before hurrying back to the negotiating table. Hundreds of Iranian drones and missiles destroying US military bases across the Middle East came as a total shock to the warmongers in Washington DC.

The US-Israeli war on Iran is now in its fifth week, and it is now clear to all sensible observers that Iran’s military resistance has staying power. Yet, Trump and his cheerleaders keep deluding themselves that Iran is on the verge of running out of missiles and drones, and that a ground invasion by US Special Forces will finally subdue the country.

There is also crazy talk that US troops can recover Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium from nuclear facilities hidden inside mountains. The Americans have no idea where the uranium stocks are, and even if they knew, the only way to get to them would be if Iran has ceased all military resistance.

At this juncture, I would like to add that all claims that US airstrikes destroyed or blocked access to these mountain nuclear sites are sheer nonsense. The same applies to Trump’s recent statement that Iran’s uranium stocks have been entombed deep underground by US airstrikes and were no longer recoverable.

Applying my expertise as a former doctorate-level researcher in the field of Mechanical Engineering, I wrote an article in June 2025, explaining the absurdity of what Trump is claiming. The article can be accessed by clicking on the graphic below:

Moving on to the topic of today…

The decision of the Pete Hegseth-led Pentagon to send multiple US military aircraft into Iranian airspace was obviously dictated by hubris. Iran have shot down expensive unmanned aerial vehicles belonging to both Israel and United States. MQ-9 Reaper drones, Elbit Hermes 900 drones, and IAI Heron drones have been repeatedly downed by various kinds of air defence systems manufactured by Iran.

A United States F-35 jet fighter flying inside Iran was damaged by an infrared-guided missile fired from the Majid Short Range Air Defence Complex. The heat-seeking missile bypassed the jet fighter’s radar-evading stealth technology.

Despite clear evidence that Iran had the ability to target aircraft flying over its airspace with air defence complexes operating in infrared mode to avoid radar signal emissions, the Trump Administration still believed that USAF and USN aircraft can operate inside Iran without any serious risks.

On 25th March, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated that US stealth technology rendered Iranian defenses “irrelevant”. During his television address on 1st April, President Trump declared that Iranian radar was “100% annihilated” and U.S. forces were “unstoppable”.

Of course, there is no proof that Iran no longer possess any radar. In fact, it is mostly likely that the Iranians still have them and only use them intermittently so as not give away their locations to the Americans. In any case, the Iran’s favourite method of engaging enemy aircraft is to apply its air defense systems in passive optical and infrared tracking modes, which bypass radar warning receivers.

With the downing of an American F-15 jet fighter over Southwest Iran and an A-10 Warthog attack plane over the Strait of Hormuz, it is beginning to dawn on Pete Hegseth and his Orange-tanned boss, Donald Trump, that the realities of this war is nothing like the Hollywood movie, Top Gun: Maverick.

As I write this article, there are new reports that the United States have rescued one of the pilots of the downed F-15 jet fighter while the other may have been captured by the Iranians, although the latter report has yet not been confirmed.

American mainstream media outlets are saying that two US helicopters on the search and rescue mission in Southwest Iran were struck by Iranian fire. Meanwhile, Tasnim News Agency in Iran reported the shootdown of an Israeli fighter jet near Tehran.

Would these unfolding disasters cause Trump to change course and give up his crazy plans to launch a ground invasion of Iran? Who knows. Given Trump’s erratic behaviour, anything is possible…

Alright, now I am returning to writing an in-depth article on the Iran-linked spy trial taking place in a Nigerian federal court in the capital city of Abuja.

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The US-Israel war against Iran is causing non-oil producing African countries, previously dependent on the Gulf Arab States, to turn to Nigeria’s privately-owned Dangote Refinery to meet their petroleum needs. 456,000 tons of petrol (gasoline), kerosene, gas oil and diesel fuel have already been delivered to Ghana, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Tanzania. At the moment, South Africa is negotiating a 12-month supply contract with Dangote Refinery. With the Strait of Hormuz semi-closed, the Nigerian refinery could see a surge in European orders.

Qatar’s decision to cease production of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) also presents Nigeria with another opportunity. However, the decrepit state of the LNG production infrastructure in Nigeria means that the West African country is unlikely to take full advantage of the opportunity.

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Nigeria’s share of the European LNG market plummeted from 14% in 2021 to 4.2% in 2025. This decline stems from increased US market dominance and Nigeria’s unreliability in fulfilling existing delivery contracts. For instance, in October 2022, Nigeria had to declare force majeure due to its inability to deliver all LNG shipments ordered by Portugal, which receives 51% of its Liquified Natural Gas from the West African country.

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As I perused the report, I couldn’t help but shake my head at some of the blatant falsehoods and half-truths that pervade the two-page document.

To the uninitiated, the report gives the impression that Nigeria is largely a Muslim country with a beleaguered and oppressed Christian minority. In reality, Nigeria’s 115 million Christians constitute half of the population. Christians are well-represented at all levels of government, and currently dominate the leadership of Nigeria’s armed forces and security services.

The report’s assertion that Nigeria is the “deadliest place to be a Christian” is absolute nonsense. The vast majority of Christians live in Southern Nigeria, where there is zero jihadi violence.

In certain parts of Northern Nigeria, Boko Haram terrorists indiscriminately attack the Muslim majority and the local Christian minority, branding the latter as “infidels” for not adhering to the Islamic faith and the former as “apostates” for rejecting the Revolutionary Salafist version of Sunni Islam.

The Congressional report calls on the Trump Administration to “demand” that the Nigerian government abolish Sharia Law in the twelve states where it is implemented. In my own opinion, Trump is free to make as many demands as he likes, but doing so would be an exercise in futility. Bola Tinubu is the President of a federation of 36 autonomous states, not an absolute monarch presiding over a country with a centralised governmental structure.

In Nigeria, the federating states enjoy a wide range of autonomy. Each state has its own executive, legislative and judicial systems, which are quite distinct from those of the national government. As much as Riley Moore and Donald Trump might desire it, President Tinubu cannot force the twelve Northern states that operate the criminal code of Sharia Law to rescind it.

In fact, I believe that the Trump Administration has a higher chance of forcing Democrat-ruled US states and cities to revoke their “sanctuary laws” than getting any of those 12 Northern Nigerian states to give up Sharia Law.

As a Roman Catholic from Southeastern Nigeria, I am no apologist for Sharia Law. In fact, if it were within my power, there would be no religious laws in Nigeria at all. However, the civil code of Sharia Law has been an integral part of Northern Nigeria’s legal framework since British colonial rule. The British themselves derived the truncated version of Sharia from the pre-colonial sovereign state—Sokoto Caliphate (1804-1903)— which disintegrated after its territory was conquered and divided among British, French, and German colonial powers. Given its deep roots in Northern Nigeria, it is ludicrous for anybody to think that external pressure can eradicate Sharia Law in its entirety.

Having chafed for decades under a truncated version of the Sharia legal system, twelve Northern states decided to adopt the full version of the religious law that once formed the jurisprudence of the defunct Sokoto Caliphate. Between 1999 and 2001, the legislatures of those 12 states amended pre-existing Sharia Law to include criminal codes alongside civil codes.

The upgrade to the full version of Sharia has been deemed by many legal experts to have contravened the Nigerian Constitution, which specifies that secular law should apply exclusively in criminal cases. The constitution grants Sharia Courts jurisdiction only over civil proceedings involving Islamic personal law, such as marriage, inheritance, child custody, and divorce.

After the contentious adoption of the Sharia criminal code by those 12 states, Sharia Courts—previously limited to civil and personal affairs—suddenly acquired the authority to prosecute and convict Muslims for perceived crimes. These religious courts began issuing harsh sentences such as amputation for burglary, flogging for alcohol consumption, and stoning for adultery. Under secular law, adultery and alcohol consumption are not considered crimes.

Nigeria’s president at the time, Olusegun Obasanjo—a Baptist Christian from the Southwest—criticised the enactment of Sharia criminal codes by the legislatures of the 12 Northern states, but opted against challenging their constitutionality in the Supreme Court. President Obasanjo feared that a legal battle would trigger civil unrest among the Muslim majority in those states. He publicly justified his non-confrontational stance by claiming that the bandwagon craze for the adoption of Sharia criminal codes in North will “fizzle out on its own.” He also added that he had extracted pledges from the governors of the 12 states not to implement the full version of Sharia enacted by their legislatures.

Only three of the twelve states honoured the pledge by opting not to actively enforce the religious criminal codes passed by their legislatures. In those outlier states—all in the Northeast—the Sharia legal system has de facto limited itself to civil and personal matters. Secular law continues to govern criminal offences, rendering the Sharia criminal codes dormant on the statute books.

The promises made to Obasanjo by the governors of the remaining nine states to not implement Sharia in full proved to be empty. Some governors were unwilling to sacrifice political capital over an issue so popular with their Muslim electorate. Others derived their very legitimacy by paying lip service to the idea of implementing Sharia penal codes. Ultimately, almost none wanted to enter a collision course with state legislatures hell-bent on enshrining religious criminal codes into law. Only one governor among the nine was brave enough to resist public pressure and defy his state’s legislature, yet even he could not halt the Sharia juggernaut.

In contrast to the three Northeastern states mentioned earlier, religious courts in the remaining nine states—seven in the Northwest, one in the North-Central, and one in the Northeast—aggressively enforce the Sharia penal codes. It is within these nine states that high-profile cases involving “blasphemy” or “adultery” usually originate.

After Sharia Courts in Northwest Nigeria sentenced two Muslim women to death for “adultery” in 2002 and 2003, the Obasanjo Administration (1999-2007) faced intense pressure from the United States and Europe to abolish the Sharia criminal code. Obasanjo, however, maintained that such a demand was politically impossible, arguing that under Nigeria's federal system, he lacked the authority to unilaterally override state-level legislation. Nonetheless, domestic and international uproar created by the death sentences caused Sharia Courts of Appeal to nullify the death sentences and free the women.

Over the years, Sharia Courts in seven states have handed down death sentences to several Muslims, only to see these judgments stalled or retracted following domestic and international outcry. The ability of convicted Muslims to appeal to the Sharia Courts of Appeal, then to the secular Federal Court of Appeal, and finally to the Supreme Court of Nigeria makes it highly unlikely for capital sentences to be executed.

To date, all death sentences —except one— handed down by Sharia Courts have either been rescinded by Sharia Appellate Courts or annulled outright by secular federal courts. The only exception was the enforcement of a death sentence in January 2002 for a man convicted in a Sharia Court of murdering a woman and her two children.

Contrary to the impression created by Congressional report prepared by Riley Moore and his colleagues, the primary victims of “blasphemy laws” enforced by Sharia Courts are Muslims. Christians are exempt from Islamic law and thus cannot be brought before a Sharia Court for any reason at all. Christians can only be prosecuted in secular courts.

Having said that, there are Muslim extremists who disregard the legal exemptions, subjecting Christians to harassment, and in the most extreme cases, extrajudicial killings. One example is the May 2022 murder of a Christian student, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, by a lynch mob of Muslim extremists, who alleged that she had committed “blasphemy”.

Abolishing “blasphemy laws” or the the broader Sharia framework—as recommended by the Congressional report—won’t have any impact on Muslim extremists, who operate entirely outside the statutory legal system and reject the authority of the Nigerian state. The murderers of Deborah Yakubu were guided solely by their personal religious convictions and couldn’t care less what the law said about “blasphemy”. Moreover, Deborah did not say anything that could have been remotely construed as offensive in Islam.

The solution to the problem of religious harassment in Northern states implementing the Sharia criminal code is rigorous federal police enforcement of existing legal exemptions and the swift prosecution of Muslim extremists who trample on the rights of Christians.

Congressman Riley Moore’s impractical recommendation that the United States pressure the Tinubu Administration to abolish Sharia Law across the 12 states is born of a profound ignorance of Nigeria’s history, its federal system, and its political culture.

A prominent Muslim organisation in Nigeria known as the Supreme Council for Shari’ah in Nigeria (SCSN) has already reacted to the Congressional report by issuing a combative statement asserting that “no authority in the world had the right to prevent Nigerian Muslims from observing the tenets of Sharia.” In essence, the SCSN is telling the Americans that they have a greater likelihood of squeezing an elephant through the eye of a needle than removing Sharia Law from the statute books.

Prominent Nigerian Muslim commentators have also highlighted that Riley Moore and his colleagues have a lot to say about religious laws in Northern Nigeria and nothing to say about the much harsher Sharia criminal codes enforced in Saudi Arabia— a major ally of the United States.

For the crime of criticising Donald Trump’s promotion of the absurd “Christian genocide” narrative, prominent Nigerian politician Dr Rabiu Kwankwaso is being smeared as a “Muslim extremist sponsoring militias” by Riley Moore. The Republican legislator is currently sponsoring a bill in the US Congress titled the “Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act of 2026’ (H.R. 7457)”. Should this bill pass, Rabiu Kwankwaso and other individuals labelled “extremists” could face severe sanctions, including visa bans and asset freezes.

In case you were wondering, this is the same Rabiu Kwankwaso who, as governor of Kano State in 2000, incurred the wrath of his Muslim electorate when he attempted to block a legislative bill that would place Sharia criminal codes on the statute books. Although he eventually signed the bill into law, his political career suffered a significant setback. He lost the April 2003 Kano State gubernatorial election to Ibrahim Shekarau, the opposition candidate, who promised rigorous enforcement of the Sharia criminal codes.

Before the 2003 gubernatorial election, Muslim voters in Kano had complained that Rabiu Kwankwaso was deliberately implementing the religious criminal codes on the statute books in a reluctant and haphazard manner. The small Christian minority—legally exempt from Sharia Law—supported Rabiu Kwankwaso, but their votes did not register as a blip in a state with an overwhelming Muslim electorate.

True to his campaign promise, the first order of business for the newly elected Governor Ibrahim Shekarau was the creation of a state-controlled religious police board known as the “Hisbah”. This board was tasked with rigorously implementing the Sharia codes that Rabiu Kwankwaso and the secular Nigeria Police Force were uninterested in.

When Riley Moore is not busy smearing Rabiu Kwankwaso with the legislative bill pending in the US House of Representatives, he is collaborating with his fellow Republicans to shoehorn America’s geopolitical struggles into a report purportedly about “Christian persecution in Nigeria”.

You win no prizes for guessing that Riley Moore’s report recommends Nigeria effectively cease its diplomatic, defence, and economic cooperation with China and Russia. The report goes as far as accusing China of funding terrorists and bandits murdering Nigerian Christians. Unsurprisingly, the report proposes that Nigeria join forces with the United States to take action against China.

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Riley Moore and colleagues also seek to dismantle the 60-year-old defence partnership between Nigeria and USSR/Russia. Their report recommends that the Tinubu Administration “divest” from Russian military hardware and instead prioritize American-supplied defense systems, effectively granting the United States a monopoly over Nigeria’s arms market.

The Tinubu Administration responded to the Congressional report by firmly rebutting claims of “Christian persecution”, highlighting the role of Nigeria’s armed forces in combating the twin threats of banditry and terrorism that affect both Christian and Muslim communities in the North. Nonetheless, the administration was effusive in its praise of Nigeria’s bilateral relations with the United States—a stance that should come as no surprise to any astute observer.

Under President Trump, the United States has been exceptionally cooperative, providing a significant amount of sophisticated weaponry that has been long sought after by the Nigerian military. The Pentagon has also granted access to Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) data from radars, satellites, and drones. The Nigerian Air Force (NAF) and Nigerian Army Aviation Corps (NAAC) are going to receive brand new US-made helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, drones, missiles, and other pertinent military equipment. More than 200 US military instructors have arrived to assist with training and guidance for Nigerian infantry troops.

The fleet of twelve A-29 Super Tucano planes, custom-built for the Nigerian Air Force (NAF), has proven to be highly effective and central to Nigeria’s counter-insurgency operations. They have the ability to loiter in the sky for 7 hours without need for refuelling. Nigeria’s fleet of jet aircraft are not designed to loiter and need refuelling after 1-2 hours of operation.

The Nigerian government invested around $593 million to procure those propeller-driven planes, and allocated an additional $38 million for the US Army Corps of Engineers to oversee the upgrade the NAF base where the aircraft are stationed.

A flight simulator annex, a new airfield, secure storage areas for precision-guided munitions, perimeter security fencing, and aircraft sunshades were among the several critical facilities covered by the upgrade.

The Super Tucano’s laser-guided munitions, integrated FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared) cameras, and advanced sensors have enabled surgical strikes against high-value targets. This capability was instrumental in the elimination of ISWAP terrorist commanders such as Mallam Ari, Ameer Malam Jidda, and Abou Aisha between 2022 and 2026.

The recommendation in the Congressional report that Nigeria should foster closer relations with the United States appears somewhat redundant, given that the Tinubu Administration has already invested over $1.7 billion in acquiring US-made weapons and deepened ties with the mercurial Orange Strongman in the White House.

The report’s recommendation that Nigeria should give up its strategic partnership with China would be politely ignored. Tinubu has a very long history of cooperating with China, which goes back to his days as governor of Lagos State. He is never going to shut down the special presidential office established to coordinate collaborative projects with Zhongnanhai within the framework of the China-Nigeria Strategic Partnership.

Of course, I don’t rule out PresidentTinubu throwing Riley Moore and his colleagues a bone by staging an elaborate song and dance routine the next time some private Chinese citizens are apprehended for illegal gold mining in Sokoto and Zamfara states, rather than quietly deporting them as has been the standard practice for years.

Obviously, the Tinubu Administration won’t have any problem with Riley Moore’s recommendation that Nigeria cooperate with the UK, France and Hungary. Nigeria has good diplomatic and economic relations with those European countries.

France and UK are buying lots of Nigerian petroleum at a time when traditional customers, such as China and South Korea, are cutting back on purchases. Additionally, the British Royal Marine Commando provides regular training to the SBS forces of the Nigerian Navy.

Overall, Nigeria’s armed forces have longstanding military training agreements with UK, USA, India, Pakistan, Turkey, China and Russia. While not a traditional military partner, Italy is currently training Nigerian Air Force pilots and engineers to operate the fleet of M-346FA fighter-attack jets purchased by the Nigerian government at the cost of $1.2 billion.

As stated in previous articles, many African countries prefer a multi-vector approach to foreign policy. This includes Central Africa Republic, which signed a cooperation agreement with France while simultaneously inking a deal with the Kremlin to establish a Russian military base on its territory.

The military junta in Niger Republic sought unsuccessfully to maintain its defence agreement with the Americans while bringing in Russian paramilitaries. However, the zero-sum mentality of the Biden Administration forced the junta to choose between US troops and the Russian paramilitaries.

Despite opting for the Russian paramilitaries and requesting the withdrawal of US troops, Niger Republic has managed to maintain amicable diplomatic relations with the United States. After all, many of the military junta leaders were trained by the US Army.

As I write this, news has arrived that the Traoré-led military junta in Burkina Faso has signed a five-year bilateral deal with the Trump Administration to support the West African country’s efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other infectious diseases.

News of rapprochement between Trump and Traoré may come as a shock to alternative media pundits who regularly claim the Sahelian states hate the “imperialist United States”. I have stated many times in the past that anti-French sentiment does not translate to dislike for the United States.

Longtime readers of this Substack will recall this passage from an old essay I wrote in July 2023:

I have read a couple of silly articles published by the Parisian media claiming that Russians are “brainwashing Africans and turning them against the French.”

It so hilarious when journalists in denial refuse to acknowledge the real reason why France is getting so much hate in Francophone Africa while the same isn’t happening to other NATO countries. There are no rallies in Francophone Africa against the United States of America or the United Kingdom.

Of course, when I made the statement back in July 2023, I was spot on. There had been no demonstrations in any of the ex-French colonies aimed at the United States. That was, until it happened in Niger Republic in April of the following year.

France has been at the receiving end of nearly all demonstrations in French-speaking Africa. In Burkina Faso, mass demonstrations degenerated into riots that resulted in the burning of French diplomatic properties. The military regimes of Mali and Burkina Faso both expelled French Ambassadors, shutdown French-owned NGOs and kicked out French troops stationed on their soil. The United States and other European countries did not suffer any of these indignities.

In Niger Republic, mass demonstrations were initially aimed exclusively at France until the Biden Administration began to issue public threats to the military junta, triggering a rare demonstration against the United States in April 2024.

The military regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso have never sought to expel American ambassadors on their territory. Despite their public rhetoric, both military juntas had tried unsuccessfully to develop ties with the United States, which they view differently from France.

In May 2021, the military junta of Mali expressed an interest in buying US weapons, but the Biden Administration was not interested. By October 2021, the Malian junta had pivoted to buying Russian military equipment. In December 2021, Russian Wagner mercenaries landed in Mali after the military junta signed a contract and paid Yevgeny Prigozhin a handsome fee.

Below is a video clip of Mali junta officials inspecting aircraft delivered by Russia to Modibo Keita International Airport in the capital city of Bamako. Those who have read my July 2023 article on Wagner activities in Africa may recall this footage recorded in 2022:

For those interested, I also covered the specifics of the different types of fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft delivered in multiple shipments to Mali in an article from August 2022, which can be viewed by clicking here.

Unsurprisingly, the reaction of the Biden Administration to Russia’s shipment of advanced weaponry to Mali was apoplectic. The Malian junta had ignored repeated warnings from the US State Department not to purchase military equipment from Russia, which was under US and EU sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine six months prior. The next year, in July 2023, the Biden Administration imposed sanctions on Malian junta officials for “facilitating the expansion of Wagner in West Africa.”

With return of the highly transactional (and unpredictable) Donald Trump to the White House in January 2025, the ruling junta in Mali began to seek US investment and assistance to counter Islamist insurgents. As a goodwill gesture, the Trump Administration dropped Biden-era sanctions against Mali junta officials. News reports now indicate that the United States is close to securing a deal to resume intelligence-gathering flights and drone operations over Malian territory to help the military junta fight jihadi terrorists.

Unlike his predecessor, President Trump does not see the presence of Russian paramilitaries on Malian soil as an impediment to working out a deal with the ruling junta on security matters and minerals such as gold and lithium. From Trump’s perspective, Biden’s policy of non-engagement with the ruling junta was foolish as it allowed Russia to gain a monopoly of influence in Mali.

Yes, even the military regimes of Burkina Faso and Mali are now actively pursuing multi-vector foreign policies like other African countries.

Circling back to Nigeria, the Tinubu Administration will likely welcome constructive aspects of the Congressional report, especially its practical security recommendations for combating terrorism from jihadi groups and recurring banditry linked to ethnic Fulani Muslim cattle herders, who reject sedentary ranching in favour of their centuries-old nomadic lifestyle.

Contrary to the narrative often found in rightwing US media, Muslim Fulani banditry is a distinct phenomenon from Salafi-jihadi terrorism of Boko Haram and ISWAP. The jihadists seek to convert Nigeria into a revolutionary Islamist state while the Fulani bandits are just common criminals with a lot of firepower. It is also false that the Muslim Fulani bandits target Christians exclusively.

During their itinerant journey across the country in search of grazing grounds for their livestock, the nomadic cattle herders do not bother to inquire whether the agricultural lands they are encroaching upon belong to Muslim or Christian farmers. The bandits do not inquire about religious affiliation before massacring entire farming communities for resisting cattle feeding on their crops.

The religious identity of the victims is simply dictated by geography. In the Northwest, the victims of the Fulani bandits are almost entirely ethnic Hausa Muslim farmers, whereas in the North-Central and Southern regions, the violence predominantly affects Christian farming communities of various ethnicities.

Further complicating matters, a significant number of young Fulani bandits have grown disenchanted with a nomadic lifestyle split between crime and cattle herding, choosing instead to become full-time kidnappers for ransom. Money made from kidnapping is then used to buy semi-automatic rifles, walkie-talkies, and maintain a large fleet of motorcycles for mobility.

In summary, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria are targeted by:

• Nomadic Fulani cattle herders encroaching on agricultural lands owned by farming communities throughout the North and parts of the South. These heavily armed bandits largely move on foot with their livestock.

• Motorcycle-riding Fulani gangs that sustain themselves through ransom kidnappings. They target farming communities in Northwest Nigeria and parts of North-Central Nigeria. They do not operate in the South.

• Salafi-jihadists who employ a strategy of murder and mass abduction to sustain Islamic terrorism, primarily in Northeast Nigeria. They move around in motorcycles and pickup trucks. Their sporadic appearances in North-Central and Northwest Nigeria has led to individuals confusing the ideologically-driven jihadists with profit-driven Fulani kidnappers more common in both regions. They don’t operate in the South.

Certainly, the nuance presented in this article holds little interest for Riley Moore and his colleagues, whose report frames Nigeria as a Muslim-dominated state with an oppressed Christian minority akin to Pakistan. Despite having visited Nigeria for several days in December 2025, the authors of the Congressional report chose to ignore the complexities they witnessed in favour of a more reductive narrative.

In any case, I believe that the true purpose of the report is to pressure Nigeria into granting United States a monopoly on the supply of military equipment and disrupt Nigeria’s longstanding ties with two friendly great powers that the Americans view as their geopolitcal rivals.

Unfortunately for Riley Moore and his colleagues, Nigeria won’t accept recommendations that circumvent the country's traditional multi-vector foreign policy. The notion that Nigeria should only engage with the United States, UK, and EU countries to the exclusion of China and Russia is a non-starter.

The Nigerian Air Force has not deviated from its intention to buy advanced air defence radars and anti-drone laser technology from China. The Nigerian Army is still going ahead with its contract with the Chinese state-owned Norinco Group to establish a military hardware production facility in Nigeria to produce various types of ammunition, including 7.62mm and 9mm cartridges, as well as the manufacturing of brass casings and bullet jackets. The contract also covers maintainance and modernization of existing battle tanks and other heavy hardware.

When it is finally esablished, the Chinese-owned Norinco facility will operate alongside Nigeria’s indigenous arms manufacturer, DICON, which produces its own natively designed armoured personnel carriers and other military vehicles, in addition to small arms and ammunition.

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• United States and Israel start a war with Iran in the Middle East

• Iranian counter-strikes target Israel and US assets in the Gulf Arab states

• Saudi Arabian political analyst expresses anger at USA for prioritizing defence of Israel over the Gulf Arab states that host US military bases

• Shia Muslims in Nigeria, Iraq, Pakistan and India protest Ayatollah Khamenei’s assassination

It is a consistent habit of US government to underestimate its adversaries, and then express shock at their ability to strike back.

Trump and his delusional subordinates had expected the Iranians to strike Tel Aviv and perhaps carry out a throwaway token attack on a US base in Qatar before returning for negotiations.

There was also an expectation that the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei in his well-known residence would disorientate the Iranians. None of that happened. Instead, the Iranians acted on their pre-war threats and attacked US military bases (plus hotels hosting US troops) across the Gulf Arab states. Israel is also taking a massive beating from Iranian drones and missiles.

In my humble opinion, the Iranian strategy for this current conflict is to cripple US military bases across the Middle East and prompt the Gulf Arab states to start perceiving the presence of American troops on their soil as a liability rather than an asset. Hopefully, this would generate enough resentment to prompt the Arab states to request the withdrawal of American troops.

Three days into the war, there are already indications of the aforementioned resentment. A Saudi Arabian political analyst appeared on Al Jazeera TV to state that the Gulf Arab countries feel abandoned by the Trump Administration, which has prioritized the defense of Israel. Meagre US Air Defence Systems in the Middle East—such as MIM-104 Patriot and THAAD— are being used primarily to help Israel combat Iranian missiles.

Meanwhile, government officials in Bahrain and UAE—two Gulf Arab states adjacent Iran— have been reduced to watching helplessly as buzzing Iranian drones fly into their territories unopposed and crash into targets.

Here is a video of the Saudi analyst speaking :

I am willing to wager that Donald Trump had no idea that Ayatollah Khamenei was not only just Iran’s de facto Head of State, but also the revered spiritual leader of millions of Shia Muslims globally.

The assassination of the spiritual leader has been reverberating far beyond the geographic boundaries of Iran. In faraway Nigeria, thousands of Shia Muslims held rallies to mourn and protest the murder of Ayatollah Khamenei. Most of the demonstrations have been peaceful as shown in the video clip:

Nigeria has about 115 million Muslims. 92% of them are Sunnis while Shia and Ahmadiyya minorities constitute the remaining 5% and 3% respectively. Many Nigerian Sunnis do not view their Shia and Ahmadiyya counterparts as “real Muslims” and often treat them with hostility.

Most Shia minorities reside in the predominantly Muslim Northwestern states, where they encounter repression and violence that has led to several protests by the Iranian government over the decades.

Beyond official diplomatic protests, emissaries of Ayatollah Khamenei have travelled to the federal city of Abuja to remonstrate with the Nigerian government regarding recurring violence against the Shia community, often perpetrated by Sunni extremist groups and Northern state authorities, and occasionally, federally-controlled security services, which view Nigerian Shias as Iran’s agents of influence.

Of course, the notion that Nigeria’s indigenous Shia community are agents of Iran is as absurd as asserting that Nigerian Catholics (including myself) are agents of the Vatican.

Outside Nigeria, the protests over the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei have been mostly violent. In Pakistan, several protesters were killed as they attempted to invade the US Consulate in the cosmopolitan city of Karachi. Violence arising from protests elsewhere in Pakistan left 10 people dead in Gilgit-Baltistan and two dead in the national capital, Islamabad.

In Iraq, protesters in Baghdad attempted to enter the Green Zone hosting the gigantic US Embassy, which covers an area almost equal in size to the Vatican City State. Several Iraqi protesters trying to reach that American diplomatic complex were shot to death for their efforts.

Indian-controlled Kashmir also experienced clashes between the local police and thousands of Shia Muslims protesting the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei.

As I post this article, I am listening to an Iranian general stating that his country would target British military bases in Cyprus because the Americans have moved their fighter jets from the Gulf Arab states to the nearby Mediterranean European country.

The world has never been more unsafe than this moment.

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I want to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you for supporting the Substack blog through your likes, comments, and shares of my articles.

Three years and seven months have elapsed since I started publishing articles on Substack, and I’d like to stop for a moment to talk about why I am here and discuss the impending changes I am going to be making to this blog going forward. Please kindly read the essay to the end.

#2. SEEING THE WORLD AS IT IS, NOT AS YOU WISH IT TO BE

My first foray into the realm of writing and analysing events in Africa occurred many years ago while I was pursuing a doctorate in engineering in the United Kingdom. Through a series of serependitious events, I found myself writing part-time for a (now defunct) student magazine.

Below is a small sample of my work for the student magazine. Please bear in mind as you peruse them that I did not choose their somewhat dramatic titles— that was the responsibility of the magazine’s editor.

My articles were so popular that I was asked to keep writing for the magazine long after I had ceased to be a student. I continued to do so until my fledgling career in engineering began to demand my full attention. My first foray into political writing concluded in 2011, four years after it started.

While nurturing my engineering career, I relied on various news sources to keep abreast of political events in Nigeria and around the world. Within Nigeria, the domestic media scene is very rich. There are hundreds of newspapers, magazines, news websites, TV stations and radio stations representing every point of view to choose from. The same applies to a certain number of African states, but obviously not all of them.

For news about events unfolding outside the continent, there are the globe-spanning Euro-American corporate media outlets. I still consume their content, but my trust in them has long evaporated following the exposure of their lies about Saddam’s non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

My quest for “believable” sources of news on events occuring outside Africa led me in 2012 to Asia Times, where I encountered Pepe Escobar’s The Roving Eye column and cross-posted articles from Andrei Raevsky’s original Vineyard of The Saker blogger site, which is still up.

I consider my discovery of Vineyard of The Saker to be a fascinating eye-opener. I quickly became a donor and fan of Raevsky's blogging project and witnessed the exponential growth of its readership, culminating in its relocation from the google blogger site to a dedicated website in 2015.

On that dedicated website, Andrei Raevsky’s articles were published alongside those of other skilled writers he had invited. Andrei also cross-posted videos and written articles originally published elsewhere. Through those cross-postings, I discovered Alexander Mercouris, Mark Sleboda, Alexander Christoforou, Andrei Martyanov, Peter Lavell, Vladimir Suchan, Gleb Bazov, Glenn Diesen, Boris Rozhin, Dmitry Orlov, the late Colonel Patrick Lang and Night Vision (a.k.a Simplicius).

It would be remiss of me not to mention that I also appreciate the work of Glenn Greenwald, Larry Johnson, Craig Murray, Max Blumenthal, and Bernhard Horstmann (a.k.a Moon of Alabama). I am also a fan of The Duran in its original format (Lavell, Sleboda, Mercouris & Christoforou) and its current format (Mercouris & Christoforou).

Here on Substack, I enjoy the work of a variety of writers, including Arnaud Bertrand, Mike Hampton, Lilian Gajewski, Aurelien, Simplicius and Big Serge.

There are, of course, several unnamed alt-media writers whose work I also enjoy, right up until they dive into the analysis of Africa—a subject about which they know very little. I am referring to those who cannot tell the difference between a Nigerian (citizen of Nigeria) and a Nigerien (citizen of Niger Republic), yet remain 100% certain that Nigeria’s President Tinubu is a “puppet of France and United States.” I am talking about those who had never heard of the Treaty of Lagos (1975), yet they are cocksure that ECOWAS is Emmanuel Macron’s favorite chew toy.

My second foray into political writing was sparked by my desire to counteract simplistic nonsense spewed both in Euro-American corporate media and alternative media spaces about events unfolding in Africa. I wanted to highlight nuances and complex politico-cultural realities often ignored by reporters and “pundits” who know next to nothing about the continent beyond the usual stereotypes.

In response to hysterical claims in the Euro-American corporate media that Africans would die of mass starvation if they were denied access to wheat produced in Russia and Ukraine, I wrote the following in June 2022:

People in the sub-Saharan region live on their real staple foods like rice, maize, cassava, yam, etc. Wheat is mainly used for making bread and pastries (none of which are traditional foods in the sub-Saharan region). Saying that Africans will starve without Ukrainian/Russian wheat is akin to saying that Europeans will starve without imported Caribbean bananas.

The real effect of the [Russo-Ukraine] war will be felt in the soaring energy prices. Petroleum-rich African nations such as Nigeria, Algeria and Angola will not feel that adverse effect to the same extent as resource-poor African nations such as Malawi, Senegal and Mali…

Nigeria alone has several state-owned and private companies producing fertilizer. In late March 2022, a new privately-owned fertilizer plant opened in Nigeria. It is the largest anywhere in Africa and is capable of producing three million metric tonnes of fertilizer annually.

Resource-poor African nations like Senegal or Malawi have to import petroleum from abroad. The high energy prices means that the importation of this precious energy resource will be incredibly expensive.

The cost of transporting real staple foods (e.g. maize) from the farms to the marketplace will rise with high petroleum prices. Before appearing in the market, staple foods such as rice needs to be processed first. The operating costs of processing machines soars with rising petroleum prices.

In other words, the market price of genuine African staple foods,which are not in short supply on the continent —thanks to local production and imports from Asia—becomes incredibly expensive and out of reach for poor people with soaring petroleum prices.

Nine months later, the hysteria was back. However, this time it was limited to the alternative media space. Several alt-media outlets reported that the Biden Administration was preparing to sponsor a Colour Revolution in Nigeria to install the third-party candidate, Peter Obi, as Federal President, amidst allegations of widespread election fraud, following the conclusion of the February 2023 Presidential Election.

The United States officially declared its neutrality. However, it was clear from the comments of Biden Administration officials before and during the presidential election that they backed the genuinely popular third-party challenger Peter Obi against Bola Tinubu and Abubakar Atiku—the candidates representing the two pro-establishment parties. The US mainstream media echoed the sentiments of the Biden Administration.

Like many young Nigerians, I backed Peter Obi—the former governor of my home state—because he has the rare reputation of not being corrupt. He also had a long history of being an underdog candidate who had successfully used the law courts to reverse the results of elections rigged against him by pro-establishment political parties.

Peter Obi was actually installed as governor of my state in March 2006 by order of a federal court after a three-year-legal battle to prove that he was the rightful winner of the 2003 Anambra State Gubernatorial Election, which was heavy rigged by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). As a result of this landmark court ruling, Dr. Chris Ngige—the incumbent Anambra State governor and PDP politician— was ousted three years into his 4-year tenure to make way for Peter Obi to take power.

As I chronicled in this linked article, Peter Obi spent a significant portion of his first term in office (2006-2010) as Anambra State Governor resisting the chicanery of his powerful PDP enemies, who controlled most of the seats in the state parliament. He would subsequently be removed from office multiple times— occasionally, with the active connivance of the electoral commission. But each time, Nigeria’s federal judiciary intervened to restore him back to power. Several judges within Anambra State’s judicial system—including the Chief Judge— were ousted by the disciplinary organs of the National Judicial Council for conniving against Peter Obi and defying the superior rulings of federal courts.

Court rulings delivered by the Federal Appeals Court and the Nigerian Supreme Court on behalf of Governor Peter Obi established legal precedents that third-party candidates in other parts of Nigeria would subsequently use during their own litigation against electoral irregularities perpetrated by the well-oiled political machinery of establishment parties. A good example is the legal battle in Ondo State, which culminated in the July 2008 court verdict removing incumbent Governor Segun Agagu and replacing him with third-party underdog, Dr. Mimiko, who was declared the rightful winner of April 2007 Ondo State Gubernatorial Election.

In the run-up to the 2023 Presidential Election, many Nigerian youths, regardless of region, state and ethnicity, backed Peter Obi. They had all heard of his anti-corruption reforms as Anambra State governor, how he was unjustly impeached by his state parliament for refusing corruptly inflate the state budget to accommodate their demands for increased parliamentary allowances, and all his successful court battles.

Mesmerized by Peter Obi’s soft-spoken affability and his lack of corruption, the American media began to openly lionize him as well. They marvelled at his ability to reach many voters through social media, thus compensating for his lack of the vast political machines and financial resources available to the establishment PDP and APC.

Tony Blinken and his State Department subordinates could have chosen to keep quiet if they wanted. After all, there was nothing at stake for the United States in the presidential election. All the candidates, ranging from the third party challenger to the two establishment candidates, were firmly pro-Western— just like most of the Nigerian populace. Any of them as President of Nigeria would inevitably seek excellent relations with USA and UK.

But then, it isn’t in the character of the Masters of The Universe running United States to stay out of any other country’s affairs. Blinken had to demonstrate to Nigerian youths tired of corrupt establishment politicians that the “United States was on their side.” Blinken had to demonstrate this by signalling support for Peter Obi, the favoured candidate of most young Nigerian voters.

In their thinly disguised endorsement of Peter Obi, the Americans incurred the quiet anger of Tinubu’s presidential campaign.

During the presidential election, tech glitches and clumsy handling of unfamiliar new electronic equipment played a role in undermining the credibility of the electoral process, which blends electronic voter identification with manual casting of thumbprinted ballot papers.

Many supporters of Peter Obi firmly believe that electoral officials in certain areas of the country deliberately sabotaged the electronic equipment to justify a return to manual collation and transmission of election results—a method which caused significant delays and created opportunities for manipulation of the final vote tally.

After expressing dismay at the conduct of the presidential election, the Biden Administration threatened to place sanctions on electoral officials and on Bola Tinubu’s political party, All Progressive Congress (APC).

In anticipation that Tinubu would be declared the election winner, thousands of Peter Obi’s young supporters took to the streets to protest. Outside Nigeria, the alternative media universe went into overdrive with claims that the United States was planning a Colour Revolution to install Peter Obi as President. Predictably, Peter Obi was dubbed “a puppet of the United States”.

After having a few arguments with some alt-media figures resident in Europe and North America, I decided to write an article on 2 March 2023 to debunk their claims. Here is an excerpt:

[It] is rather unwise to reflexively assume that a Colour Revolution is being planned whenever one sees or hears the US government, its European allies, and its media propagandists making certain remarks about the internal politics of a country.

As a Nigerian, I can certainly say that I have seen no evidence that US or EU nations are meddling in the general elections. One must not assume that a US State Department video or a comment from an EU bureaucrat is evidence of such. Unsolicited commentary on the elections of other countries (including that of Nigeria) is given for the USA and the EU who arrogate themselves the status of “The Global Guardians of Democracy”.

Nigeria is not Venezuela, Nicaragua or Iran. There is nothing at stake for Western countries in the elections taking place in Nigeria. For one thing, most Nigerians are reflexively pro-Western. For another, the entire political class of Nigeria (corrupt and incorrupt) are totally enchanted by the West…

Western mainstream media support for one candidate, Peter Obi, has more to do with the fact that he seemingly emerged from nowhere to run a brilliant election campaign powered by social media engagement, which has attracted young educated Nigerians tired of corruption.

But Peter Obi did not emerge from nowhere. Despite the Western media not knowing him until he began to run for Presidential Office as a third party candidate, Peter Obi has been around for a long time…

Shortly after publishing the article, the electoral commission declared Bola Tinubu the “winner of the election” and “duly elected President of Nigeria”.

While leaders of various foreign countries were calling Bola Tinubu to offer their congratulations, the Biden Administration was sabre-rattling. Many young people protesting on the streets hung their hopes on American displeasure with the announced results and threats of sanctions against Nigerian election officials and stalwarts of Tinubu’s political party.

Unfounded pre-election rumours among Peter Obi’s supporters—that the American FBI would present “proof of drug dealing” to force Tinubu out of the presidential race—morphed into a ludicrous post-election narrative that the US agency would finally release the “damning evidence” to block Tinubu’s ascendancy to the presidency.

I was an ardent supporter of Peter Obi, but not one to be pulled into the realm of legends, fantasies and delusions. Bola Tinubu may be a deeply corrupt politician, but there is no real evidence of his involvement in drug trafficking. I say this in spite of reams upon reams of text published by his Nigerian detractors, who hate him with a passion that I find frightening and irrational.

As I had anticipated, the Americans eventually ended their brinksmanship and grudgingly congratulated Tinubu on his “election victory” after the man was seen in the company of the Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria. The Biden Administration subsequently sent a nine-person delegation to Tinubu’s presidential inauguration ceremony.

My best guess was that the Americans realized that it was worthless to continue alienating Tinubu, who could not be stopped from ascending to the presidency. Moreover, the Americans knew that Tinubu had a history of working with the Chinese, going back to his days as a state governor. There was simply no value in pushing Tinubu totally into the pro-China camp.

The passage of time revealed that I was completely correct and those alternative media outlets pushing the Colour Revolution narrative were wrong. The street demonstrations petered out as the aggrieved presidential candidates— Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar— went to court to challenge the election results and seek the retroactive disqualification of Tinubu.

There was no Colour Revolution in Nigeria, but that did not deter the alternative media pundits. They simply moved the goalposts—the label of “American puppet” shifted from Peter Obi to Bola Tinubu. This label was later modified to “Franco-American puppet” and applied to all West African leaders opposed the military coup that occured in Niger Republic on 26 July 2023.

African leaders across the continent voiced their opposition to the coup d’etat and refused to recognize the subsequent military junta established in Niger. However only elected leaders from ECOWAS countries were garlanded with the “Franco-American puppet” label by alt-media pundits. Interestingly, the leaders of Algeria and South Africa, who expressed strong disapproval of the coup, escaped the “Franco-American puppet” label. Even their ongoing refusal to recognize the Niger junta has not earned them the label.

Personally, I was relieved that Russia’s Sergei Lavrov—who condemned the coup as “anti-constitutional” and “undemocratic”— was not also denounced in alt-media outlets as a puppet of Biden and Macron.

At a time when alt-media pundits were wrongly predicting an imminent military invasion of Niger Republic by “puppets of USA and France”, I made the following prescient prediction in early August 2023, which turned out to be spot on:

There is no doubt that France and USA desperately wants ECOWAS to intervene in Niger. Both countries are frustrated and disappointed that a military intervention has not already begun. But the fact of the matter is that the final decision to intervene does not rest with those NATO countries. An actual ECOWAS intervention would depend a lot on the domestic political situation both in Nigeria and in Niger Republic. Until then, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan and Macron would have to read the tea leaves like everybody else.

I also wrote the following :

Unless, Tinubu can find a way to neutralize domestic opposition, it is doubtful he would be willing to order the Nigerian Air Force circling the skies and troops of the Nigerian Army at the border to enter Niger. It is as simple as that. Officials of France, EU and USA have mostly been reduced to following Nigeria’s meandering political system instead of calling the shots.

The argument I made through a series of articles on the Niger crisis was that local political actors in my subregion (West Africa) had their own agency. Neither France nor the United States had the kind of unlimited powers of influence conferred upon them by alternative media commentators, most of whom did not even know that a country named Niger Republic existed prior to July 2023 coup d’état.

Outsiders unfamiliar with Africa’s intricate history often find it perplexing why Nigeria or any other African country would involve themselves in the affairs of a neighboring sovereign state. Many assume that African states have no national interests that extend beyond their immediate geographic boundaries and automatically interpret any intervention beyond their borders as serving the interests of external powers from North America or Western Europe. Of course, these assumptions are nonsense that does not accord with historical evidence.

The reality is that large African nations, such as Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa, with more advanced economies, generally tend to have national and regional interests that need protection. Niger Republic is a country with strong ethnic and religious affinity with Nigeria. For many decades, Niger Republic received 70% of its electricity—free of charge—from Nigeria. Niger Republic has been a longstanding beneficiary of free Nigerian grain delivered perodically by the truckloads. The idea that Nigeria does not have its own independent motives for wanting to intervene in the affairs of Niger is laughable.

It is equally ludicrous to expect that Nigeria would remain docile and fail to intervene when a politically destabilizing event is occuring in neighbouring Benin Republic, with which it also shares ethnic and cultural bonds.

Since 1990, ECOWAS has maintained a protocol that allows for military intervention in member states suffering from political instability precipitated by military coups and civil wars. The protocol was adopted in reaction to the First Liberian Civil War, which crossed national borders and sparked the Sierra Leonean Civil War. Both wars threatened regional stability in West Africa.

At this juncture, I would like to note that all pan-African bodies —including the AU, SADC, ECOWAS, and ECCAS—are reflexively hostile to military coups, as these unconstitutional changes of government have a long history of plunging the continent into instability and war. A few examples would suffice:

• The Algerian Civil War (1992-2002) was triggered by the January 1992 coup carried out by the Algerian Army to stop the popular Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) from forming a democratic government after winning the December 1991 parliamentary election. At the end of the civil war, defeated jihadi rebels such as Mokhtar Belmokhtar, Abdelmalek Droukdel and Abdelhamid Abou Zeid drifted into neighbouring Mali, married local women, and began to build terrorist gangs. Their presence in the Sahel Belt marked the onset of jihadi terrorism in West Africa. The destruction of Libya’s statehood a decade later served as a turbocharger for the terrorist gangs, as weapons air-dropped by NATO and others looted from the armouries of the collapsed Libyan state created an arms bonanza in the Sahel.

• Ethiopian Civil War (1974-1991) began within days of the military coup that ended the existence of the 704-year-old Ethiopian Empire. The civil war between the newly installed Marxist-Leninist regime and disgruntled Marxist rebels took 1.4 million lives—the bulk of those deaths being due to the famine that took place in the middle of the war.

• Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-1970) was the culmination of a chain of events set off by the January 1966 military coup executed by young idealistic army officers who wanted to end corruption in Nigeria. That particular putsch spawned the counter-coup of July 1966, which was accompanied by large-scale massacres of civilian Easterners resident in Northern Nigeria. Outraged by the massacres, Eastern Nigeria declared its independence and statehood as the Republic of Biafra, and a shooting war broke out six months later.

• Somali Civil War (1981-present) and Ethiopia-Somalia War (1977-1978) both have their origins in political choices made by the military junta of General Said Barre, who came to power after a putsch in October 1969. To mollify the discontented populace, he promoted the Greater Somalia project, which sought to annex ethnic Somali areas of eastern Ethiopia and northeastern Kenya. The project ended in failure after Somalia was defeated by Ethiopia in a shooting war. Disgruntled Somalian Army officers blamed Said Barre for their defeat. A coup against him failed and he summarily executed its ringleaders. Barre’s later attempt to suppress a mass uprising in the northwest region (former British Somaliland) degenerated into a full-blown civil war. Somaliland proclaimed its independence and statehood on 18 May 1991, as the rest of Somalia descended into chaos.

• Ugandan Bush War (1980-1986) and Uganda-Tanzania War (1978-1979) both have their origins in politically destabilizing events that followed the January 1971 coup d’etat carried out by General Idi Amin. The coup leader Idi Amin was initially popular because he burnished his “anti-imperialist” credentials by regularly criticizing the United States, Israel and European countries. His popularity reached stratospheric heights after the racist expulsion of Ugandan-Asian minorities in 1972. His popularity only began to fade when he started murdering both critics and allies alike in a fit of paranoia. His paranoia also led to periodic massacres of Ugandans from certain ethnic groups whom he perceived as opponents of his regime.

• First Liberian Civil War (1989-1997) was the culmination of political instabilities resulting from the 1980 military coup that ended 133 years of minority rule by Americo-Liberians (i.e. Black American settlers and their descendants).

• Sierra Leonian Civil War (1991-2002) and Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003) were both offshoots of the First Liberian Civil War.

Given the historical context presented above, it is no surprise that Nigerian-led ECOWAS and South Africa-dominated SADC have both intervened in neighbouring countries in their respective subregions to quash or forestall military coups.

The fact that Nigeria’s national security interests in Niger Republic happened to somewhat coincide with the geopolitical ambitions of French and American interlopers is not proof that Nigeria is a puppet of either external power. France and the United States did not even share the same interests in Niger Republic and often worked at cross purposes with each other.

The Biden Administration refused to coordinate with France and even appointed a new US Ambassador to Niamey in August 2023 at a time when the Niger junta was requesting the removal of the French Ambassador. The United States couldn’t care less about French concerns. The only thing the Americans feared was Niger Republic falling under the influence of Russia, which eventually happened.

I am confident that many alt-media commentators asserting that “Nigeria is controlled by France” are ignorant of the historical tensions that existed between the two nations. France was hardly pleased when Nigeria created ECOWAS in 1975, with the goal of regional integration and a long-term plan to replace West African CFA Franc with a regional currency.

A brief excerpt from a comprehensive article I wrote on the subject:

Charles De Gaulle bemoaned the fact that Anglophone Nigeria existed in a corner of Africa where French-speaking states were in the majority. Nigeria had the largest population of any country on the continent.

Back then, Nigeria had an agrarian economy, which was growing very fast in the early 1960s. Vast reserves of petroleum resources was discovered in 1958, but did not play a strong part in Nigeria’s economy until the 1970s.

Given its gigantic national population and large economy, De Gaulle correctly predicted that Nigeria would eventually become the hegemon of West Africa and France would be powerless to do anything about it as she exercised zero influence in Anglophone Africa. Moreover, France’s commercial trade with the landlocked Francophone states of Niger and Chad relied heavily on the transit through the territory of Nigeria and the use of its sea ports.

The federal government of the newly independent Nigeria vocally opposed continued French control of Algeria, supported the defiance of Ahmed Touré in Guinea, and expelled the French Ambassador to Nigeria in January 1961 to protest France’s third nuclear bomb test in the Sahara Desert on 27 December 1960.

The expulsion of the French Ambassador was followed by the closure of all Nigerian sea ports and airports to French ships and aeroplanes, but those measures were gradually reversed after the economies of landlocked Chad and Niger were adversely affected. The French Ambassador was not allowed to return to Nigeria until 1965...

Regarding the 2023 coup d’état in Gabon, I also went against the grain of popular opinion in the mainstream and alternative media. While every other alt-media pundit hailed the putsch as “revolutionary” and proclaimed the end of French influence in Gabon, I wrote an article four days after the coup to state that French influence had not been harmed at all.

I explained that the masterminds of the 2023 Gabonese coup d’état had no intention of changing the status-quo. In any case, the Gabonese populace does not have a tradition of harboring animosity toward the French. Gabon is not interchangeable with Mali and Burkina Faso located over a thousand miles away.

Fast-forwarding two years later, I believe I have been vindicated. While French influence is retreating in Francophone West Africa, it remains very strong in petroleum-rich Gabon. In the absence of any popular constituency calling for eradication of French influence in Gabon, Macron went ahead and signed new agreements for his country’s military base in the Gabonese city of Libreville. This was taking place at a time when France was gradually shutting down military bases in otherwise friendly West African countries such as Senegal and Ivory Coast at the request of their governments. Hostile military regimes in West Africa—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger— expelled French ambassadors and issued short-notice ultimatums for the closure of all French military bases.

So, why do so many in the alternative media often misread political events in in Africa? Well, the answer is that many alt-media pundits who comment on the subject matter know little or nothing about the continent. There is a generalized one-dimensional understanding that Africa is a place of poverty and wars, a geopolitical playground for “rapacious” neocolonial exploitation. Of course, the devil is always in the details, but those three-dimensional “details” largely elude a lot of outsiders because they lack a comprehensive knowledge of the differing histories and political cultures of various countries on the continent.

In the minds of many alt-media commentators, African countries are passive subjects in an ongoing geopolitical struggle for influence. These commentators interpret every action taken by an African state as either aligned with the “good” Russia-China axis or the “bad” US-led NATO axis.

For obvious reasons, Euro-American corporate media outlets take the opposite stance. As far as they are concerned, African governments seeking friendly diplomatic relations with the Kremlin are under the spell of “Russian Disinformation” while African governments aligned with Western countries are “good” and “democratic”.

In reality, the vast majority of African countries do not feel that they need to pick a side. In fact, most countries cherish their multi-vector approach to foreign policy. Hence, the reason why Chad maintains good relations with the United States and Russia at the same time.

Claims made in February 2023 by the Biden Administration that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had uncovered plans by Kremlin-backed Wagner mercenaries to overthrow the government of Chad was not taken seriously by officials of the African country. In fact, Chadian President Mahamat Deby visited Moscow a year later to meet with his Russian counterpart.

Until May 2024, almost 100 American soldiers were stationed in Chad. However, the Chadian government requested their withdrawal, contending that the US Special Operations Forces had failed to justify its continued presence in the country and was not contributing significantly to the fight against jihadi terrorism in the wider region.

The Pentagon moved 75 Special Operations troops from Chad to Germany. By negotiation and mutual agreement, a small residual US force stayed behind to provide counterterrorism training and act as military advisers to Chadian troops.

Similarly, Niger’s military junta had sought good relations with the United States while cultivating new military ties with Russia. The junta was ultimately unsuccessful in its approach because the Biden Administration, steeped in zero-sum mentality, refused to cooperate.

Eventually, frustrated junta officials requested the withdrawal of 1,100 American troops, all of whom had been idle for many months because Biden had barred them from assisting Niger troops in combating rampaging jihadi terrorists. This was reported in Newsweek magazine and corroborated by Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, the token civilian in the military junta.

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Post, published on 14 May 2024, he expressed his indignation with the Biden Administration as follows:

“ The Americans stayed on our soil, doing nothing while the terrorists killed people and burned towns. It is not a sign of friendship to come on our soil but let the terrorists attack us. We have seen what the United States will do to defend its allies, because we have seen Ukraine and Israel.”

The junta’s decision to cancel the USA-Niger Military Cooperation Agreement was not influenced by any principled “anti-imperialist” ideology, but by common sense. If foreign military troops in your country are no longer willing to cooperate with you, if they are willing to standby and watch jihadi terrorists on the rampage, then it is only logical to ask them to leave.

In spite of everything that happened, Niger junta still threw two separate send-off parties for departing US troops and signed an agreement with the United States to maintain their diplomatic relations. These courtesies were never extended to France, which had its ambassador and 1,500 French troops thrown out in an ignominious manner.

I continue to see misrepresentations and exaggerations when it comes to the subject of French influence in Africa. Yes, French influence has taken a fatal blow in Francophone West Africa from which there can be no recovery.

Nevertheless, French influence survives—albeit weakened— in Francophone Central Africa, where ordinary people’s attitudes range from outright Francophilia (Gabon) to a general ambivalence (Congo Rep & C.A.R) to a distaste for France (D.R. Congo, Cameroon & Chad).

There are no Francophone Central African countries that harbour the same sort of visceral loathing of France found in Francophone West African nations. This explains why Emmanuel Macron is overseeing the French Treasury’s surrender of authority over the West African CFA Franc while maintaining full control of the separate Central African CFA Franc.

After successfully renewing ties with nearly all Francophone Central African countries, Macron took the time to cultivate new friendships with Anglophone and Lusophone African nations populated by millions of people, who harbour ZERO animosities towards the French since they never lived under the colonial yoke of France at any time in their history.

As I write this article, Macron is busy making preparations to do something that none of his predecessors would ever have dreamed of— organizing a France-Africa Summit in an Anglophone African country.

Charles De Gaulle, Francois Mitterrand, and Jacques Chirac may be turning in their graves, but at least Macron would be able to travel to the Republic of Kenya without fearing that the local population would break into street riots that culminate in the burning of the French Embassy and other properties linked to that diplomatic mission.

Although Macron wasn’t physically present in Burkina Faso during the October 2022 riot, I am sure he saw the footage of French diplomatic properties burning in the capital city of Ouagadougou:

I am also certain that he saw this humiliating spectacle as well in the same city:

Euro-American corporate media propagandists blame “Russian Disinformation” for political rallies such as the one shown in the video above. In reality, those rallies were completely organic and not the machinations of the Kremlin. Attendees of those rallies adhere to the classic dictum: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Anti-French demonstrators in Burkina Faso perceived Russia as the enemy of France. So they burned French flags and waved Russian ones.

Moreover, Burkinabes and Malians had also heard that Russian mercenaries were racking up successes against Muslim insurgents in Central African Republic (C.A.R) situated about 1,892 miles (~ 3,045 km) away. They wanted those mercenaries in their countries to replace the French troops.

The Kremlin was actually taken by surprise by the wave of Russophilia sweeping Francophone West Africa. It scrambled to capitalize on this sentiment to forge new friendships in a subregion where historic allies of the USSR were few and far between. Apart from a handful of West African allies such as Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and the now defunct People’s Republic of Benin, Soviet influence was largely confined to the subregions of Southern and Northern Africa.

Getting back to the concept of geopolitical manoeuvering, a common theme among all those African countries currently being courted by France is their steadfast commitment to a multi-vector foreign policy, their reluctance to put all their eggs in one basket.

While hosting Russian mercenaries, the Central African Republic (C.A.R) never stopped offering the olive branch to France despite Emmanuel Macron’s tantrums over that African state’s military and diplomatic relationship with the Kremlin.

Initially, the efforts of the C.A.R government went nowhere as Macron made the expulsion of Russian mercenaries a condition for improvement in diplomatic relations. Of course, the C.A.R rejected Macron’s attempt to control its national security policy. So, ties between the country and Russia continued to grow stronger at the expense of France, which withdrew its donor aid in 2021.

However, as French influence retreated at breakneck speed in Francophone West Africa, President Macron began to reconsider his attitude towards the olive branch offered by the Central African Republic. He finally recognized that France needed all the allies it could garner in French-speaking Africa.

In April 2024, the French leader finally accepted the olive branch that C.A.R has been offering since 2018. Central African Republic signed a partnership agreement with France while simultaneously concluding a deal with the Kremlin to set up a permanent military base for Afrika Korps— the name of Russian paramilitary units consisting of former Wagner mercenaries.

Central African Republic also held talks with an American mercenary outfit, Bancroft Global Development, to provide US mercenaries to augment the counterinsurgency efforts of Russian paramilitaries on the ground. If that is not a prime example of a multi-vector foreign policy, then I don’t know what else could be.

Many alt-media commentators in the Western world have a very romantic view of China and Russia, but Africans don’t have such a view (not even Russophiles like me). We see the world as it is, not how we prefer it to be.

China and Russia always put their own interests first, which is not necessarily a bad thing. For that reason, I understand why Russia decided to develop ties with the head-chopping jihadi terrorist currently presiding over the ruins of the former Syrian Arab Republic. Yeah, the spectacle of Putin shaking hands and having dinner with the jihadi terrorist in Moscow was ghastly, but that is realpolitik in its rawest form.

Both China and Russia cooperated with the Americans in sanctioning Iran and North Korea. It was only when both China and Russia failed in their attempts to develop closer ties with the Americans that they belatedly decided to stop helping the Americans to disrupt the economies of North Korea and Iran. The governments in Moscow and Beijing are not angels, and most African states know this. So, they will work earnestly with Russia and China, but keep their options open. That doesn’t make leaders of such African countries “the puppets of France or the United States”.

This is not to suggest that African leaders do not appreciate the historic roles that the Russians and the Chinese played in helping their countries defeat colonialism, assert statehood, and build critical infrastructure. On the contrary, they do—as evidenced by the video of Comorian President Azali Assoumani (then AU Chairman) addressing Vladimir Putin in July 2023 :

I have written articles about the sacrifices that poverty-ridden China made in the 1960s and 1970s to build the iconic TAZARA railway, connecting landlocked Zambia to the coast of Tanzania. By Mao Zedong’s admission, certain railway projects within China had to be suspended to make significant resources and personnel available for the project in Southern Africa. To further put things in perspective, the TAZARA railway project was the largest single foreign-aid project undertaken by China anywhere in the world as of the year 2012.

On 10 August 2022, TAZARA Memorial Park was inaugurated in Zambia to honour the 160 construction workers—including 64 Chinese citizens— who died during the railway project. Both Tanzania and Zambia have paid tribute to the spirit of cooperation between their countries and China.

Having said that, Tanzania and Zambia are not interested in putting all their eggs in one basket.

Vice-President Kamala Harris was reminded of how seriously African states take their multi-vector foreign policies during her March 2023 visit to Tanzania, Ghana and Zambia, all friendly Anglophone African states with populations that are largely pro-Western.

A few weeks before Kamala embarked on her visit, angry crowds had beseiged President Emmanuel Macron as soon as his plane landed in the French-speaking Democratic Republic of Congo (a former Belgian colony). His meeting with students at a Congolese university was a disaster, with an angry Macron delivering a blistering speech. “France is not responsible for Africa's problems with sovereignty,” he told the students in the lecture hall. Finally, the joint press conference between Macron and his Congolese host, President Félix Tshisekedi, degenerated into an embarassing mess, with both presidents engaged in an argument.

None of that happened to Kamala when she came to the continent. As shown in the video above, the US Vice President was welcomed by large crowds in all Anglophone countries visited. Nevertheless, she failed in her mission to persuade the governments of those countries to downgrade ties with China.

During the Ghanaian leg of the visit, Harris was warmly welcomed by then-President Nana Akuffo-Addo, who delivered a heartfelt speech, extolling the US-Ghana relations and recalling how several Ghanaians had benefited from US grants to study in American universities during the 1950s and 1960s.

Nana Akuffo-Addo had spent his formative years in the United Kingdom. He attended secondary school in Sussex and later studied at Oxford University. He worked as a Barrister in the courts of England for a while before returning home to Ghana. So, he is as pro-Western as can be for any African leader.

Nonetheless, he resisted Kamala’s attempt to pressure him to reconsider his country’s multi-vector foreign policy. Later, during an uncomfortable joint press conference with Kamala, he criticized US obsession with China-African relations, as seen in the video clip below:

Even South Africa is not excluded from the African states aiming to pursue a an equidistant foreign policy. American companies based in South Africa produce more than 500,000 local jobs, noticeably higher than the 400,000 local jobs estimated for Chinese firms by the South African government. Although only 7.6% of South Africa’s exports go to the United States, Trump’s tariffs on them has put around 100,000 South African jobs in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors at risk.

With unemployment at 32% and thousands of jobs on the line, South Africa is forced to balance its geopolitical alignment with Russia and China against its economic relationship with the United States. Hence, why Ramaphosa and his delegation travelled to Washington DC to meet Donald Trump in the wake of the fake allegations of “white genocide”.

Of course, South Africa’s attempt to repair its deteriorating relationship with the United States, which began during the Biden Administration, was never going to be successful. The Americans would not settle for anything less than South Africa downgrading its relations with Russia and China, and dropping its legal case against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

Nonetheless, South Africa will continue to seek better relations with the United States and try to avoid actions that would make things worse. That is why the South African government was relieved that Putin did not attend the BRICS Summit in August 2023 and the G-20 Summit in November 2025.

In an attempt to reduce tensions with the highly unpredictable Trump Administration, the coalition government of South Africa tried to stop Iran from participating in naval exercises with Russia, China and UAE in South African waters. However, the leadership of the South African armed forces ignored government instructions and allowed Iran to participate in those exercises.

To mollify the Americans, the South African government announced it would investigate why the military leadership had defied its directives. I don’t expect much to come out of this “investigation”. This is not the first time the leaders of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) have defied orders from the Ramaphosa-led coalition government.

In August 2025, the overall head of SANDF, General Rudzani Maphwanya, ignored government instructions and visited Iran. During a meeting with his Iranian counterparts in Tehran, General Maphwanya delivered a speech pledging to strengthen ties between SANDF and the Iranian armed forces. He also reiterated South Africa's support for the Palestinian people.

Unsurprisingly, South Africa’s coalition government of strange bedfellows reacted discondantly. Government ministers from the white liberal-dominated Democratic Alliance (DA) demanded that General Maphwanya be dismissed as SANDF chief and face a court-martial. Government ministers from the African National Congress (ANC) issued a tepid statement stating that Maphwanya’s trip to Iran was “unfortunate and not sanctioned by President Ramaphosa.”

The South African ministry of defence requested a report from the SANDF chief regarding his Iranian trip— an administrative move intended to reassure the irate Americans that the matter was being addressed.

Of course, nothing came of that administrative exercise because President Ramaphosa and his ANC faction within the coalition government were in full agreement with the views of the SANDF chief, especially with regards to the Palestinian Cause. However, senior ANC officials have no wish to further strain relations with the Orange Strongman in the White House.

Here is the inconvenient truth— South Africa has a trade surplus with the United States, which is a lucrative export destination of its value-added manufactured goods, certain precious metals and some agricultural products. By contrast, South Africa has a perennial trade deficit with China, which is mainly interested in buying raw materials from the country. Russia and South Africa may have a powerful geopolitical relationship, but their economic ties are negligible.

A cursory look at the table below confirms that South Africa cannot simply sell more iron ore and coal to China to compensate for the loss of thousands of high-skilled jobs if the Mercedes-Benz or BMW assembly plants in the Eastern Cape Province lost their U.S. export market.

In many ways, South Africa’s current predicament mirrors that of Venezuela. Russian and Chinese assistance was insufficient to counteract the devastation inflicted on Venezuela’s economy by the U.S. trade embargo imposed since 2019. While China’s role as a primary buyer of crude oil offered a vital lifeline, it ultimately failed to compensate for Venezuela’s loss of the extremely lucrative U.S. market. In fact, the Maduro government had to offer substantial discounts to incentivize Chinese giants like PetroChina and Sinopec to resume buying Venezuelan crude, after they had previously halted purchases to avoid the risk of U.S. secondary sanctions.

Recently, South Africa was reminded of the limits to the power of its two largest BRICS partners. China and Russia were unable to stop the Orange Strongman from sending US Special Forces troops to invade Venezuela, kill 80 people, and kidnap the President of the country. The US Navy is still hijacking tankers bearing Venezuelan crude oil on the high seas like an 18th Century piracy group. On top of the U.S. trade embargo, Venezuela is now under an economic blockade, unable to sell its petroleum to the rest of the world.

Many African countries have benefited immensely from Chinese investment and trade. Nevertheless, their economies still require trade with Europe and North America to remain solvent. This partly explains the multi-vector foreign policy.

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THE END

• Trump Administration invades Venezuela and kidnaps President Maduro and his wife.

• African Union and individual African countries react to events in Venezuela.

• Trump hosts 17 oil company chief executives in the White House. Certain chief executives express their skepticism of his proposals.

• Regardless of what Trump says, actual US control of Venezuela’s petroleum resources is far from being a foregone conclusion.

• Delcy Rodriguez and her officials are ready to offer generous petroleum concessions to the United States, but are likely to refuse to surrender control of Venezuelan oil. Doing so would damage their credibility in the eyes of the Chavista-supporting working classes and destroy the Bolivarian Republic in the long run.

Obviously, I agree with the banner headline above, which I pulled from the website of Channels TV, a privately-owned Nigerian television station.

It is indeed embarassing that the largest country in Africa—by population size—did not have anything to say about the US military operation to kidnap the President of Venezuela. Under normal circumstances, Nigeria would have issued a strong condemnation of the Maduro kidnapping— just as it did the recognition of Somaliland by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

However, the circumstances right now isn’t normal. The Nigerian government is receiving unsolicited military aid from the United States to fight jihadi terrorists who mostly operate in northeastern parts of the country.

Of course, there is nothing altruistic about this military aid. Donald Trump simply wants to appeal to his religious MAGA base by pretending to be a warrior chief protecting Nigerian Christians from an imaginary genocide. The Nigerian government dismissed the false “Christian genocide” narrative, but saw an opportunity to gain access to advanced US weaponry that it had long sought since the era of the Bush Jr. Administration.

After decades of being denied access to such equipment, Trump suddenly approved the sale of some of the desired military ordnance to Nigeria for $346 million in August of last year.

This is not the first time that Trump broke with his predecessors to approve weapon sales to Nigeria. Back in 2017, Trump lifted the ban on the sale of A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft, which the Obama Administration had imposed on the basis that the Brazilian-made aircraft contains US components.

Nigerian officials have long learnt that Trump is highly transactional, thin-skinned and has an ego the size of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. Therefore, if you want something from him, then you had better limit your criticism of his actions.

Many Nigerians are aware that part of the motivation for Trump “going all medieval on Nicolas Maduro’s ass” is the affront he felt at the Venezuelan leader dancing on the streets, seemingly dismissive of the Orange Strongman’s mafioso-style demands.

Although, the Tinubu government does not think the United States will invade Nigeria, there is a fear that the highly mercurial Trump may revert to his predecessors’ policy of not selling advanced US arms to Nigeria.

Of course, Nigeria buys plenty of weapons made elsewhere— Turkey, Russia and China are top suppliers to the Nigerian Armed Forces. However, the prevailing mindset among Nigerian officials is that military equipment made in the USA is inherently superior. Therefore, they are not willing to jeopardize their access to these advanced armaments by antagonizing Trump with an official statement condemning the Maduro kidnapping.

In the absence of an official statement from Nigeria, I would have to make do with the scalding condemnation of the kidnapping issued by the Ghanaian government, which is generally friendly to the United States:

I also align myself strongly with the speech given by South Africa’s Deputy UN Ambassador Jonathan Passmoor :

For a man who had suffered “white genocide” in South Africa, Jonathan Passmoor looks remarkably healthy. I guess Trump Administration officials would have to work harder to convince Jonathan, and 4.7 million South Africans that share his racial appearance, that they would be wiped out unless they agree to transition from wealthy landowners in South Africa to landless refugee-hobos in the United States.

The African Union (AU) issued a communique, expressing its “grave concern” about the abduction of Maduro and his wife. The wording in the communique could have been stronger, but I guess it is better than remaining silent:

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Moving on to the events in Venezuela, I have a couple of things to say. I’ll start by stating that I have zero interest in fitting myself into the leftwing-versus- rightwing paradigm. Like the vast majority of Africans, my personal ideology is called Pragmatism. Therefore, I will refrain from wading into the leftwing pro-Maduro and rightwing anti-Maduro arguments raging among Westerners on the internet. Regardless of what one thinks of Maduro, the United States had absolutely no business invading a sovereign nation and kidnapping its President under the dubious pretext of “fighting drug trafficking”.

The entire world knows that there were no “drug boats” trafficking fentanyl and cocaine to the United States. None of those small boats in Caribbean waters, off the coast of Venezuela, had enough fuel to reach the United States. They would need to refuel more than 20 times before they can come anywhere close to the coast of USA. More importantly, Venezuela does not manufacture fentanyl, and plays a marginal role in international drug trafficking.

The 2025 report published by the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) identified Mexico and Colombia as chief sources of drugs trafficked into the United States. The report stated that a negligible portion of the drugs trafficked to the USA came from Venezuela, and even then the trafficking was done by low-level drug dealers.

Nothing in the report supports Trump’s spurious claims that the Venezuelan government was in any way involved in drug trafficking. Neither does it support Marco Rubio’s claims that President Maduro is at the head of a fictitious organisation named Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”).

President Maduro’s real crime was his survival of previous attempts by Trump to remove him from office, and his refusal to grant United States the exclusive right to engage in the “trafficking” of Venezuela’s heavy crude oil. Chinese participation in the Venezuelan petroleum market was also unacceptable to the Orange Strongman in the White House. Of course, we must factor in Marco Rubio instrumentalizing the US government to settle his family’s personal feud with the Cuban state, which has been a close ally of Venezuela since 1999.

Rightwing US media outlets often describe the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela as a “communist state”, which I consider to be laughably false. Yes, the inaugral Bolivarian government of Hugo Chavez established state-owned companies, state media networks and nationalized key sectors of the economy, including the petroleum industry.

However, many of the pre-existing privately-owned businesses in Venezuela were left intact. Right-leaning Venezuelan upper classes were allowed to keep their luxury homes and other assets, including private TV networks openly hostile to Bolivarian government. Between themselves, these TV networks held up to 90% of the television-viewing audience in Venezuela.

When Chavez was temporarily overthrown in 2002, those private TV networks cheered heartily. In the aftermath of the failed coup, the restored Chavez Administration blocked Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) from operating as a terrestrial public broadcaster as punishment for being the most fervent cheerleader of the US-backed 2002 coup d’etat. Contrary to claims in the Euro-American corporate media, RCTV did not shut down entirely. It continued to broadcast via cable and satellite.

Over a long period of time, both Chavez and Maduro inevitably took steps to curb the reach and influence of these extremely hostile private media networks. Nevertheless, privately-owned media organizations antagonistic to the Venezuelan state continue to operate even as I write this article. Claims that all Venezuelan private media outlets are now pro-government are false. Opposition-run private media hostile to the Venezuelan government continues to exist with a lively audience.

Having said that, there are many cases of opposition-aligned journalists being harrassed by security officials for allegedly “working for foreign interests”. Some anti-government news websites— El Nacional, La Patilla and El Universal— can only be accessed via a Virtual Private Network since they are blocked by CANTV, the state-run internet service provider.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that many of these pro-opposition Venezuelan media outlets do not actually care about “democracy” any more than their pro-government counterparts. During the failed 2002 coup d’etat many of these opposition media outlets loudly cheered plans by the coup plotters to suspend civil liberties and censor pro-Chavista Venezuelans.

During the administration of Hugo Chavez, socialism and capitalism cohabited uneasily under one roof. As previously mentioned, Chavez embarked on an extensive nationalization campaign that extended across various sectors of the economy, such as petroleum, banking, and telecommunications. Yet, private enterprises continued to exist and wealthy Venezuelans kept their mansions.

Under President Maduro’s leadership, the uneasy mish-mash of socialism and capitalism became overlaid with old-fashioned government corruption and nepotism. The rigid socialist rhetoric of the Chavez era quietly gave some way to pragmatism. Maduro even reversed some of Chavez’s nationalisation policies. Certain state-owned companies were privatised.

Nonetheless, the United States was not impressed at all, and it wasn’t because of “a lack of democracy” or “evil dictator Maduro”. Those are just excuses. The United States has a long history of creating and supporting military dictatorships in Latin America and beyond. The ruling elites within the United States simply saw the existence of the Bolivarian Republic as an affront to themselves.

Since Chavez and his leftist crew came to power in 1999, there have been non-stop plots by successive United States Administrations to topple the Bolivarian Republic. In that endeavour, the United States had an inexhaustive list of willing Venezuelan collaborators, mainly drawn from that Latin American country’s middle and upper classes, who never accepted the economic and social reforms carried out.

The Bush Jr. Administration abandoned all talk of “democracy” to support the botched April 2002 coup d’etat carried out against Hugo Chavez by senior Venezuelan military officers and wealthy civilian businessmen. The Obama Administration issued an Exective Order in March 2015, declaring Venezuela a “national security threat to the United States” and placed sanctions on seven security and military officials serving in the Maduro Administration.

I have heard all the arguments about the “lack of democracy” in Venezuela, but nobody has convincingly explained how that Latin American country poses a security threat to United States as boldly asserted by President Barack Obama. Back in 2015, the United States was Venezuela’s largest trading partner.

Right from its inception, the First Trump Administration was beseiged with malicious allegations stemming from the Russiagate Hoax. Nevertheless, that besieged administration still found some time in between fighting those malicious allegations to mount a sustained trade sanctions campaign to destroy the Venezuelan economy. The hope was that the terrible economic conditions would incite the working class, who support the Chavista ideology, to revolt and topple Maduro and the Bolivarian Republic.

Thanks to the effective sanctions campaign mounted by the First Trump Administration between 2017 and 2020, Venezuela’s petroleum production fell by approximately 75%, and real GDP per capita declined by about 62%.

Yes, government corruption, nepotism and mismanagment on the part of the Maduro Administration excerbated the economic malaise of Venezuela, but the trigger for the collapse of the national economy was the crippling sanctions, which denied the Latin American country access to international financial markets. This prevented the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, from securing the capital needed for essential maintenance and infrastructure investment.

The Bolivarian Republic lost its largest source of revenue in 2019 when the First Trump Administration banned importation of Venezuelan crude oil into the United States. The evaporation of petroleum revenue, capital flight, denial of access to Venezuelan state-owned money and assets in foreign banks all combined to lay waste to the national economy.

To reiterate again, Maduro Administration’s corruption and mismanagement excerbated the economic malaise. Trump’s crippling sanctions in 2017 were the main factor that led to the overnight collapse of the Venezuelan economy. In 2018, the inflation rate reached and surpassed 130,000%, according to data from the Central Bank of Venezuela.

It had nothing to do with the fabled “communism” that never existed in the Bolivarian Republic beyond the fiery rhetoric by some Chavista politician. In any case, I doubt any government swimming in crude oil profits— no matter how incompetent— would have managed a world-breaking inflation rate of 130,000% in just one year. Only a sudden trade embargo can do that.

In a desperate bid to mitigate the adverse effect of the trade embargo imposed on Venezuelan petroleum by the First Trump Administration, the Maduro Administration began to reroute its crude oil exports to distant markets like China at steep discounts, often through “shadow fleets” that increased costs.

In other words, it was Donald Trump’s own actions in 2019 that pushed Venezuela and China together. Remember that when you next hear some propagandist on Euro-American corporate media screeching about Chinese influence in Venezuela.

In addition to the crippling sanctions imposed on Venezuela’s economy, the First Trump Administration came up with a ludicrous plot to overthrow Nicolas Maduro by simply recognizing a random guy named Juan Guaidó as “President of Venezuela”.

Of course, the “random guy” was not really random. Juan Guaidó was the uncharismatic leader of the Venezuelan national legislature, who had declared himself President in January 2019 and got ignored by the Maduro government, and subsequently by significant segments of the anti-Maduro Venezuelan opposition. Apart from European states and a handful of Latin American countries, submissive to the diktat of the US government, most of the world laughed at the absurdity of the whole Juan Guaidó saga.

Brimming with frustration at the failure of the Juan Guaidó gambit, Donald Trump accused Maduro of being a “narco-terrorist” and offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest.

In April 2020, Trump began to threaten to send US Navy ships and AWACS planes to the coast of Venezuela to ostensibly interdict “drug boats”. However, Trump did not follow through with his threats because somebody had convinced him that Maduro could be toppled without the spectacle of a US military invasion. The use of mercenaries was thought to be more cost-efficient.

In May 2020, the world laughed again at the so-called “Bay of Piglets” military operation in which US mercenaries secretly attempted to infiltrate Venezuela, kidnap Maduro, and install Juan Guaidó in power. The operation failed spectacularly. Eight participants were killed, and dozens were captured, including two former US Army Special Forces members, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, who were later sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The creative cloak and dagger plots did not stop with the exit of the First Trump Administration in January 2021. The succeeding Biden Administration devised its own ingenious plot to bribe Venezuelan General Bitner Villegas to betray Maduro.

General Villegas was the primary pilot of Maduro’s presidential plane. The Americans offered him 50 million dollars and safety for his family in exchange for diverting the presidential plane to a U.S-controlled location like Puerto Rico or Guantanamo Bay, where an unsuspecting Maduro can be captured.

The clever plot fell apart when Villegas rejected the monetary offer, telling the US government agent pressuring him the following :

“We Venezuelans are cut from a different cloth... The last thing we are is traitors.”

Of course, I profoundly disagree with Villegas. He might be an honourable individual, but there are plenty of Venezuelans who would have taken the money and delivered Maduro to the Americans.

Although clandestine attempts to depose Maduro never stopped, the United States under President Joe Biden sought a degree of rapprochement with the Bolivarian Republic.

The Biden Administration pledged to arrange the release of $3 billion of Venezuelan state funds frozen by foreign banks. Chevron was permitted to expand its joint venture with the Venezuelan national oil company PDVSA. Some sanctions relief for the Venezuelan petroleum company was granted by the Biden Administration as well.

By the time Biden Administration left office, President Maduro was pretty much looking invincible, despite the economic difficulties his country was enduring.

Having failed to remove President Maduro using cloak and dagger methods, Donald Trump in his second administration was ready to move on to primitive methods reminiscent of the Vikings and the Mongols. He sent US warships to the coast of Venezuela to re-enact a redux version of the British Royal Navy’s blockade of China during the Opium Wars.

The Second Trump Administration revived false claims of Maduro being at the helm of a drug trafficking organisation called Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”) and claimed that the armada of over a dozen warships— including guided-missile destroyers, cruisers, and a nuclear submarine— were there to interdict “drug boats”.

Between September 2025 and early January 2026, US Navy aircraft had performed 36 airstrikes on small vessels in the Caribbean Sea, resulting in 123 confirmed deaths.

There is absolutely no proof whatsoever that any of those boats had anything to do with drug trafficking. As stated earlier in this article, none of those boats off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela had enough fuel to reach the shores of the United States. The claims that these boats are trafficking fentanyl to the United States are childish lies refuted by the 2025 DEA report.

Now, let us discuss the murky origins of the the fictitious organisation dubbed Cartel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”).

In 1993, the CBS TV program “60 Minutes,” hosted by the late journalist Mike Wallace, aired an exposé on how the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) collaborated with elements of the Venezuelan Armed Forces led by General Ramón Guillén Davila to ship several tons of cocaine into US cities. The CIA operation was billed an anti-drug operation meant to infiltrate the Colombian drug cartels by gaining their trust.

To hide their involvement, the CIA and its Venezuelan military collaborators operated under the alias of a fictitious Venezuelan drug cartel called Cártel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns).

The CIA operation, taking place in 1990, succeeded in shipping Venezuelan cocaine to United States, but failed to infiltrate and disrupt the Colombian drug cartels. The fictitious Cártel de los Soles avatar fell into disuse after the CIA wrapped up their botched operation.

Below is the CBS exposé of the CIA operation televised in 1993. I must warn readers that the documentary is 13 minutes long :

Nine years after the CIA scandal, Chavez and other leftist political figures came to power in Venezuela and established the Bolivarian Republic. Throughout his presidency, Hugo Chavez faced false accusations from the US mainstream media of being involved in drug trafficking.

At a point, Chavez stated that he had been informed that the Pentagon was preparing a plan to conduct a military raid on Venezuela and kidnap him on fake charges of drug trafficking.

“They are planning to apply the Noriega Formula to [me]” Chavez said, recalling the US invasion of Panama in 1989 that resulted in the seizure of Panamanian military ruler Manuel Noriega—a former CIA asset who had outlived his usefulness. Noriega was brought to United States in shackles to be prosecuted for genuine drug trafficking offences.

Watch the short video clip below:

Well, President Chavez did not live long enough to witness the prescience of his prediction. With his departure from the land of the living, his successor Maduro became the new target for the “Noreiga Formula”.

Although Maduro has been falsely accused for many years of being a “drug trafficker”, it was the Second Trump Administration that went the extra step and resurrected the fake Cártel de los Soles avatar. Trump Administration officials like Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio claimed that Cártel de los Soles was a real narco-trafficking terrorist organisation led by President Maduro and several Venezuelan officials, including Vladmir Padrino-Lopez (Defence Minister) and Diosdado Cabello (Interior Minister).

While naval aircraft bombed small boats off the Caribbean coast of Venezuela and warships seized petroleum tankers carrying Venezuelan crude oil, President Nicolas tried to negotiate with Donald Trump.

However, Trump was not in the mood to listen. He was not interested in Maduro’s ideas of granting more concessions to US oil companies, such as Chevron, which is already operating in Venezuela. Now cosplaying a Viking/Mongol warlord, Trump demanded that Maduro relinquish presidential power and allow full US control of Venezuela’s petroleum. He also wanted the Latin American country to terminate its growing diplomatic and economic ties with Russia and China.

Thinking the whole thing was a joke, Maduro danced and sang, “don’t worry, be happy”. Given his big ego, Trump could barely endure what he considered to be an affront. Hence, the blitzkrieg US military operation that swept into Venezuela and ended with the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife by US special forces.

US Attorney-General Pam Bondi has since filed fake charges against the abducted Venezuelan leader and his wife. The charges include Maduro’s possession of machine guns, importing cocaine, and other inanities.

No one with an ounce of common sense takes those fake charges seriously, especially when the 2025 DEA report is available for all to read. In any case, Pam Bondi undermined her own case by admitting that Cártel de los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”) was fictitious. Unsurprisingly, the charge sheet did not include those fake allegations that Maduro produced and trafficked fentanyl to the United States.

But none of that matters. The important thing is that Pam Bondi has found another spectacle that can be used to distract the MAGA voting base angry at her shoddy handling of the Epstein Scandal.

A cavalcade of influencers in the MAGA world have already gotten busy hailing the Trump Administration for its violation of the sovereignty of Venezuela and its bizarre kidnapping of President Maduro. Some of them falsely cite the Monroe Doctrine, which was actually about keeping 19th Century European colonial empires from crushing Latin American countries, which had proclaimed their independence.

President James Monroe said that Latin American colonies that proclaimed their independence and statehood would be protected by the United States from being recolonized. He did not say that United States itself would take over the colonial administration of Latin America from the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.

During my teenage years in southeastern Nigeria, I was fortunate to have a mother who was then a university academic. In her private library, she had the complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I avidly read. One of the intriguing topics I delved into was the history of the United States.

I am often shocked at the widespread ignorance within the United States of what the Monroe Doctrine entails. American politicians, mainstream media propagandists, and now MAGA influencers consistently misrepresent the Monroe Doctrine.

Here is a small sample of the chest-beating MAGA influencers embarassing themselves on Twitter:

Some of those influencers delude themselves that ordinary Americans would benefit from US government control of Venezuelan petroleum. In reality, the only beneficiaries would be US petroleum companies and Trump-aligned Zionist billionaire moneybags such as Paul Singer, who benefitted from the forced sale of CITGO, the US subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned petroleum company, PDVSA.

Over the objections of the Venezulean government, a US federal judge in Delaware ordered the expropriation and forced sale of CITGO, which owned oil refineries in Louisana, Texas and Illinois as well as 43 bulk petroleum product storage and distribution facilities, and over 4,000 gas stations.

Alexander Witkoff could not help, but inject a personal family tragedy into the Maduro kidnapping controversy. Alexander is one of three sons born to businessman Steve Witkoff, who currently serves as Trump’s envoy to Russia and the Middle East.

Apparently, Alexander did not get the memo that the Trump Administration was dropping their false claim that Maduro trafficked opioids (e.g. fentanyl) into the United States.

Citing the 2011 death of his brother— Andrew— from an OxyContin overdose, Alex proceeded to blame Maduro for the tens of millions of Americans who had suffered opioid overdoses.

Of course, Alex Witkoff knew very well that everything he had written in his Twitter post was false. Neither OxyContin, Fentanyl nor any other opioid for that matter is produced in Venezuela and trafficked to the United States. OxyContin is produced inside the United States by the Sackler family-owned Perdue Pharma, which declared bankruptcy in 2019. After the death of Andrew, the Witkoff family sued the drug rehabilitation centre, where he overdosed.

In my opinion, it is shameful for anyone to convert their family tragedy into propaganda fodder to justify the military invasion of a sovereign country and the kidnapping of its national leader.

Apart from MAGA influencers, several politicians and certain media propagandists in the United States cited the wild celebration of Maduro’s kidnapping by Venezuelan exiles as justification for the military invasion ordered by the Second Trump Administration.

In reality, the picture is more complicated. Anti-Maduro Venezuelan middle-class and upper-class exiles celebrated in their foreign places of abode while many Venezuelan working-class people inside Venezuela protested the US invasion of their country, the abduction of President Maduro, and the loss of 80 lives when US helicopters began to pound the capital city of Caracas with missiles.

Let us watch some video clips of people inside Venezuela protesting the US invasion of their country and abduction of their national leader:

In any case, debates about whether Venezuelans support or oppose Maduro's abduction are irrelevant. If some external power swooped into the United States and kidnapped Trump and Melania from the White House, there would be millions of American liberals on the streets of United States celebrating that event and millions of American conservatives outraged by it. That a large segment of the US population would celebrate Trump’s removal from office does not justify an external power attempting such an action.

In the absence of contemporary video clips of anti-Chavista crowds inside Venezuela celebrating the US military invasion and kidnapping, some MAGA influencers have been deceptively circulating archival footage of protests against Maduro from many years ago.

Other MAGA influencers have been claiming that anti-Chavista people inside Venezuela are too scared to venture into the streets and hail the US invasion of their country. I believe that there is some truth to these claims. Indeed, the police, the regular military, and the irregular paramilitaries are on the lookout for potential “traitors to the Bolivarian Republic”.

Nevertheless, I must point out that government crackdowns have never stopped anti-Maduro protesters from assembling on the streets to demonstrate in previous times. Fear of government harassment has never stopped Venezuela’s opposition political figures from joining such protests in the past.

Although I acknowledge that government intimidation may have contributed to the reluctance of anti-Maduro opposition figures to speak out, I believe the primary reason is profound demoralization.

At a press conference held after the successful abduction of Maduro and his wife, President Trump demoralised the pro-regime change faction of the political opposition inside Venezuela by dismissing Maria Corina Machado as unsuitable for the leadership of Venezuela. “She doesn’t have the respect or support within the country,” Trump told journalists at the presser, as shown in the video clip below:

Thereafter, Trump pivoted to discussing the only thing he cares about— U.S. control of Venezuela’s petroleum.

There have been claims that Trump is deeply resentful of the fact that Maria Corino Machado was given the Nobel Peace Prize while he got nothing, despite his frequent statements that he deserved the prize for allegedly settling eight wars.

Having pledged her fealty to Israel and stated that she would submit her country’s petroleum wealth to the Americans, Maria Machado was confident that if the Bolivarian Republic was overthrown by the Second Trump Administration, she would be installed in power.

To Machado's surprise, Donald Trump appeared satisfied with the removal of Nicolas Maduro from the picture and was willing to work with the Bolivarian Republic currently led by Delcy Rodriguez.

Perhaps on the advice of her American public relations handlers, Machado went on FOX News channel to offer her phony Nobel Peace Prize as a gift to Donald Trump. Rather than politely declining the offer as expected by normal social conventions, Trump made an appearance on the same FOX News channel and declared that he would accept Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize. He reiterated his claim that he had resolved eight wars and criticized Norway and the Nobel Prize Committee for not awarding him the prize:

Unlike his precedessors in the White House, Trump has steadfastly refused to pretend that United States’ meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs is motivated by “democracy”. Even before the abduction of Maduro, he had straightforwardly stated that the United States demands full control the petroleum wealth of Venezuela.

Since the successful Maduro kidnapping, numerous US politicians—both Democrats and Republicans—have issued cautiously worded statements discussing the necessity of “releasing political prisoners” and “bringing democracy to Venezuela”. The tone-deaf President Trump continues to focus on Venezuela’s natural resources, stating that he would use the US Navy to seize oil tankers carrying Venezuelan crude oil— like an 18th-century pirate—until Delcy Rodriguez agrees to hand over control of Venezuelan oil resources.

American comedian, Jon Stewart, made fun of Trump’s unpretentious desire to seize the natural resources of another country, as shown in the video clip:

Now, let us closely examine the US military operation inside Venezuela that resulted in the death of 80 people and the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife. I will start by remarking about extraordinary lack of resistance offered by the Venezuelan Armed Forces when US special forces invaded the Bolivarian Republic.

American troops encountered stiff resistance and suffered casualties during the invasions of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), as shown in the table above. Compared to those two countries, Venezuela has a larger and better equipped Armed Forces. Moreover, Venezuela has a geography that would have proven much more challenging for the American invaders if stiff resistance had been encountered.

Yet American troops in low-flying helicopters were able to waltz in and out of the Venezuelan capital city of Caracas without any resistance from the Venezuelan military. The only resistance encountered by the American invaders came from Maduro’s Cuban bodyguards. The American invaders captured their quarries (Maduro and wife) without incurring any casualties on their side.

The only casualties came from the 80 civilian and military residents of Venezuela on the receiving end of air-to-ground missiles fired by US helicopters and bullets pumped out by Heckler & Koch assault rifles blazing with automatic fire. Among the 80 fatalities were 32 Cuban military bodyguards killed while protecting Maduro.

Obviously, Maduro did not trust fellow Venezuelans enough to have them as his primary bodyguards. I wonder how that made Venezuelan security and military officials feel. How did Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino-Lopez feel about that arrangement? Did he feel resentful enough to betray Maduro to the Americans?

Delcy Rodríguez has overseen the Venezuelan petroleum industry for several years, most notably as Minister of Petroleum since 2024. How did she feel about subsidizing Cuba with cheap oil exports? Was she of the opinion that Cuba posed an unnecessary strain on Venezuela’s crippled economy and that a shift in policy was unattainable without Maduro's removal? It’s uncertain, but I am inclined to speculate.

Since the US abduction of Maduro, there has been lots of speculation as to what exactly happened. Some have speculated that Maduro had negotiated his own kidnapping and rendition to the United States.

I have come across the “Russia-and-China-sold-out-Maduro” theory. Proponents of this theory highlight the “suspicious” timing of the US military operation, which occurred shortly after Chinese officials visited Maduro. The theorists also suggest that the Kremlin supposedly “betrayed Venezuela” in the expectation that the Americans would relinquish Ukraine to Russia.

Then there is the most popular theory that top-ranking Venezuelan officials betrayed Maduro and sold him out to the Americans. Having sold out Maduro, these government officials—led by Vice President Delcy Rodriguez— are now preparing to hand over control of their country and its natural resources to the United States.

My own personal take is that all claims of Chinese and Russian complicity in the US abduction of Maduro are absurd. No, I don’t think Maduro was complicit in his own abduction. If Maduro had negotiated his own exit with Trump, it is likely he would have elected to go into exile in a friendly country. It is improbable that he would have preferred to be kidnapped by US special forces and then be subjected to the humiliation of a kangaroo trial in New York, followed by incarceration in a Super Max jail.

The most plausible theory is that Venezuelan government officials under President Maduro concluded a secret agreement with the Trump Administration to allow for the kidnapping of their boss. This theory would accord with US history of cajoling local security officials to stand down before militarily invading their countries. The Americans bribed Saddam’s generals shortly before the Iraqi Invasion in March 2003. The Americans were involved in clandestine negotiations that led to Syrian army generals ordering their troops to stand down, facilitating the advance of extremist jihadists to Damascus in December 2024.

Proponents of the theory that Venezuelan officials sold Maduro out are strengthened by the fact that the Bolivarian ruling elites of Venezuela are moving on to a new chapter after the Maduro kidnapping. Delcy has called for a rapprochement between Venezuela and the United States. She has not made this rapprochement conditional on the release of the abducted presidential couple.

As the nominal head of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) since June 2018, Delcy appears uninterested in investigating the security breaches that allowed the Americans to identify the exact location of President Maduro and his wife.

Her Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino-Lopez, who runs the Venezuelan Armed Forces and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello-Rondón, who runs the Colectivo paramilitaries, are currently engaged in fiery “anti-imperialist” rhetoric against the “evil Yankees”, but none of them seem to be investigating why their forces did not put up even token resistance against the US military operation. Gustavo González López who currently leads the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGIM) is similarly uncurious.

I understand that electronic warfare equipment in Boeing EA-18G Growler planes, flying over the Caribbean Sea, was used to disrupt Venezuela’s radar network, preventing the S-300 and BUK systems from acquiring a target lock on those low-flying US helicopters. However, I cannot understand why none of the 5,000 available Russian-made MANPADS fired at the helicopters.

Rather than investigate the humiliating violation of their country’s sovereignty, government officials at all levels are conducting business as usual. Thirty-six hours after the US military raid, the pro-Chavista governor of Táchira state in southwestern Venezuela, is busy discussing with his cabinet the preparations for the annual San Sebastian Fair held in late January in the state capital, San Cristóbal.

As shown in the video clip, neither Governor Freddy Bernal nor his cabinet officials seem perturbed that President Maduro, who also leads their socialist party, has been abducted by the Americans. It would be remiss of me not to mention that this particular governor is also a high-ranking intelligence official within SEBIN, which maintains a significant presence in Tachira, a state that borders the Republic of Colombia.

There are claims in the Euro-American corporate media that Qatar acted as an intermediary in secret negotiations between the Trump Administration and Delcy Rodriguez to sell out President Maduro. While I would never fully trust the words of corporate media outlets, I do find their claims plausible given that Delcy was involved in the management of Venezuela’s petroleum industry for a very long time and had a business relationship with the Qataris through her country’s membership of OPEC.

Most likely, Trump was so impressed with whatever extra goodies Delcy was willing to sell apart from Maduro that he dumped the opposition politician Maria Machado. Many members of the US ruling elite are not exactly thrilled. They want the dissolution of the Bolivarian Republic and restoration of the good old client state of Venezuela that existed until 20 December 1999. This can only be achieved through the eradication of all Chavista governmental structures and the installation of a puppet regime headed by an individual like Maria Machado.

Donald Trump is not an ideologue. Apart from Maduro, whom he personally dislikes, Trump is indifferent to who governs Venezuela. He doesn’t care if the country remains a Bolivarian Republic or not. His main preoccupation is gaining control of Venezuela’s oil. He seems confident that Delcy Rodriguez would hand it over to the United States.

I suspect that his confidence is due to Delcy's long history of negotiating with Trump, dating back to 2017 when she instructed CITGO—then under Venezuela’s control—to donate $500,000 to Trump's inauguration. She also hired Trump’s former campaign manager as a lobbyist. None of those friendly gestures from Delcy had any impact. The First Trump Administration started a crippling economic war against Venezuela.

In his second administration, Trump is not interested in boycotting Venezuelan oil; instead, he aims to control it. He perceives Delcy Rodríguez as a pushover who can be coerced into submitting to his whims. I believe he is wrong. I don’t think Delcy will ever agree to allow the United States exercise control over her country’s natural resources.

Before I continue, I would like to post this short video clip of Delcy Rodriguez describing her negotiations with the Americans prior to the military invasion and abduction of Maduro:

In the video, Delcy states that the Americans want Venezuelan crude oil without having to pay its market value. Americans think that controlling the oil would help them recover their position as the world’s largest economy, which they have already lost to China. She blasts the seizure of oil tankers, likening the actions of the Second Trump Administration to those of Tren de Aragua, a drug-trafficking street gang.

US officials falsely allege that Tren de Aragua is a “narco-terrorist organisation” controlled by the Maduro Administration, despite the 2025 DEA report indicating that it is simply a street gang.

I have no doubt that Delcy Rodriguez and the Bolivarian ruling elites are eager to grant generous concessions to US petroleum companies. However, I don’t believe that Delcy or any official of the Bolivarian Republic would ever agree to hand over control of their petroleum resources to the United States.

Trump thinks otherwise. In fact, he is now pressuring the executives of Chevron (USA), Shell (UK), Eni (Italy), Repsol (Spain), Exxon (USA), ConocoPhillips (USA), Halliburton (USA) and 10 other energy firms to invest 100 billion dollars to rebuild Venezuela’s dipladiated petroleum infrastructure.

Chevron is the only major US oil company still operating in Venezuela. ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips withdrew from the Bolivarian Republic to protest the nationalization process that the Chavez Administration was executing in the early 2000s.

Hilariously, during the White House meeting of oil executives, Trump asked the chief executive of Halliburton why his company departed from Venezuela. The chief executive, Jeff Miller, replied that the First Trump administration’s blanket ban on importing Venezuelan oil into the United States forced Halliburton to exit the country. Watch the short video clip below :

While Jeff Miller appeared to be upbeat about Trump’s proposals, the ExxonMobil chief executive, Darren Walker, was not. Darren Walker probably spoke for most of his colleagues when he voiced his deep skepticism of Trump's proposals. He told Trump that the Bolivarian Republic would need to overhaul its legal framework to make it worthwhile for major energy companies to invest in the Venezuelan oil sector.

Ryan Lance (ConocoPhillips), Harold Hamm (Continental Resources), Mark Nelson (Chevron) also expressed skepticism about committing $100 billion to rebuilding the petroleum industry of a country that Trump has not shown proof that he actually controls.

While Trump may believe that US control of Venezuela's petroleum resources is inevitable, I believe that prospect is far from being a foregone conclusion.

I believe that Delcy and and the Venezuelan military leadership sold out the dancing and singing Maduro because they deemed him to be weak in the face of Trump’s aggression. But they have no intention of selling Venezuela’s sovereignty to the United States.

With the man (Maduro) disliked by Trump out of the way, Delcy thinks a deal can be struck that will allow departed US oil companies to return without Venezuela losing its sovereign rights . However, if Trump insists on full control of the Venezuelan oil, then all bets are off.

Delcy Rodriguez is already defying Trump’s command that the Bolivarian Republic cut ties with Russia and China. She personally met with the Chinese Ambassador, Lan Hu, to expressed her gratitude to China for condemning the US military raid and abduction of Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

Later on, Yván Gil— Venezuela’s Foreign Minister— met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Melik-Bagdasarov to thank Russia for supporting his country’s right to preserve its sovereignty

While Delcy Rodríguez will try as much as possible to be flexible, she cannot allow Trump to seize control of Venezuela’s oil resources; such a move would destroy the credibility of the Bolivarian Republic in the eyes of the Venezuelan working class, which forms the base of support for the Chavista ideology.

There is nothing in the personal history of Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge, who leads Venezuela’s national legislature, that suggests that they would abet the collapse of the Bolivarian Republic. Their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, was a Marxist revolutionary who was tortured to death in July 1976 by the US-backed Venezuelan government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez, who was notoriously corrupt. Delcy and Jorge were seven and ten years old, respectively, at the time of their father’s murder.

Both grew up as fiery far-left activists; however, they moderated their stances upon ascending to power in the Bolivarian Republic. While certainly pragmatic, the Rodriguez siblings are still leftists.

Pure survivalist instinct will compel them to be flexible with the Trump Administration up until it threatens the continued existence of the Bolivarian Republic. If Trump is willing to simply accept generous concessions for US oil companies then a deal can be struck with the Bolivarian ruling elites.

If Trump insists on destroying the credibility of the Bolivarian Republic by insisting on humiliating terms such as 100% control of Venezuela’s natural resources, then he will meet stiff resistance. Already, the US Senate has passed a War Powers resolution, which may stymie Trump from taking military action against Venezuela at will. I am sure Delcy and her officials in Caracas have taken note of that.

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President Donald Trump sent out a long-winded message on social media, beating his chest, and portraying the US missile attacks on some terrorist lairs in Sokoto State as a unilateral action he undertook to protect “Christians in Nigeria”. He deliberately pretended to his MAGA followers that there was no coordination with Nigerian military authorities. Apparently, he had just ordered Pete Hegseth to randomly launch missiles into some area and somehow the terrorists were all obliterated.

In reality, ever since Trump began to beat his chest about caring about non-existent “Christian genocide”, the Nigerian Federal Government has sought to take advantage of the situation by repeating the same requests for help that had been denied by previous US Administrations.

For instance, the Obama Administration refused to sell specialized weaponry unless Nigeria granted military bases and allowed deployment of US troops to fight on its soil.

The Nigerian government reiterated its standard line— US soldiers would continue to be welcomed in tiny numbers as military trainers and instructors. However, there would be no military bases and no large-scale deployment of US troops to fight on Nigerian soil. Nigeria was not interested in going down the route followed by Niger Republic, which then hosted over 1000 US troops supposedly “fighting terrorists”. Obama Administration responded by rejecting Nigeria’s request for weapon sales, claiming “human right abuses” of suspected terrorists taken into custody. Obama even went as far as blocking Brazil from selling A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft to Nigeria on the basis that the Brazilian-made military plane had US components inside it.

The first Trump Administration lifted the restrictions in 2017, permitting the Nigerian Air Force to buy 12 aircraft for approximately $593 million. The planes did not arrive in Nigeria until 2021 and even then, the Americans imposed restrictions on how they could be used. By contrast, the Nigerian military was free to use its Russian- and Chinese-made turbojet aircraft as it saw fit.

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Fast-forwarding to 2025, Trump is back in the White House for his second administration. This time around, things are different. Unlike in his first administration, Trump cannot count on automatic support from all sides of his enormous voting coalition. This was obvious from the disillusionment within the MAGA grassroots, stemming from Trump's shoddy management of the Epstein File saga.

Desperately seeking to reverse dwindling support among his religious MAGA followers, he began presenting himself as a warrior chief battling non-existent “Nigerian Christian genocide”. While vigorously denying Trump’s absurd claim, the Nigerian government saw an opportunity to gain access to high-quality surveillance data from sophisticated American drones and US military satellites.

Throughout November, the Americans have been flying drones from the Republic of Ghana into Nigerian air space. The surveillance data gathered by US drones have been transmitted to Nigerian Air Force to conduct bombing runs on terrorist hideouts in Borno State—the northeastern state that serves as the epicenter for both al-Qaida and ISIS-linked jihadist terrorists.

Yesterday, Trump sought a grand spectacle, some fireworks he could showcase to his MAGA supporters who were still aggrieved by the Epstein File release debacle, among other issues. The Nigerian military identified a terrorist hideout in the northwestern state of Sokoto, which has a population that is nearly 100% Muslim, and US missiles targeted the location.

If there were any beneficiaries of last night’s strike, it would be the local Muslims inhabitants of Sokoto, who have been victimized by marauding bandits, known for ransome kidnapping and blowing up worshippers inside mosques. To be clear, the bandits terrorizing Sokoto inhabitants have no known affiliation to larger jihadi networks. Neither Boko Haram nor ISWAP (Islamic State—West Africa Province) have a presence in Sokoto State.

There are barely any Christians in Sokoto State for Trump to protect. If he wanted to “protect Christians”, then the place to strike is Borno State in Northeast Nigeria and not Sokoto State in Northwest Nigeria.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about the whole exercise. On one hand, I am fine with the US military coordinating with their Nigerian counterparts to obliterate marauding bandits in Sokoto, who are as Muslim as the local populace they are terrorizing. On the other hand, I am worried by the lies and misrepresentations propagated by Trump and his officials.

Trump did not conduct this strike to help Nigeria with its terrorism problem. He did it to appeal to his MAGA followers, who embrace the false narrative of a “Christian genocide” in a country where Christians hold prominent positions in the military and security services.

Let’s go through a list of powerful security and military positions in Nigeria and identify who holds them:

1. Defence Minister General Christopher Musa — Christian

2. Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Femi Oluyede — Christian

3. Chief of Air Staff (CAS) Air Vice Marshal Kelvin Aneke — Christian

4. Chief of Naval Staff (CNS) Vice Admiral Idi Abbas — Muslim

5. Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Kayode Egbetokun — Christian

6. Chief of Army Staff (CAS) Lt. General Waidi Shaibu— Muslim

7. Chief of Defence Intelligence (CDI) Major-General Udiandeye — Christian

8. Director of State Security Services (DSS) Mr. Adeola Ajayi— Christian

I am concerned that in the future, the Orange Strongman in the White House might opt to carry out a unilateral strike without coordinating or consulting with the Nigerian government, potentially resulting in the loss of innocent lives. I vividly recall when Trump dropped aerial bombs on a gathering of Yemeni civilians and then claimed he had targeted “a gathering of Yemeni Houthis”. I also remember the earlier incident when Pentagon officials under the Biden Administration fired missiles at innocent Afghans and falsely claimed that the dead civilians were “ISIS-Khorasan terrorists”.

ADDENDUM :

Just as I was about to go to press, video footage surfaced showing the rural area in Sokoto state hit by US cruise missiles. It appears that the Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from the American warship, USS Paul Ignatius, and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles fired by MQ-9 Reaper drones bypassed the northeastern area of Sokoto where the bandits are active and struck the relatively secure southeastern area where the bandits are not present.

At least, some of the missiles hit an empty piece of farmland. Local people in the vicinity of the scorched farmland said there was no loss of life. The local police bomb squad dug out unexploded Tomahawk warheads buried in the farmland.

In faraway Kwara state, unexploded warheads were also recovered from damaged buildings, farmlands and empty fields, as some of the missiles had missed their targets in Sokoto and traveled to North-Central Nigeria, where Kwara is located.

Watch the brief video clip of rural Sokoto filmed by the Nigerian TV channel, Arise News:

Of course, it doesn’t really matter if none of the local bandits operating in Sokoto were impacted by those expensive missiles launched with pomp and peagantry. The important thing is that Trump gets to keep his title as the “Chief Defender of Nigerian Christians” among his MAGA followers. Hopefully, the fireworks will keep them transfixed long enough to forget all about the fiasco surrounding Epstein File release and the internecine fight over the place of Israel in the domestic politics and foreign policy of the United States.

I half-expect that uninformed singer Nicki Minaj to make an appearance on a stage in the United States to hail Trump as pure gold. There are rumors circulating in the United States suggesting that she is pandering to Trump in the hope of securing pardons for her husband and brother. However, it is worth noting that both her brother and husband were convicted on state charges, not federal charges. Therefore, it is unlikely that Trump would have any authority to pardon either of them.

Circling back, I expect more U.S. missile strikes on targets inside Nigeria in the coming days and weeks. Would any of those strikes be effective against the terrorists? Who knows. After all, Niger Republic hosted 1,100 US troops armed with drones from 2012 to 2024. Yet, the issue of terrorism in Niger persists and is even more severe than in Nigeria.

Personally, I would prefer that the Pentagon restrict itself only to providing surveillance data to the Nigerian military. However, we are talking about Trump’s Pentagon. Trump wants to be seen as the warrior chief ordering US drones and US Navy vessels to launch missiles at Nigerian terrorists. The Nigerian government would gladly indulge Trump’s vanity, provided he is willing to allow access to cutting-edge surveillance technology. Hopefully next time, US missiles would be aimed at terrorist hideouts in Borno State in the Northeast rather than Sokoto State in the Northwest.

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This article is the fourth installment in our long-running Gabon series. To save readers from having to expend time and energy searching the Substack archives, I created a one-stop web page hosting links to all published articles on Gabon. Readers can gain direct access to this omnibus page containing background information and links to all previous articles in the Gabon series by clicking here.

Alternatively, readers on the home page of this blog can click the relevant tab on the navigation panel as illustrated in the picture below :

Now, let’s move on to the fourth article in the series…

On 30 August 2023, a coup d’état led by Brigadier-General Brice Nguema swept away the civilian government of President Ali Bongo, who has been in office since August 2009. His larger-than-life father, President Omar Bongo, ruled Gabon for 42 years before his death from intestinal cancer in June 2009.

Gabon is noted for its unusually francophile populace. During the 1958 French Constitutional Referendum, held in part to decide the future of Francophone Africa, Gabon was the only colony that sought to become an integral part of France. The Gabonese were poised to vote in the referendum for their homeland to become an overseas province of France, much to the alarm of Charles de Gaulle, who wanted to maintain control over Gabon without the financial burden of administering a large overseas province. (At the time, Gabon was not a commercial petroleum producer.)

By his own admission, Charles de Gaulle had a hard time convincing local political leaders in the colony of Gabon to persuade their population to abandon the idea of becoming a French overseas province and instead vote to join Communauté Française, as an “associated state” of France.

Voting to join the supranational organisation, Communauté Française, transformed the Francophone African colonies into “associated states” and set them on a managed path to nominal independence, which would allow them to claim the title of “sovereign” countries while France maintained de facto control over their economies and foreign policy positions.

Guinea was the only outlier among the French colonies. It rejected the idea of becoming an “associated state” set on a path to nominal independence. During the 1958 French Constitutional Referendum, the Colony of Guinea voted for total independence from France.

France’s reaction was to destroy most of the infrastructure it had built in Guinea. Before French colonial administrators withdrew from the colony, all telephone lines were cut, blueprints for a sewage pipeline network in capital city of Conakry were destroyed, medicines meant for Guinean hospitals were burnt, and my personal favourite… all office light bulbs were unscrewed.

To deter other colonies from emulating Guinea, Charles De Gaulle banned French investment in the renegade colony and terminated pension payments to Guinean veterans, who had fought for France in World War II.

Unfazed by the harsh actions of France, the rebel colony declared itself fully independent on 2 October 1958. Thereafter, the newly established Republic of Guinea entered the Soviet Orbit, although it maintained friendly relations with United States during the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

By contrast, Gabon remained firmly in the French camp. The first leader of post-(nominal) independence Gabon, President Leon M’ba proudly declared, “every Gabonese individual had two fatherlands: France and Gabon.”

Many years later, his successor, Albert-Bernard Bongo, would expand on Leon M’ba’s declaration by adding, “Africa without France is like a car without a driver. But France without Africa is like a car without petrol”.

Charles De Gaulle played a personal role in the ascendancy of President Bongo, the progenitor of the ruling Bongo Dynasty, as explained in a previous write-up:

After Gabon gained its “independence” in August 1960, Charles de Gaulle played a significant role in selecting senior and junior cabinet officials for the inaugural government of President Léon M’ba. One such official was Flight Captain Albert-Bernard Bongo, who took a leave of absence from the French Air Force to serve in the Gabonese government. He would later retire from military service as he ascended to higher cabinet posts within government.

On 12 November 1966, he was appointed Vice-President of Gabon, a position he assumed following De Gaulle’s arm-twisting of cancer-stricken President Léon M’ba. The dying Gabonese leader was taken from his hospital bed, put into a wheelchair and wheeled to an office, where he reluctantly swore in Bongo as his deputy and successor.

General elections held in March 1967 returned Léon [unopposed] as President and legitimized the position of Bongo as his Vice-President. Although, in practice, Bongo had been the de facto leader of Gabon since November 1966 as President Léon M’ba was in the final phase of his terminal illness.

Léon M’ba died on 28 November 1967. Four days later, Albert-Bernard formally became the President of Gabon, ushering in 42 years of autocratic rule tempered with an unusual level of benignity.

Bongo’s presidency was characterized by massive corruption, nepotism, petroleum-driven improvements in Gabonese living standards, bribing of Gabonese political dissidents, and using violence only as a last resort. He employed as many Gabonese citizens as possible in the bloated civil service to put them on government payroll, to secure their loyalty, and minimize the risk of public anger or uprisings.

Upon conversion to Islam in 1973, Albert-Bernard Bongo transformed into Omar Bongo Ondimba, and gained the desired friendship of Gulf Arab monarchs, who facilitated Gabon’s entry into OPEC in 1975.

The number of Muslims in Gabon rose as a result of Bongo’s conversion. Nevertheless, Islam continued to be a minority religion in the predominantly Roman Catholic country.

During the period of his long rule, Omar Bongo leveraged Gabon’s petroleum wealth to gain a high degree of autonomy from his French handlers by contributing large amounts of illicit funds to the political campaigns of powerful French politicians. His money also bought him influence over French foreign policy in the Central African subregion.

Any French leader who offended the Gabonese ruler, even slightly, was punished by having the flow of cash diverted to his political rivals. In 2009, former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing publicly recounted how Omar Bongo stopped contributing to his political campaign over a disagreement and began funding his chief rival, Jacques Chirac, in the run-up to the 1981 French Presidential Election.

Former President Jacques Chirac, who was facing a corruption scandal at the time, denied Valery’s allegation. Chirac would ultimately be tried for embezzlement and fraud for creating fake civil service jobs for friends while he was the Mayor of Paris. Chirac was given a two-year-suspended prison sentence in 2011.

Anyways, the skillful use of French businessmen as middlemen in the covert distribution of cash-stuffed briefcases to powerful French politicians bought Omar Bongo some level of independence to pursue the domestic policies that he wanted. Those policies included allowing a limited amount of the oil wealth to trickle down— just enough to prevent civil unrest.

Bongo spent some the petroleum wealth on infrastructure, building several schools, hospitals, universities, new cities and new towns, some of which he named after himself— Bongo University, Bongo Stadium, Bongoville town, several Bongo Hospitals, etc.

As already stated, he was so unlike other authoritarian rulers on the continent. He preferred to buy off political opponents, and only resorted to violence if all else had failed.

The effect of Omar Bongo’s style of pacification was that Gabon remained politically stable for 42 years unlike other nations in the Central African subregion. That stability, despite all the corruption, allowed the injection foreign direct investment into the oil-rich country and the creation of jobs.Under President Omar Bongo, Gabon had the fourth highest living standard in the whole of Africa.

Meanwhile, Bauxite-rich Guinea, which broke free of French influence and control, ranked in the 45th place out of all 54 African states.

In the two months following the June 2009 death of Omar Bongo, a brief power struggle ensued between his powerful daughter Pascaline Bongo and his show business son, Ali Bongo Ondimba (born Alain-Bernard Bongo). Ali Bongo won control of ruling political party, Parti Démocratique Gabonais (PDG), and became its candidate in the August 2009 Presidential Election. He won the presidency narrowly with 41.8% of the total votes cast.

President Ali Bongo proved to be a much poorer administrator of the Gabon than his late father. During his 14-year presidency, Gabon went from having the fourth highest standard of living in the entire continent of 54 nations to the seventh highest. Youth unemployment rate refused to budge from the 30% mark. Healthcare services declined, and the problems of constant electricity supply surfaced.

After 55 years of political stability, Gabon experienced a military coup d’état on 7 January 2019. The coup was thwarted due to the decisive action taken by Brigadier-General Brice Nguema the Intelligence chief.

The 2019 coup attempt by the renegade elements of the regular army and the praetorian guard service, officially known as the Gabonese Republican Guard, came as surprise to many seasoned watchers of Gabon, yours truly included.

Before January 2019, Gabon had previously experienced just one coup attempt in its entire history as an independent state, and that occured before the initiation of the ruling Bongo Dynasty.

The 1964 coup d’etat, executed by junior officers of the military and paramilitary police force (gendarmerie) of Gabon, had sought to overthrow President Leon M’ba. The coup attempt was thwarted after French Air Force Captain Albert-Bernard Bongo—then Leon M’ba’s chief of staff— alerted Charles De Gaulle who activated French paratroopers stationed in Senegal and Republic of Congo (not to be confused with Democratic Republic of Congo).

An advance party of 50 French paratroopers flew into the international airport in the Gabonese city of Libreville. Despite declaring the airport closed, the Gabonese putschists were unable to prevent the military transport plane carrying the advance party from landing. An additional 600 French paratroops soon arrived to reinforce the 50 soldiers already on the ground.

The Gabonese mutineers were shocked and dazed by the French military intervention. Charles De Gaulle had not intervened to reverse the successful military coup d’etat executed in the Republic of Dahomey (now called Benin Republic) on 28 October 1963.

De Gaulle chose not to get involved in the January 1963 coup d’etat in Togo. President Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated by putschists angered by his steadfast refusal to increase funding for the small Togolese army and allow it to expand beyond the 250 troop-limit he had imposed. Of course, when the Togolese putschists went on national radio, they claimed the coup was about the failing national economy and Olympio’s authoritarianism.

De Gaulle also refrained from intervening in August 1963 to suppress the “Trois Glorieuses” (Three Glorious Days) coup d’état in the Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the DR Congo), which shares an international border with Gabon. The “Trois Glorieuses” coup had occurred amidst popular protests against the autocratic government of Reverend Father Fulbert Youlou, a laicized Catholic priest, who never stopped wearing his clerical clothing.

This may surprise some readers who are unfamiliar with African history. France does not always intervene to stop coup d’etats, even when done by those who style themselves as “revolutionaries”. Notably, France refrained from intervening in the never-ending cycles of coups and counter-coups that engulfed Congo and Benin Republic, even when those cycles eventually took on a coruscating Marxist hue.

Élysée Palace did not attempt to stop the successful Marxist coups that subsequently led to the establishment of the People’s Republic of the Congo (1969-1992) and People’s Republic of Benin (1975-1990), which aligned themselves with the Soviet Union and other communist Eastern Bloc countries.

Circling back to Gabon, the February 1964 coup plotters had expected everything to go according to plan. If French troops stationed in neighbouring Congo had not attempted to block the overthrow of Reverend Father Fulbert Youlou in August 1963, then the Gabonese coup plotters reckoned that France would not intervene to stop their own putsch.

Before the 1964 coup attempt, France’s military presence in Gabon was limited to a contingent of 150 French soldiers integrated into the Gabonese Army as military instructors and commanders of 400 Gabonese troops. The future military base housing thousands of French troops had not yet been established.

When the coup d’etat began on the night of 17 February 1964, the coup plotters drawn from the army and gendarmerie were elated that none of the French officers embedded within the Gabonese military had attempted to stop them. Some of the putchists raided the Presidential Mansion and took President Leon M’ba hostage. Others took to national radio to announce their seizure of political power and to affirm that Gabon’s friendly relations with France would remain unchanged.

The coup plotters were confident their putsch would be counted among the numerous successful coups that swept the continent in the 1960s. However, they were wrong. Charles De Gaulle was never going to entrust the most francophile of all former French colonies in Africa to the putchists.

The fact that the local population did not go into the streets to show support for the coup was also an encouraging sign for the aging French President. Even back in 1964, Gabon enjoyed a relatively high standard of living compared to other African countries. Therefore, the kind of public discontent that would fuel popular support for a coup did not exist in Gabon at the time.

The 650 French paratroopers flown into Gabon quickly secured the airport and began to move inland. Soon, the national radio station was surrounded, trapping some of the putchists inside. What remained of the 150 coup plotters who had not already surrendered retreated from the city of Libreville, with French paratroopers and loyalist Gabonese troops in hot pursuit.

Cornered in a military base in the town of Lambaréné, the Gabonese mutineers staged their last stand, firing their rifles until they ran out of ammunition. The military base was hit on all sides with heavy machine gunfire, a massive barrage of mortar shells and strafing from a French military plane. Upon surrender, the highest-ranking Gabonese putschist on the scene was shot dead and the remaining mutineers taken into custody. President Leon M’ba was freed to resume his presidency.

After the coup was supressed, thugs loyal to President M’ba went around Libreville, arresting members of the political opposition. This sparked violent street demonstrations that had to be quelled by the police.

To deter any further coup attempts in Gabon, Charles de Gaulle established a full-blown military base with 2,000 French paratroopers to operate separately from the pre-existing French contingent embedded within the Gabonese Army.

Over the course of the next five decades, the number of French troops at the military base gradually decreased. By August 2023, the military base had 400 French troops. The number fell to 350 troops in early 2024 and then 300 troops in early 2025.

In the aftermath of the 1964 coup attempt, the profile of Albert-Bernard Bongo rose exponentially. Charles De Gaulle was impressed that the first person to pick up the phone and inform him of the coup d’etat as it unfolded was Albert-Bernard not Ambassador Paul Cousseran, the top French diplomat in Gabon. After the coup was quashed, Cousseran was removed from his ambassadorial post.

Following President M’ba’s cancer diagnosis in 1965, Charles De Gaulle began to prepare 29-year-old Bongo to be Leon M’ba’s successor. That same year, Bongo was promoted to a senior position, which placed him in charge of national defence matters. In November 1966, Bongo was promoted to Vice-President. A year later, he succeeded the deceased Leon M’ba as President of Gabon.

As a member of the Bateke ethnic minority, Bongo was compelled to think carefully about the survival of his government in a country politically dominated by Fang people, who constituted the largest ethnic group in Gabon. If the late President Leon M’ba, an ethnic Fang, could be confronted with a military coup led by soldiers mostly of Fang ethnicity, then there was even less hope for an ethnic Bateke, who would have never ascended to the presidency without the helping hand of Charles De Gaulle.

After the 1964 coup d’etat against Leon M’ba, the military and gendarmerie were purged of disloyal elements and restructured. But that was not enough. Once in power, President Omar Bongo began to reorganize a unit of the gendarmerie, known as the Gabonese Republican Guard, into a praetorian guard service he could entrust with his personal safety and the survival of his government. That involved ensuring that leadership positions within the praetorian guard service were occupied by individuals whose loyalty Omar Bongo could rely on. Who better to trust than family members?

The Bongos have always been ardent procreators. Omar Bongo had 12 full and half-siblings, all of whom sired numerous children. Omar Bongo alone sired 54 children with his third wife, his two ex-wives, and several mistresses. Many of those children born to Omar and his siblings grew up and entered government service as civilians or joined the military and the paramilitary police (gendarmerie), where they rapidly advanced in rank. So, when I mention the ruling Bongo Dynasty in my writings, I am not referring only to Omar Bongo’s direct descendants, I am referring to the large extended Bongo family that includes Omar’s siblings, cousins, nephews, nieces and other relatives.

Delusional mainstream media journalists believe that the ruling Bongo family merely consists of Omar Bongo, his children and grandchildren.

For the sake of national stability, Omar Bongo always strived to respect the ethnic diversity of the country. Individuals of various ethnicities were chosen to serve in government insitutions. Volunteers of all ethnicities were recruited to serve in the regular armed forces and paramilitary police. Nevertheless, Omar Bongo was careful to ensure that sensitive leadership positions in the military and intelligence services were either occupied by Bongo family members or individuals closely connected to the family.

Omar Bongo carefully crafted the organogram of the Gabonese Republican Guard. The most sensitive positions in the praetorian guard service went to members of the Bongo family tree. Ordinary soldiers and officers of the Gabonese Republican Guard, who have no familial ties to the Bongo family, were still connected to the ruling family through their shared identity as members of the Bateke ethnic minority. The assumption here being that people that share a common native language and culture would always stick together.

That in effect meant that Gabonese soldiers not of ethnic Bateke heritage were unlikely to be chosen to serve in the elite praetorian guard service, which is better equipped than the regular army. The only non-Bateke individuals wholeheartedly welcomed into the Gabonese Republican Guard are its French military advisers.

That nepotistic practice of reserving sensitive security and military posts for family members carried on after the death of Omar Bongo in June 2009. Just like his late father, President Ali Bongo ensured that individuals of all ethnicities were represented in his government. However, sensitive security, intelligence and military positions were reserved exclusively for his blood relatives or an ethnic Bateke.

Of course, there are exceptional cases, where a trusted person of a different ethnicity ended up in a sensitive security position. For instance, Brice Nguema’s father— a military officer of ethnic Fang origin— was close enough to the Bongo family to be able to marry one of its female members.

Despite all the elaborate security arrangements, Ali Bongo never felt fully secure. Sporadic street protests against his incompetence and inability to address the deteriorating living standards were escalating in frequency. He simply did not have the administrative skills of his father. But he could always distract the masses by drawing from his experiences as a former musician and showbiz man, who had organised Michael Jackson’s 1992 visit to Gabon.

In 1977, Ali Bongo, then aged 18, produced this funk song, A Brand New Man:

During his presidency, Ali Bongo arranged for international celebrities to visit Gabon to provide escapist entertainment for the disaffected population. Famous Brazilian footballer Pele was brought to Gabon in 2012. Three years later, popular Argentine footballer Lionel Messi was paid millions of dollars to visit Gabon, where football (soccer) is beloved by most.

President Ali Bongo also created a spectacle by participating in rap music competitions. By late 2015, the novelty and razmattaz had worn off, and most Gabonese citizens were exhausted and simply wanted him out.

President Ali Bongo rapping on stage with Gabonese hip-hop artistes :

After a devastating stroke that left him partially paralyzed in October 2018, the Gabonese military high command began to quietly advise Ali Bongo to resign and tend to his failing health.

Alarmed by unsolicited advice offered by what was essentially the military wing of the ruling Bongo family, President Ali Bongo quickly fired his half-brother, Colonel Frédéric Bongo from his position as the Chief of Intelligence. Ali Bongo replaced him with his more reliable cousin, Brigadier-General Brice Nguema, who had to be recalled from diplomatic duty abroad.

President Ali Bongo trusted Brice Nguema because the latter had never displayed any overt political ambitions. Nguema had previously served as a personal aide to the late President Omar Bongo and later as a military attaché in Gabonese embassies in Senegal and Morocco.

Three months after Brice assumed the role of intelligence chief, what was previously thought impossible happened. The 2019 coup attempt happened, and it was jointly executed by renegades from the regular army and the Gabonese Republican Guard. As the coup plotters were junior officers, none of them were Bongo family members, who typically hold positions at mid-level and senior ranks. As already stated, the 2019 coup d’etat was crushed by Chief of Intelligence, Brigadier-General Brice Nguema, with the assistance of the Gendarmerie Intervention Group, an elite special forces unit of Gabon’s paramilitary police.

Having acquitted himself well in the intelligence service, Brice was appointed to head the Gabonese Republican Guard in April 2020 after General Grégoire Kouna— another Bongo family member— was fired for failing to detect and prevent the 2019 coup attempt.

With Brice Nguema better positioned to quash any further attempts to overthrow the government, President Ali Bongo let his guard down. Despite additional discreet advice from the military high command to step down and tend to his failing health, Bongo remained adamant about seeking re-election in the 2023 Presidential Election.

The presidential election held on 26 August 2023 was a contest between Ali Bongo and 19 opposition figures, some of whom had actually served in his father’s government. As reported in previous articles in the series, Omar Bongo often pacified his opponents by bribing them with government posts. After Omar Bongo’s death, many of those previously bribed dissidents returned to opposition politics.

The conduct of the 2023 Presidential Election was so characterised by irregularities and vote-rigging that many Gabonese voters launched violent street protests even before the election results had been announced.

Media pundits unfamiliar with Gabonese political culture have often cited sporadic street protests against Ali Bongo (and his father before him) as a sign of widespread anti-French sentiment. Nothing can be further from the truth.

During Emmanuel Macron’s Safari tour of Africa in March 2023, Gabon was one of those countries he visited without incident. Macron’s polite reception in Gabon stands in stark contrast to the street protests that erupted as soon as his plane landed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation that was never a French colony.

Let me quote myself from an article I wrote about Macron’s Safari tour:

Macron’s arrival in Gabon passed without any problems. However, the visit was not well received by the political opposition to the ruling Bongo dynasty.

Opposition politicians aren’t generally hostile to French influence in Gabon. They are merely opposed to what they construe as Macron’s [quiet] endorsement of incumbent President Ali Bongo in the upcoming 2023 Presidential election.

Once you exclude fringe groups, most members of the political opposition in Gabon aren’t against French influence in their country, they simply want the French government to switch its support from the ruling Bongo Dynasty to themselves. That attitude in Gabon is in sharp contrast to the situation in Guinea, Burkina Faso and Mali, which want nothing at all to do with France.

While officially proclaiming its neutrality, the Macron government had no issues with Ali Bongo being declared “winner” of the presidential election held on 26 August 2023. Élysée Palace was already used to working with the Bongo family, and saw no reason to change course. The domestic political opposition in Gabon was considered weak and fragmented.

Having failed to convince him to step down, the military leadership of Gabon decided to move against Ali Bongo amidst violent street protests over a presidential election whose result had not yet been announced.

On 30 August 2023, the Gabonese Electoral Commission finally declared Ali Bongo the “winner” of the presidential election held four days earlier. He had apparently “defeated” his closest rival, Professor Albert Ondo Ossa, by “garnering 64.7% of the total votes counted”.

Moments after the official announcement of the election results, another coup d’etat took place. The coup was a resounding success because it was carried out by the military wing of the ruling Bongo family.

To Ali Bongo’s surprise, the successful putsch was led by his trusted cousin, Brigadier-General Brice Nguema, who had suppressed the earlier 2019 coup attempt.

Unfortunately for Ali Bongo, those clever precautions, undertaken by his late father, did not avert his overthrow. It turns out that trusted family members are not above partaking in Byzantine-style putsches (albeit without the gruesome ritual of blinding, castrating, and cutting the nose of deposed Byzantine Emperors).

In the days following the 2023 coup d’etat, mainstream and alternative media outlets gloated about the end of French influence in Gabon. Clueless pundits in both types of media kept comparing the West African nations of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso to the Central African nation of Gabon, despite the glaring differences in their histories and political cultures.

The assumption that African nations are identical to one another is a blind spot that both alternative and mainstream media outlets share in common.

Four days after the coup, I published my first article in Gabon series to correct the record. I explained that the mainstream media outlets had no clue what they were saying. I also stated that alternative media pundits had hallucinated a revolutionary, “anti-imperialist” coup that did not occur.

I shared two videos of the Gabonese people celebrating the coup in the streets. There were no burning of French flags, no anti-French placards, no chants denouncing the presence of 400 French troops in Gabon. There were definitely no Russian flags being waved anywhere.

Ordinary people were just delighted to witness the end of the incompetent Ali Bongo Administration, which could not be eradicated through elections. Most of the population did not seem to mind that Ali Bongo’s replacement was another Bongo family member in a starched army uniform.

Here is one video:

Here is another video:

Pascaline Bongo broke her silence to publicly back the removal of her estranged brother from power in favor of her first cousin. This move led veteran political dissident, Albert Ondo Ossa, to condemn the coup as a “farce” and an “internal Bongo family affair orchestrated by Pascaline”.

There is no evidence that Pascaline was behind the coup. However, Albert was right that the coup was not revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination. The coup d’etat did not overthrow the ruling Bongo family, it merely reconfigured itself.

Ali Bongo, Nouriddine Bongo, Slyvia Bongo and several others were swept away from power to make way for more competent members of the ruling Bongo family. Civilian family members were replaced by military members of the family, allowing ancien régime to adapt and continue in the form of a military junta.

Gabonese people were not fooled by this. They knew that Brigadier-General Brice Nguema was an integral member of the Bongo family, who loved and honoured his uncle, the late President Omar Bongo.

As soon as he became the new military ruler of Gabon, Brice Nguema dashed off to the tomb of his maternal uncle to pray. This was widely reported in the local media.

Whatever the misgivings of the Gabonese people about the Bongo family’s monopoly of power, they seem to appreciate the political stability, especially in a region mired in non-stop civil wars. With a poverty rate of 34%, Gabon is “paradise” compared to neighbouring Central African countries with 70% to 95% of their citizenry mired in poverty and civil conflict.

Many Gabonese appreciated the relatively decent living standards under the autocratic rule of Omar Bongo, the progenitor of the ruling Bongo family.

The Gabonese public had heard rumors of Nguema’s possible involvement in some of the corrupt excesses of the ruling family, yet they did not protest his ascendancy to the position of military ruler.

Perhaps, this was due to the fact that he was a Bongo family member, who had previously operated in the background before assuming power as a military ruler. Therefore, he was shielded from public scrutiny unlike his more prominent relatives, who headed the previous civilian government and faced public anger for their incompetence.

Nguema’s popularity was not dented when it was eventually revealed in the media that he had spent one million dollars to purchase three houses in Maryland, United States between 2015 and 2018, when he was part of the security apparatus of the defunct Ali Bongo Administration. When asked about his houses in the United States and France, Nguema gave the following curt response to the press:

“I think whether in France or in the United States, a private life is a private life that [should be] respected.”

The Gabonese populace barely notice the commentary over Brice Nguema’s overseas houses. The public was excited by the flurry of arrests of unpopular political figures, who had all served in the overthrown civilian government. Stacks upon stacks of cash money embezzled by Ali Bongo and his acolytes were being discovered all over the capital city of Libreville.

As reported in my first article:

As much as 70 billion CFA Francs ($155 million) was found in and around the home of Maitre Park, a South Korean friend of Ali Bongo who has been living in Gabon for quite some time. Loads of cash was also recovered from home of Ian Ngoulou, a personal aide to Noureddin Valentin Bongo, the 31-year-old son of Ali Bongo.

All of these discoveries have been shown on state TV in Gabon, causing outrage in the citizenry. The new military ruler has moved to pacify the populace, promising that public officials who embezzled money would be prosecuted.

In September 2023, military junta leader Brice Nguema announced a two-year transition from military rule to elected democratic governance. This was largely welcomed by the public in Gabon, as reported in the video below:

Although Brice Nguema was coy as to whether he would contest the presidential election set for April 2025, it was clear to all discerning Gabonese that he would do so. After all, his so-called “transition-to-democracy” charter exempted him from the blanket ban that prohibited members of the ruling junta from seeking elected political office in 2025.

I predicted in my third article in the series, published in December 2023, that everyone, from ordinary Gabonese people to Emmanuel Macron, would be fine with Nguema running in the 2025 Presidential race— albeit for different reasons :

Although Brice has not yet indicated any interest in standing for presidential election in 2025, it is very likely that he will go for it to protect his own interests and that of the extended Bongo family.

[The] people of Gabon will likely tolerate his transformation to a civilian President— provided he is able to maintain political stability and keep a trickle of the petroleum wealth flowing downwards to the masses as his uncle was able to do for 42 years.

France would also be fine with a member of the Bongo family continuing as civilian President of Gabon after the planned April 2025 elections. Because, why not?

After all, the day after the coup, Brice Nguema quietly reached out to the Macron government to explain that Gabon’s diplomatic relations with France would not be affected in anyway by Ali Bongo’s removal from power.

This was very important because mainstream corporate media outlets—including those inside France—kept claiming idiotically that the Gabonese coup was similar to the putsch in Niger Republic. Nguema felt obliged to assure Macron that those media reports weren’t true.

That particular assurance was followed up with a discreet face-to-face meeting between Nguema’s emissaries and the French government officials on the sidelines of the Annual World Bank/IMF International Meetings hosted in the Moroccan city of Marrakech from 9 to 15 October 2023.

Of course, none of those latter day revelations of Nguema’s quiet assurances to France would come as a surprise to seasoned watchers of political events in Gabon. But it might have surprised those alt-media romantics, who continued to portray the Gabonese putschists as “revolutionaries conquering French imperialism.”

When I wrote my first article on 3 September 2023, I had no way of knowing about the discreet phone call made by Brice Nguema to Elysee Palace to reassure Macron that the dullards of the mainstream media had no idea what they were yammering about. Nevertheless, I noticed that the French government had only given a tepid response to the Gabonese coup, which was so unlike the visceral reaction to the military coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger Republic.

More importantly, nobody had called for the expulsion of the 400 French troops stationed in Gabon. Not the general public. Not any mainstream political figure. Not the putschists, who subsequently formed a military junta.

I concluded my first article, with the following:

My dear readers, there is a good reason why French President Emmanuel Macron has not blown a gasket over the Gabon coup as he had done when putschists seized power in Niger Republic.

The two-year transition period announced by Brice Nguema created an opportunity for ancien regime—in the guise of a popular military junta— to increase support among the masses by making certain sacrifies. If ordinary Gabonese citizens were angry about government corruption, then why not offer up certain members of the Bongo family as scapegoats?

Nguema’s military junta expanded its popularity among the masses by sacrificing the most notorious members of the Bongo family— arresting Sylvia Bongo (Ali Bongo’s wife) and Noureddine Bongo (Ali Bongo’s eldest son) on corruption charges; dismissing Colonel Frédéric Bongo (Ali Bongo’s half-brother) from the army for indiscipline.

Several non-family members, who had served as senior officials in the bureaucratic structures of the deposed Ali Bongo government were also arrested for their part in corruption and embezzlement.

Amidst the flurry of arrests and dismissals, Brice Nguema steadfastly shielded his ailing cousin, former President Ali Bongo, from any further trouble since his forced removal from office. The military ruler stated that his cousin was free to travel overseas to seek medical help for his health problems.

The failure to place Ali Bongo in a detention facility did not seem to bother the Gabonese public that much. The detention of Sylvia, Noureddine and several formerly powerful figures on corruption charges were enough to keep the general public content and conveniently forgetting that the military junta include other Bongo family members dressed in army uniforms.

The general public also accepted the military junta’s rationale for why Pascaline Bongo was never arrested, despite her likely involvement in the corrupt activities of previous governments led by her father and later her estranged brother.

Military ruler Brice Nguema told the general public that there was no need to arrest and prosecute Pascaline domestically since she was already facing corruption charges filed in July 2022 before a French court.

Unaffected by the waves of police arrests sweeping Gabon in September 2023, the semi-retired Pascaline travelled to France to defend herself against charges of accepting €8 million in bribes from Elgis Group between 2010 and 2011. These alleged bribes were purportedly in exchange for assisting the French construction company in securing public contracts from the Ali Bongo Administration.

Pascaline’s defense was quite simple. She did not have the necessary political power in 2010 and 2011 to help secure public contracts for anybody. She cited the estranged relationship between herself and her brother, which I covered in great detail in the third article in our Gabon series. Here is an excerpt:

Once Ali Bongo seized control of the ruling political party... and subsequently became [the] elected President of Gabon in October 2009, Pascaline was thrown into a downward spiral from power and influence. Her brother gradually stripped her of positions and privileges. By early 2019, she was still clinging to her final national post—High Personal Representative of the President of Gabon.

Without advance warning, on 2 October 2019, the council of cabinet ministers chaired by the partially paralyzed Ali Bongo issued a succinct one-sentence statement declaring that Pascaline had been fired from her final national post.

On 22 April 2024, Paris Criminal Court found Pascaline not guilty of the corruption charges levelled against her. Madame Bénédicte de Perthuis, the presiding judge, accepted Pascaline’s argument that her position as “High Personal Representative of the President of Gabon” did not grant her the ability to award the public contracts in question. The judge also highlighted that the French law making it an offence to bribe a foreign public official did not exist at the time of the alleged infraction.

In other words, the judge was signalling to French prosecutors not to waste their time filing new charges covering bribery dating back to the era when Pascaline held a powerful position in the government of her father. That would the 22-year period from 1987 to 2009.

Despite his ostensible war on corruption, Brice Nguema was never going to eschew the Bongo family tradition of unabashed nepotism. So, it came as no surprise that Brice gave his brother-in-law, Régis Onanga Ndiaye, the role of Minister for Foreign Affairs.

The Ndiaye family has served the ruling Bongo Dynasty loyally for many decades. Regis Ndiaye’s father served the preceding Omar Bongo Administration as a representative of the state-owned airline, Air Gabon.

Régis served the Ali Bongo government as Gabonese Ambassador to Senegal until his brother-in-law carried out the 2023 August coup.

In any other African country, the 2023 coup d’etat would have likely signalled the end of the political career of Regis Ndiaye. But Gabon is quite unique in the sense that both the pre-coup and the post-coup regimes were controlled by the same ruling family. In fact, the coup gave Mr. Ndiaye’s career a boost. He went from being an ambassador in a somnolent West African country before the coup to heading his country’s foreign ministry after the coup.

Riding the wave of public support, Brice Nguema moved to consolidate his power. He presided over the writing of a new draft constitution, which abolished Gabon’s traditional semi-presidential system in favour of a purely presidential system. This change in political system abolished the position of prime minister, paving the way for the concentration of all executive powers in the office of the presidency.

The draft constitution also introduced the concept of term limits into Gabonese politics. The old system of unlimited five-year presidential terms, renewable by winning elections, was abolished. The draft constitution provided for a seven-year presidential term that can be renewed only once, meaning that an elected President can only serve a maximum of 14 years (i.e. two terms). The constitution stipulated that any attempt by future presidents to amend the law to remove term limits would be a “treasonable offence”. The draft constitution gave future elected parliaments the power to impeach “treasonous” presidents.

Candidates for the presidency must be no older than 70 years old. In line with the growing trend on the continent, the new draft constitution banned same-sex marriages in Gabon. Finally, the draft constitution set the date for the next general election on 12 April 2025.

As shown in the short video below, the draft constitution was presented with fanfare to military ruler Brice Nguema in September 2024:

The general public was pleased with the draft constitution’s imposition of presidential term limits, the prohibition of “dynastic succession” and the provision that stipulates that a presidential candidate should be Gabonese and also have a Gabonese spouse— a provision that mainstream media outlets claim is aimed at former first lady Sylvia Bongo, who is of French descent.

I don’t believe that to be true because Sylvia and her parents became naturalised citizens after they emigrated to Gabon in 1974. Her mother worked as Omar Bongo’s personal secretary for a time.

In the referendum held on 16 November 2024, the draft was adopted as the new constitution by 91.6% of the Gabonese population. Interpretation of any ambiguous provisions within the constitution is the responsibility of the Gabonese Constitutional Court headed by a judge, who is part of the Bongo family tree.

In September 2024, Ali Bongo published an open letter declaring that he had quit politics for good. “I wish to reaffirm my withdrawal from political life and the definitive renunciation of any national ambition,” he stated in the open letter.

Ali Bongo used the letter to plead with the military junta to release his wife and son from detention, stating that they are “helpless scapegoats”. He apologized to the Gabonese people for “his shortcomings while he was President”. While begging for national reconciliation, Ali Bongo stated in the letter that his renunciation of personal political ambitions extended to his detained wife and son.

Brice Nguema reiterated that his 65-year-old cousin was free to travel overseas to seek medical help for his health problems. However, Sylvia and Noureddin would stand trial. In other words, the two most unpopular members of the Bongo family would continue to serve as scapegoats for the time being.

Throughout the year of 2024, Brice Nguema worked hard to renew the traditional friendship that existed between France and the ruling Bongo Dynasty.

Macron was quite relieved to see that the virulent strain of anti-French sentiment in West Africa had not “infected” large swathes of the Central African subregion. Attitudes in Francophone Central Africa range from outright francophilia to a general distaste for France. There are no Francophone Central African countries that harbour the sort of visceral loathing of France encountered in Francophone West African states.

Apart from Gabon, the Republic of Congo (not DR Congo) is another Central African country where France does not feel it is losing any ground.

Even in neighbouring Central African Republic (C.A.R), public attitudes to France is nowhere close to the virulence of Mali or Burkina Faso. Despite tensions over its decision to hire of Russian mercenaries, Central African Republic has always sought to maintain good relations with France. It is the Macron government that has been throwing temper tantrums over growing diplomatic and military ties between C.A.R and Russia.

However, as French influence waned in Francophone West Africa, President Macron’s hostility towards Central African Republic began to dissipate. In April 2024, he finally accepted the olive branch that C.A.R has been offering since 2018. Perhaps, he realised that it was the self-defeating policies of his predecessors— especially Chirac and Hollande—that compelled C.A.R to seek help from the Kremlin in the first place.

An excerpt from a previous article:

Hollande was extremely reluctant to intervene in C.A.R when insurgents from the minority Muslim community of the predominantly Christian country kicked off the civil war in December 2012.

While he was still weighing the official request of C.A.R for French military help, the Muslim insurgents captured and sacked the capital city of Bangui on 15 March 2013, causing the Bozize government to collapse.

Elysée Palace finally authorized French military intervention in December 2013. As France had no soldiers stationed inside C.A.R, having voluntarily closed its sole military base there fifteen years prior, significant logistical efforts were expended to assemble French troops from various military bases in other African states and from France itself.

French military intervention in C.A.R lasted three years and ended in October 2016 to the disappointment of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra who was then the newly elected leader of the troubled Central African country.

Once the capital city of Bangui was secured, French President Hollande declared “mission accomplished” and voluntarily withdrew French troops— even though the civil war was still in full swing and Muslim insurgents were still on the rampage in other parts of the country…

Put simply, the Russians benefitted from the erosion of French influence. The erosion commenced in July 1997 when Chirac opted to shut down the only French military base in Central African Republic, withdrawing 1,400 paratroopers. The erosion concluded in October 2016 when Hollande refused to prolong French military assistance against Muslim insurgents despite pleas from the government of C.A.R. Shortly after that, Kremlin-backed Yevgeny Prigozhin and his mercenaries entered the picture.

In late 2024, Brice Nguema and Emmanuel Macron signed an agreement, converting the French military base in Gabon into a joint facility between the petroleum-rich African country and France. In other words, the management of the base will no longer be the exclusive preserve of France. Gabonese troops can also be stationed there as well. The provisions within the signed agreement is nothing new.

During Emmanuel Macron’s March 2023 Africa Tour, he made the same proposal for joint management of French military bases to friendly Francophone African states: Gabon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Chad. While the other countries declined the offer and politely requested France to initiate the closure of military bases on their territories, Gabon chose a different path, which aligns with its own unique history as the perpetual francophile outlier in Africa.

On 20 February 2025, France evacuated its soldiers and officially handed over its sole military base in Ivory Coast to local authorities, ending 50 years of continuous French military presence in the country. On 7 March 2025, France completed the withdrawal of its troops from Senegal and handed over the buildings that constituted its bases, ending 65 years of continuous French military presence in the country.

In francophile Gabon, the number of French soldiers have reduced to a paltry 150 in accordance with plans to convert the military base into a joint facility of the two nations.

The only French military bases that remain unaffected by political headwinds sweeping Francophone Africa are those in the Republic of Djibouti, housing 1,500 French soldiers. Macron designated those bases collectively as the French military headquarters in Africa. Interestingly, China and the United States maintain rival military bases in Djibouti. All three foreign countries pay annual fees to lease the land occupied by their bases.

On 3 March 2025, Brice Nguema publicly confirmed that he would contest the upcoming presidential election to be held the following month. There was no doubt who would win the election.

Nguema did not even have to expend any energy on ballot fraud. He was genuinely popular in Gabon, and he was the only serious presidential candidate standing in the election.

Veteran opposition politicians, such as 73-year-old Pierre Claver Maganga Moussavou of Parti Social-Démocrate (PSD) and 71-year-old Economics Professor Albert Ondo Ossa of Omar Bongo University, were constitutionally barred from running for presidential office because of their ages.

Both men are classic examples of dissident politicians who compromised their principles in exchange for cabinent positions in Omar Bongo’s government.

Of the two veteran dissidents, centre-left opposition politician Pierre Claver Maganga Moussavou served the longest in government they had previously denounced as corrupt.

Pierre served in Omar Bongo’s government in several cabinet positions in the ministries of planning, agriculture, transport, civil aviation and tourism. After Omar Bongo’s death in 2009, Pierre returned to opposition politics. Nevertheless, he continuously alternated between supporting and opposing the policies of Ali Bongo, who never stopped courting the leftist politician in accordance with his father’s peaceful pacification tradition.

In 2017, Pierre accepted the position of Vice President in Ali Bongo’s government. However, he lost the position in 2019 over a scandal involving his connivance with a Chinese firm to illegally trade timber.

After the coup d’etat, Pierre returned permanently to opposition politics since Brice Nguema had little interest in following the “settlement politics” of his uncle and cousin. In any case, Nguema did not consider Pierre to be of any electoral value. The veteran opposition politician led the fringe Parti Social-Démocrate (PSD), which has never won anything exceeding 3.6% of total votes cast in elections.

Fringe opposition parties such as PSD and others were only valued by Omar Bongo and Ali Bongo because of their ability to mobilize the angry masses into street protesters. Brigadier-General Brice Nguema is currently the most popular political figure in the entire history of Gabon. There are no angry masses for opposition political parties to mobilize for street protests.

A few weeks before the 2025 Presidential Election, two French journalists came to Gabonese capital city of Libreville to interview the military junta leader. During the interview, Nguema mentioned that he would quit the military before running for presidential office. That is nothing new. African history is filled with military rulers that shed the uniform to become civilian leaders after elections.

During the interview, Brice Nguema told the journalists that Sylvia Bongo was being held because she forged her husband’s signature on official documents and embezzled government funds. Brice insisted that she would stand trial along with other arrested individuals.

When the journalists requested proof, Nguema reminded the journalists that Ali Bongo’s right arm was paralyzed due to a stroke. Considering Ali Bongo had been confined to his residence since suffering a stroke in October 2018, it was likely that any official documents sent to the Presidential Mansion for his approval were returned with forged signatures of the First Lady.

The French journalists were not convinced by Brice Nguema’s reasoning, but moved on.

The journalist for France 24 Television correctly noted that only a handful of Gabonese political figures had been arrested for corruption. Many prominent political figures were still running around freely and the former ruling political party, Parti Démocratique Gabonais (PDG), had declared its support for Nguema’s plan to run for presidential office. The journalist pointedly asked Nguema whether he was governing like his predecessor Ali Bongo.

Below is the exchange between Nguema and the journalist from France 24 TV:

Of course, there was nothing wrong with questioning the personal integrity of the Gabonese military ruler and pondering whether he was any different from the cousin he overthrew. The French 24 journalist rightly called out Brice Nguema for selectively arresting certain figures connected to Ali Bongo while letting others off the hook.

Nevertheless, that line of questioning betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of the political realities in Gabon. Because the French 24 journalist wrongly believes the era of Bongo family rule has ended, he interprets Nguema’s application of double standards as stemming from a personal moral failing. Hence, the reason, why he asked Nguema why he was seemingly behaving like Ali Bongo.

Contrary to journalist’s opinion, there was nothing self-interested or “personal” about Nguema’s actions as military ruler of Gabon. Nguema is nothing like the cousin he deposed. Ali Bongo’s refusal to step down when his unpopularity put Bongo family rule in jeopardy was the ultimate act of selfishness. Nguema, on the other hand, has always acted on behalf of family, clearing up the mess left behind by Ali Bongo.

For family rule to survive in the long term, it must adapt and make concessions. Hence, the designation of the most unpopular family members as scapegoats to appease the Gabonese public, who remain appalled by 14 years of Ali Bongo’s overtly corrupt leadership.

For obvious reasons, Nguema did not tell his clueless French interviewers that ancien regime never ended, that he was the popular face of family rule continuing under the façade of a military junta. He evaded the question about the inconsistency of arresting some corrupt political figures while letting others off the hook. Instead, he discussed his future plan to transform into an elected civilian President.

He subtly distanced himself from the highly unpopular former ruling party (PDG), stating that he would stand in the presidential election as an independent candidate, backed by his personal campaign organization, “The Builders.”

The French journalists did not ask to see the membership list of “The Builders”. If they had done so, they might have realized that the era of Bongo family rule was far from over. But then again, it is entirely possible that seeing the names on that list would not have disabused them of their false assumptions. After all, ignorance is bliss.

Elsewhere in the interview, Brice Nguema delighted his interlocutors with his remark that the 2023 coup d’etat had nothing in common with those West African coups in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso. Over in Central Africa, Gabon simply wanted to continue the tradition of maintaining good relations with France.

Below is the exchange between Brice Nguema and journalist from Radio France International (RFI) :

The RFI journalist could not resist asking whether Gabon would permit the establishment of a Chinese naval base in the future :

Nguema probably lowered the high blood pressures of unseen French officials by confirming that Gabon won’t accept any future request from China to build a naval base overlooking the Gulf of Guinea. Instead, Gabon looked forward to Chinese investment in Gabonese infrastructure.

Elsewhere in the interview, Brice Nguema insisted that Gabon’s standared diplomatic relations with Russia and China would remain as it is. He reassured the French journalists that Gabon’s relations with France remains strong.

The French 24 TV journalist wondered why Gabon was not emulating the West African states by seeking the closure of French military base. Once again, Nguema reassured them that the military base would stay. However, the name of the base— “Camp De Gaulle”— would have to be changed to something more appropriate for the times.

Once again, that question highlighted the French journalist’s stunning ignorance of the history and political culture of Gabon. Had any of those French journalists taken the time to venture out onto the streets and engage with ordinary citizens, they would have discovered that there is no significant constituency in Gabon advocating for the closure of the French military base.

Gabonese people living in Central Africa are not interchangeable with Burkinabes and Malians living over a thousand miles away in West Africa.

There is literarily an entire city in Gabon named after France. It is called Franceville, and the vast majority of the Gabonese population don’t mind the name.

In February 1988, the New York Times revealed that the French government financed special scholarships for 800 Gabonese students, who come to study in France every year. I cannot confirm if France still operates the special scholarship scheme. Nevertheless, the scheme’s existence for many decades is one of several reasons why francophila have endured for so long in Gabon.

At the urging of the journalist from French 24, Brice Nguema expanded on his remark about the need to rename Camp De Gaulle base. He wanted the military base to be named after a local military figure, such as General Nazaire Boulingui (1918-1984), a Gabonese soldier, who fought under the command of Charles De Gaulle’s Free French Forces and saw action in the French and Italian theatres of the Second World War.

Nguema also explained the agreement reached with France to transform the French military base into a jointly managed French-Gabon military facility. As part of the agreement, the number of French troops will be cut from 300 to 150. Considering everything that Nguema said about the agreement, it is clear to me that French military presence in Gabon is essentially reverting to the status-quo that prevailed before the 1964 coup attempt— 150 French troops without any heavy armour of their own, working in a joint military facility as instructors to Gabonese soldiers.

The interview concluded with the journalist from Radio France International (RFI) criticizing the disqualification of prominent opposition politicians like Pierre Claver Moussavou and Albert Ondo Ossa from contesting the upcoming April 2025 Presidential Election, which was just a month away at the time of the interview. He also made the unsubstantiated claim that Albert Ondo Ossa had been the “true winner” of the controversial 2023 Presidential Election that triggered the overthrow of President Ali Bongo.

Brice Nguema replied that the overwhelming majority (91.6%) of Gabonese people had ratified the new constitution, which barred individuals above the age of 70 from contesting the election. Pierre and Albert were above the age of 70 and therefore they are ineligible.

“Please respect our constitution. In France, are laws not respected? Tell me.” Nguema signalled indignantly to his French interviewers, who had nothing remarkable to say after that.

I am willing to entertain the RFI journalist’s assertion that Albert might have won the 2023 Presidential Election in the first round if not for vote-rigging. However, it is important to note that people who voted for Albert did not do so because they thought he was the best qualified person to be president. They voted for Albert because he was not named Ali Bongo. The same reasoning applies to those who voted for Pierre instead.

The truth of the matter is that Albert and Pierre are not as popular as that RFI journalist was making them out to be. Reiterating points made earlier in this article, both veteran political dissidents had compromised their principles in exchange for cabinet positions from Omar Bongo, whom they had previously accused of corruption.

Opposition politician Jean Ping possesses greater public appeal than Pierre and Albert combined. However, at the ripe age of 83, Jean is constitutionally prohibited from running in the 2025 Presidential Election. Had he been eligible, it is improbable that he would have competed in the presidential race given his staunch support for Brice Nguema.

For most of his adult life, Jean Ping had worked overseas as a diplomat for Gabon in various agencies of the United Nations before returning home to serve in the government of the late Omar Bongo as a cabinet minister. Despite being married to another person, Jean sired two kids with fellow cabinent minister, Pascaline Bongo.

While Jean Ping was a staunch ally of Omar Bongo, he had little respect for Ali Bongo. During the presidency of Ali Bongo, the Afro-Chinese politician quit the ruling political party, Parti Démocratique Gabonais (PDG), and became an opposition politician.

Jean ran against Ali Bongo in the controversial 2016 Presidential Election. Despite heavy vote-rigging in favour of the incumbent, Jean managed to secure 48.2% of the total votes cast. The incumbent, Ali Bongo, supposedly “won” narrowly with 49.8% of the total votes.

Brice Nguema has been and continues to be the most charismatic political figure in Gabon. The 2025 Presidential Election was essentially a referendum to confirm his popularity. No other individual comes close.

There was absolutely no chance that Gabonese voters would have chosen either Albert or Pierre over Brice had both dissidents been eligible to compete in the election. Nevertheless, their absence from the presidential race made the election held appear less remarkable. Same applies to 60-year-old Professor Jean-Remy Yama, who was strangely barred from competing in the presidential election held in April, despite being below the age of 70 stipulated in the new constitution. He was also barred from running in the legislative elections held from September to October. The spurious reason given for his disqualification from the elections was his inability to produce his father’s birth certificate to prove that his lineage is indeed Gabonese as required by law.

I suspect that his inability to compete in the elections probably has something to do with the fact that he publicly asked for Gabon’s relationship with France to be reviewed at a time when Brice Nguema was discreetly reassuring Macron that the 2023 coup d’etat had nothing in common with those in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso.

While Jean-Remy Yama’s position on France does not have a significant constituency in Gabon, he is a well-liked trade unionist, who stood up to Ali Bongo and was jailed twice for his efforts. He was in jail when the 2023 coup d’etat occurred. Brice Nguema released him from jail, and allowed him to contribute to the development of the legal framework for the conduct of the elections—the same ones he was later unable to participate in.

Had Jean-Remy been allowed to compete in the presidential election, he would not have fared any better than Albert or Pierre against the immensely popular Brice Nguema. Tellingly, there was no public uproar over Jean-Remy’s exclusion from the presidential and legislative elections. It was as if the Gabonese populace were too mesmerized by Nguema to even care.

Only eight political candidates participated in the presidential election. Of the eight, Nguema was the only serious contender for the elected presidency.

The only other candidate with name recognition in the presidential race was Alain Claude Nze, who had been a loyal servant to the Bongo family for many years. He was a cabinet minister in Omar Bongo’s government. He served as Deputy Prime Minister and later as Prime Minister during the administration of Ali Bongo.

Alain had no chance of winning the election. He was a senior member of a widely despised government ousted in a popular coup. Luckily for him, he was among those political figures who were never marked as scapegoats for arrest and prosecution.

Given the context painted above, it came as no surprise to anyone paying attention that Brice Nguema indeed stormed to election victory with 95% of the total votes cast in the election. Alain Claude Nze won 3% of the votes. The remaining 2% was shared among the remaining fringe presidential candidates.

Under normal circumstances, I would have laughed at the 92% margin of victory. However, it is important to take into account the peculiar nature of the election— it was essentially an invitation for the Gabonese public to put their imprimatur on the coup d’etat that toppled the widely reviled Ali Bongo.

International election monitors, deployed to observe the 2025 Presidential Election, reported that the electoral process took place without any major problems. Voter turnout was a remarkable 70.7%, which quite high for a place like Gabon. The election result reflected the collective will of the people.

Gabon is a country with a long history of post-election violence. In previous election cycles, large segments of the population have taken to the streets to violently protest vote-rigging. Before the 2023 Presidential Election result had been announced, there were already street riots over perceived electoral irregularities.

The aftermath of the 2025 Presidential Election is one of the most peaceful in Gabon’s history. There was no post-election violence. Instead, the same patriotic crowds that rejoiced during the military coup d’état in 2023 reappeared to celebrate the transition of Brice Nguema from a military ruler to an elected civilian President.

Behind the scenes, lesser known members of the Bongo family also celebrated discreetly. Brice Nguema, one of their own, had successfully restored ancien régime to its proper civilian governing format. Now, it was time to release unpopular family members who had been sacrificed to placate the masses incensed by government corruption. Yes, it was true that Brice Nguema had promised the general public that those individuals would face justice for embezzlement of government funds on a grand scale. Nevertheless, it was time to act once again in the family’s best interests.

Releasing the likes of Noureddin and Sylvia Bongo was risky, but Brice Nguema had the necessary political capital to absorb public discotent due to his immense popularity. The release need not be dramatic. Once freed, Sylvia and Nouredddin would be sent abroad. Resettlement in France was out of the question given that family-owned properties in Paris and Nice, worth €85 million, were seized by order of the French courts between 2010 and 2025.

However, the Bongos have never been ones to put all their eggs in one basket. There was always the option of living comfortably in exile in Bongo family-owned luxury homes in Britain, Spain and the United States.

The unease within the ruling Bongo Dynasty, as they watched certain family members being made scapegoats, dissipated once the 2025 Presidential Election concluded. Shortly he became the elected leader of Gabon, President Brice Nguema ordered the release of Sylvia and Nouriddine Bongo from the detention facility where they were awaiting trial.

The general public was not informed of the release of Sylvia and Nouriddine until they had left the country with former President Ali Bongo. The Gabonese populace woke up one morning in the middle of May 2025 and learned that Ali Bongo and his family had flown the coop.

The Gabonese public was told that Sylvia and Noureddin have reunited with Ali Bongo and left for Angola, a Portuguese-speaking country in the Southern African subregion.

There was nothing to worry about, reassured the spokesman for the elected government of Brice Nguema. The release of the Sylvia and Noureddin was only “provisional”. Their trial for corruption, money laundering, embezzlement, and forgery will proceed as scheduled. The government stated that the suspects must return to Gabon to attend the proceedings.

Public reaction to President Brice Nguema’s decision to free Sylvia and Noureddin from pre-trial detention to travel abroad was mixed. Some members of the public expressed disappointment with the decision while others seem to accept the government narrative that the release of both Bongo family members was only “provisional”.

Here is a brief video clip showing public reaction to the decision to permit Noureddine and Sylvia to leave the country:

The general public did not explode in anger following the release of the two most unpopular Bongo family members after Ali Bongo himself. There were no violent protests in the streets.

As anticipated by the fully restored ancien régime, President Brice Nguema retains a significant amount of political capital with the Gabonese populace. In any case, there were still several political underlings who had not been released and who were going to be prosecuted in the courts to the fullest. For the sake of appearances, the court trial of Sylvia and Noureddin would proceed while both are safely out of the country, never to return.

On 9 November 2025, a special Gabonese court heard the charges against Sylvia and Noureddin. Both were accused of exploiting Ali Bongo’s medical condition following his 2018 stroke to run Gabon for their own financial gain.

The prosecution team portrayed Ali Bongo as a blameless victim. It was as if all the corrupt activities that happened during his presidency (2009-2023) were due to the perfidy of his wife and eldest son, who supposedly took advantage of him when his health began to fail in 2018.

Mr. Eddy Minang, the chief prosecutor, also expressed his “surprise and disappointment” that Sylvia and Nourredin had not returned to Gabon to attend their trial. The proceedings lasted for only 48 hours.

On 11 November 2025, the special court sentenced Sylvia and Nourredin to 20 years imprisonment in absentia for concealment and embezzlement of public funds, money laundering, criminal association, and forgery. Both convicts were also ordered by the court to pay 100 million CFA Francs ($177,000) in damages for “crimes against the Gabonese state.” Noureddin was singled out for an additional fine of 1.2 trillion CFA francs ($2.1 billion).

Of course, there is absolutely no chance that Sylvia or Noureddin would ever return to Gabon to serve their prison sentences. It is unlikely that President Brice Nguema would seek their extradition from Britain, where Ali Bongo is reportedly receiving medical treatment.

Having said that, I cannot discount the possibility that Nguema might make some noises about extradition—if for no other reason than to provide a public spectacle of accountability while protecting the rest of the Bongo political establishment still entrenched in power.

From the safety of his new home in Britain, Noureddin reacted to the court verdict against himself and his mother. He dismissed the entire court trial as a “legal farce”. He told the BBC that the sentences handed down to him and his mum were part of a “rubber-stamping exercise” that was “predetermined a long time ago” by the government of Brice Nguema.

As a parting shot, Noureddin released a covert video recording of President Brice Nguema unwittingly confirming that the August 2023 coup d'état was indeed an internal Bongo family affair.

Watch the short video clip below:

In the secretly recorded meeting, captured by spy glasses won by Noureddin, Brice can be observed advising Bongo family members who were about to be released not to harbour resentment regarding their detention. Brice states that the August 2023 coup was orchestrated to avert the disaster that might have unfolded if a soldier without ties to the family had executed a successful coup.

This video not only validates what I wrote in my first article, published four days after the 2023 coup, it also offers an insight into thinking of the military wing of the Bongo family.

In all likelihood, military members of the family were frightened by the failed 2019 coup attempt led by soldiers with no blood ties to them. They realised that further coup attempts were inevitable so long as the widely reviled Ali Bongo held onto the presidency.

Having failed to persuade Ali Bongo to resign, the military wing of the family took action. If another coup against Ali Bongo was inevitable, then it was the duty of the family to carry it out before a group of ambitious soldiers without familial ties took the initiative.

In the video, Brice says that he informed Macron that none of the detained family members were actually in a prison cell. Brice concludes the meeting by urging the soon-to-be-released family members not to seek retribution for being scapegoated. He advised them against sharing details of their detention with the rest of the world. Apparently, Brice made them sign a pledge before their release on 15 May.

However, months after their release, Sylvia and Noureddin indicated that they have no plans to keep quiet nor forgo retribution. They have filed a legal case against the Gabonese government in France, alleging false imprisonment and torture. (Sylvia and Noureddin are dual citizens of Gabon and France.)

Both have followed up with public statements about being “brutally tortured in jail”— a claim I find difficult to believe given their remarkably healthy appearance and the fact that French diplomats who visited them in jail said they did not see any signs of torture. Noureddin then went on to leak video evidence exposing the 2023 coup d'état as a charade in an attempt to embarass Brice Nguema and the rest of the Bongo family.

Noureddin’s leakage of the six-month-old clandestine video recording in November 2025 was designed to throw shade on his conviction and expose the 2023 coup d’état as a charade.

While the release of the footage caused a stir among the Gabonese public, there is no evidence that it damaged the reputation of Brice Nguema, who still has a lot of political capital to spend.

Outside Gabon, the mainstream media outlets continue to delude themselves that Bongo family rule ended with the 2023 coup d’etat— even after the release of the Noureddin’s secret recording.

Inside Gabon, the political machinery of Bongo family rule continues to function without any issues. The general public has been kept entertained with the televised trials other political figures charged with embezzlement and corruption.

On 18 November 2025, the populace watched a live TV broadcast in which a female judge in red robes convicted nine out of ten individuals for assisting in the diversion of approximately CFA 4.9 trillion ($8.7 billion) from state coffers during Ali Bongo’s 14-year rule. The nine convicts—including South Korean Park Sang-chul (alias “Maitre Park”)—were given prison sentences ranging from two years to fifteen years. Watch the short video clip below :

Unlike Sylvia and Noureddin, those individuals are not members of the Bongo family. They were loyal servants of the family who are being thrown under the bus to placate the general public. By ensuring those individuals serve their prison sentences in full, Brice Nguema aims to prove the “sincerity” of his fight against national corruption.

END OF YEAR FUNDRAISER : Your generous financial contributions help me as I make the hard transition from a university academic to a self-employed individual. Kindly donate to: buymeacoffee.com/chimandubichi.

I will start by addressing the fake narrative floated by the Trump Administration and Zionist shills on social media. No, there isn’t a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria.

As some of you already know, I am from Southeastern Nigeria, which is heavily Roman Catholic. There are 115 million Christians in Nigeria and most of them live in the Southern part of the country, where Islam is a minority faith and jihadi terrorism is completely absent.

In the Northern part of the country, jihadi terrorists do attack the local Christian minority there, but they also attack the Muslim majority. Check the news on Nigeria, and you find headlines about jihadists in Northeastern, North-central and Northwestern regions of Nigeria blowing up mosques and killing lots of Muslims when they are not busy doing the same to local Christians in those areas.

Ever since Nigeria condemned the genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza, all manners of Zionist shills, pretending to care about Christians, have been spreading disinformation with fake statistics, fake photos or misleading videos.

There is a strong attempt to conflate Christian victims of jihadi violence in Northern Nigeria with homicide of Christians all over the country due to common crimes and ethnic violence.

For instance, in Southeastern Nigeria, where Muslims are less than a fraction of a percent, the murder of a Catholic priest at the hands of ransome kidnappers is being passed off on social media as an example of “Muslim persecution of Christians”.

There is also the recurring banditry of nomadic ethnic Fulani cattle herders who criss-cross the entire country, searching for grazing grounds for their cattle. During their itinerant journey in search of fodder for their cattle, these gun-totting Fulani bandits would trespass on agricultural lands owned by farmers of other ethnicities. When those farmers protest cattle feeding on their crops, the Fulani bandits would open fire, massacring entire farming communities.

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The fact that those Fulanis happen to be Muslim, and the farming communities happen to be mostly Christians of various ethnicities, allows liars on social media to pass off those tragedies as examples of “Muslim persecution of Christians”. Of course, instances of Muslim Fulani cattle herders massacring Muslim farmers are never mentioned as that would destroy the narrative.

Occasionally, the violence is in the opposite direction. There has been instances of cattle rustlers, who happen to be Christian, murdering the Fulani herdsmen for their livestock. Those sorts of reports are of zero propaganda value to people peddling the fake narrative of “Muslims committing Christian genocide in Nigeria.”

Guys, do not fall for this Zionist psyop operation being led by liars and AIPAC sockpuppets like Senator Ted Cruz. This “Nigerian Christian Genocide” narrative is basically a variant of the fake “White South African Genocide”. The only difference here is that Trump will NEVER EVER sign an Executive Order granting refugee status to Nigerian Christians.

In any case, the “white genocide” propaganda narrative seems to have disappeared from social media. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that only 49 individuals out of 4.7 million whites in South Africa took advantage of Trump’s Executive Order granting refugee status to Afrikaners.

Just I predicted in my February article, most Afrikaners (and other white ethnicities) refused to play along with the “white genocide” nonsense. Even Elon Musk’s father and other family members in South Africa could not be persuaded to play along.

*******

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Instead of publishing an article today, I would like you to post any questions you might have about past or current events on the continent of Africa.

Please do not feel like you need to limit yourself to the sub-Saharan area. I am pretty knowledgeable about events in North Africa. After all, I am from Nigeria, which is not that far from Libya. (Gaddafi travelled by road from Libya to Nigeria for a state visit in May 1997).

Long before I started this blog, I wrote for a (now defunct) student magazine, covering internal events in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Libya. I reported on the 2011 Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia and Egypt through the lens of each country’s unique history and contemporary geopolitics.

In 2007, I wrote an article about Libya, covering its history as an Italian colony, an independent kingdom, and finally as a quasi-socialist republic led by the highly mercurial Muammar al-Gaddafi.

Four years later, I reported on the destruction of Libya’s statehood by NATO. In a poignant article written in October 2011, I correctly predicted that NATO weapons air-dropped to the Libyan jihadists— hailed as “pro-democracy freedom fighters” by Euro-American media propagandists— would end up in the hands of other jihadi fighters in the Sahel Belt of West Africa, which shares a common history and a large desert frontier with North Africa.

Present-day Libya is in a complete mess. Its territory is de facto partitioned between two parallel administrative entities claiming to be the “true national government of Libya”.

Eastern and Central Libya is nominally administered by civilian politicians under auspicies of the so-called “Government of National Stability” (GNS). In reality, those eastern and central territories are effectively ruled by GNS-aligned warlord, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a US-Libyan dual citizen and former CIA asset.

Haftar resided in Langley, Virginia, for many years before returning to Benghazi to play a key role in the dismantling of Libya’s statehood in 2011.

Through his strategic control over large swathes of Libya, especially coastal areas overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, Khalifa Haftar has managed to gain the patronage of the Emiratis, the Egyptians and the Russians.

Western Libya— including the capital city of Tripoli— is ruled by a rival administrative authority, which refers to itself as the “Government of National Unity” (GNU). The GNU enjoys the backing of Qatar and Turkey. More importantly, the United Nations recognizes the GNU as the “true national government of Libya”.

Khalifa Haftar’s “Libyan National Army” frequently clashes with a disparate coalition of independent militias loyal to the GNU, which operates under the collective name, the “Libyan Army”.

Contrary to what certain outsiders think, there is no physical line demarcating North Africa from the rest of the continent. Whatever happens in North Africa has a direct impact on sub-Saharan Africa and vice-versa. So, if you have any questions pertaining to any part of Africa, post in the comments section.

Within 72 hours of receiving your questions, I will start responding. Simple questions will be answered exclusively in the comments section. For more complicated questions, I will provide brief answers in the comments section and then address them in greater detail through a long-form essay to be published in the near future.

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PART I: US PROPOSES, NIGERIA REJECTS

Shortly before he imposed visa restrictions on Nigerians visiting USA, President Donald Trump demanded that Nigeria’s Federal Government accept Venezuelan deportees. Nigeria promptly refused the demand despite threats and refused to budge after the Orange Strongman acted on the threats.

Trump has probably heard of the legendary corruption of Nigerian government officials, but it is likely that he has never heard of their pride, their ego and their firm belief that the vast multiethnic federation is indeed the “Giant of Africa”, which should never be pushed around by foreigners, especially ones from thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

It was a pride that another US President, George Walker Bush, grossly underestimated at the beginning of the 2000s. Alarmed at the speed with which Chinese influence was advancing on the continent of Africa, the Bush Administration announced its intention to create the African Military Command (AFRICOM). Shortly after, it began to search for African nations willing to host its headquarters.

Given its strategic position in the petroleum-rich Gulf of Guinea, Nigeria received multiple requests from US government officials for talks on hosting the military headquarters. The requests were all turned down.

When Liberia announced its willingness to host the AFRICOM headquarters, the Nigerian government sent an immediate démarche to the Liberian government, which at the time was reliant on Nigeria’s police and army to maintain law and order within its war-devastated territory.

Nigeria’s position was clear. AFRICOM won’t be allowed to host its headquarters anywhere in West Africa.

This decision was not made because of any “anti-imperialist” sentiments. Nigeria enjoys excellent diplomatic relations with USA. The decision was made because Nigeria’s political establishment sees the country as the regional economic and military hegemon of West Africa and did not want to be overshadowed by the United States in its own neck of the woods. It was hard enough having to deal with the then entrenched presence of France in certain Francophone countries in the subregion.

Of course, Nigeria did not object to Americans bringing small numbers of military advisers to train its armed forces. That would mirror the longstanding cooperation between the Nigerian armed forces and the militaries of India, Pakistan, Egypt and the United Kingdom.

The Indian Army played an immeasurable role in the establishment of Nigeria’s sole military university in 1964. Today, the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), has 2,500 officer cadets in training. These include cadets from other African countries. In addition to officer cadets, the military university also enroll civilian students into its BSc, MSc and PhD degree programmes.

Nigeria also has longstanding military ties with Pakistan, which goes back to the 1960s. In recent years, Nigerian Navy sailors underwent training in Pakistan on how to use Chinese-made submarines. The Nigerian Navy has plans to buy submarines from China and want its personnel to benefit from Pakistan Navy’s experience using them.

Recently, the Nigerian Army signed a training and cooperation agreement with China’s Peoples Liberation Army.

Nigeria also has a military training scheme with USA as shown in the photograph above. However, the US government intensely dislikes the straitjacket terms that comes with such schemes.

The United States prefers the freedom of geopolitical manoeuvre that ownership of military bases in foreign countries gives it. Therefore, the pressure on Nigeria to grant military bases never stopped, even after the Bush Administration ceased to exist on 20 January 2009.

In 2012, the Obama Administration asked Nigeria to send troops to Somalia to fight Al-Shabaab terrorists. This was promptly rejected as Nigeria had no security interests in Somalia beyond making sure that its commercial ships are not hijacked by seafaring pirates. But that same year, Nigeria organized for ECOWAS troops to intervene in Guinea-Bissau where it has real regional security interests.

In 2015, President Obama renewed the longstanding campaign of the United States to gain a military base on Nigerian soil. Following the menace of Boko Haram terrorists, the Obama Administration repeatedly made offers to send US troops to “help Nigeria fight the terrorists”.

The Nigerian government politely rejected the offer, but requested American-made weapons for Nigerian troops fighting the terrorists. The Obama Administration denied the request, citing the usual memetic allegations of “human rights abuses”.

The US troops meant for Nigeria eventually went to neighbouring Niger Republic, which had granted the Americans the desired military bases in 2012. Nigeria did not express any objections to the US move as Niger has always had large contingents of foreign soldiers (i.e. French troops) on its territory ever since France conjured it into existence in 1880.

Almost a decade after President Obama sent them there, US troops would be asked to leave those bases by a military junta composed almost entirely of US-trained Niger army officers.

PART II: DIGRESSION INTO NIGER REPUBLIC

Contrary to what many believe, the Americans were not asked to leave because of any “anti-imperialist” sentiment on the part of the Niger junta. All the “anti-imperialist” rage was focussed exclusively on France. The French Ambassador was kicked out. The expulsion of 1, 500 French troops and the closure of their military base followed later.

After the 2023 coup d’etat, the Biden Administration imposed economic sanctions, froze 200 million dollars in donor aid and repeatedly called on the Niger military junta to disband. Despite all of that, junta officials persisted in making friendly gestures towards the Americans until policy-makers within the Biden Administration finally shot themselves in both kneecaps.

The State Department announced that 1,100 US troops stationed in Niger would halt military cooperation on grounds that the junta was “secretly” planning to sell uranium to Iran and import Russian mercenaries. The first allegation was false. The second allegation was true.

After the Biden Administration declared that American troops stationed in Niger would no longer cooperate with local authorities, the junta had no choice but to revoke the United States-Niger Military Cooperation Agreement signed in 2012.

As explained in an interesting Newsweek article, American troops stationed in Niger Republic idled away for months inside their military bases, leaving Niger soldiers to battle alone against jihadi terrorists rampaging across the land.

The token civilian official in the military junta, Mr. Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine, blamed the Biden Administration for destroying Niger’s military partnership with United States.

In an exclusive interview with the Washington Post, published on 14 May 2024, Mr. Lamine confirmed that US troops refused to help the junta in its fight against jihadi insurgents:

“ The Americans stayed on our soil, doing nothing while the terrorists killed people and burned towns. It is not a sign of friendship to come on our soil but let the terrorists attack us. We have seen what the United States will do to defend its allies, because we have seen Ukraine and Israel.”

In other words, the junta’s decision to cancel the USA-Niger Military Cooperation Agreement was not influenced by any principled “anti-imperialist” ideology, but by simple common sense. If foreign military troops in your country are no longer willing to cooperate with you, then it is only logical to ask them to leave.

Despite the cancellation of the military cooperation agreeement, the Niger junta remained largely on friendly terms with the United States. Unlike her French counterpart, US Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon did not face expulsion. Rather than impose an arbitrary deadline, the junta negotiated with the Biden Administration to find a mutually convenient date for the withdrawal of US troops.

When it was announced that Russia’s Wagner mercenaries-turned- government paramilitary troops (Afrika Korps) would begin to arrive in Niger Republic, the Americans threw a tantrum.

The Biden Administration sent a Pentagon official to Niamey to state categorically that US troops would not share quarters with the advance party of 60 Russian fighters. Defiant, but polite, Niger junta officials informed the visiting Pentagon official that the Russians would be accomodated in one of the two military bases occupied by the US troops.

When personnel of Russia’s Afrika Korps began to arrive in Niger Republic, a humiliated Biden Administration hurriedly relocated some US troops in Air Base 101 in Niamey to Air Base 201 in the city of Agadez. The move was aimed at reducing contact between US troops and the newly arrived Russians.

Nevertheless, the remaining US troops in Air Base 101 cohabited with Russia’s Afrika Korps, much to the horror of numerous US politicians and their mainstream media toadies.

In response to uproar within the United States, the Secretary of Defence at the time, General Lloyd Austin, held a press conference in Hawaii to alleviate the worries of anxious mainstream media propagandists. He assured them:

“The Russians are in a separate compound and don't have access to U.S. forces or access to our equipment.”

Indeed, the former Wagner mercenaries—renamed “Afrika Korps” after coming under proper Russian Defence Ministry control—did not mingle with US troops in Niger. The Russian paramilitary fighters were housed in a separate hangar inside the same air base.

Niger junta’s cancellation of the military cooperation agreement was helpful to Kurt Campbell in the factional war raging inside the Biden Adminstration over whether USA should prioritize Asia above all else or continue its current strategy of spreading its military presence thin across the globe.

As National Security Council Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, Kurt Campbell favoured prioritizing Asia above all else. On this contentious topic, Kurt Campbell clashed regularly with Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who preferred the longstanding policy of spreading her country’s armed forces thin across the globe.

After the retirement of Wendy Sherman as United States Deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland was given the job, but only in an acting capacity.

Vicky believed that she would eventually retain the job in a substantive capacity. However, President Biden humiliated her by giving the position to Kurt Campbell. In protest, Vicky resigned from her Under-Secretary role.

Within one month of becoming Deputy Secretary of State, Kurt Campbell accelerated efforts to get US troops out of Niger Republic.

He travelled to Niamey and reached a mutual agreement with the Niger junta to withdraw American troops gradually, starting from July 2024 and ending on 15 September 2024.

To show there were no hard feelings, the junta and the Pentagon signed a joint communique, affirming their commitment to maintaining good relations after US troops had pulled out by the mutually agreed deadline.

The joint communique signed by junta official, Salifou Mody, and US Assistant Secretary of Defence, Christopher Maier, is available below:

In July 2024, US troops pulled out completely from Air Base 101. Unlike the unceremonious expulsion of French troops, the Niger junta held a ceremony for the departing US troops, which was attended by Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon, as shown in the video:

Video showing an US military officer signing documents handing Airbase 101 in Niamey to a representative of the Niger junta:

Before their departure, US troops gave their Niger counterparts a guided tour of the Air Base 101, as shown in the videos below:

Finally, US troops loaded their equipment into a transport plane bound for North America. 600 US troops departed, leaving 500 behind.

Note that the videos depict the handover of Air Base 101 in Niamey back in July 2024. The Americans had a mutual agreement with Niger to handover Air Base 201 on 15 September 2024.

Kurt Campbell did not wait for that date. Under his direction, the remaining 500 US troops left Niger Republic on 5 August 2025, more than a month ahead of schedule.

Before their departure, the American troops attended another ceremony organized by the Niger junta to celebrate the handover of Air Base 201, which the Obama Administration had built in Agadez city at the cost of 100 million dollars to US taxpayers.

It goes without saying that Russia’s Afrika Korps inherited both former US air bases at little or no expense to the Kremlin.

PART III: TRUMP’S AFRICAN DUMPING SITES

Cancellation of visas issued to Nigerians intending to visit the United States did not move the needle. So, the Orange Strongman threatened to raise US tariff rates beyond the current 15% imposed on 2 April 2025.

The Nigerian government remained steadfast in its refusal to accept any migrant deportees.

During a Nigerian TV interview, Foreign Affairs Minister Yusuf Tugga stated that the vast multiethnic federation already had 230 million citizens and was not keen on adding 300 Venezuelans deported from US Prisons to the Nigerian population.

In the brief video excerpt from the interview, the Foreign Minister even referenced Flavor Flav from the US hip-hop group Public Enemy to illustrate Nigeria’s rejection of Trump’s request :

After threats failed to change Nigeria’s position, President Trump started exploring other options in Africa for his deportees.

It didn’t take long for him to secure agreements with five African countries eager to do whatever the Trump Administration wanted in the hope of securing trade deals or cash payment from the United States.

The countries that agreed to the serve as dumping ground for Trump’s deportees are: Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, South Sudan and Swaziland. The first two countries on the list already have a history of accepting unwanted foreigners being removed from the United States.

[a] Rwanda

Despite its poverty, post-genocide Rwanda is one of the best run countries on the continent of Africa. Corruption is extremely low; the local police force is professional; there is a national health insurance scheme; and the cities and towns are kept clean.

The Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF) is arguably the most battle-hardened fighting force on the African continent. The deployment of Rwandan expeditionary troops to Portuguese-speaking Mozambique has had the immediate effect of turning the tide against an Islamist insurgency raging in Carbo Delgado Province, where Mozambique’s natural gas fields are located.

As a result of the activities of ISIS-linked jihadists, construction work on some of the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) facilities had to be suspended. After the Mozambican Armed Forces folded like a lawn chair in the face of Islamist firepower, the government of Mozambique sought external help.

A series of European and white South African mercenary groups were hired, but the Islamist rebels kept advancing until Rwandan expeditionary troops were deployed. Under Rwandan firepower, the Mozambican jihadi rebels began to retreat, much to the joy of the locals and the embarassment of the Mozambican armed forces.

RDF miliary successes stems from the fact that many of its retired and serving personnel had gained experience fighting in several wars, including the Mozambican War of Independence (1964-1974), Uganda-Tanzania War (1978-1979), Ugandan Bush War (1980-1986), Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994), First Congo War (1996–1997), Second Congo War (1998-2003) and the Eastern Congo offensive (2009).

Many senior officers in the Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) had grown up in the refugee camps of neighbouring Uganda following the flight of their parents to escape the massacre of Tutsis during the Rwandan Revolution (1959-1961) that presaged the creation of the Rwandan republic.

Like many male Tutsi refugees living in Uganda, Paul Kagame and his close friend, Fred Rwigyema, ended up fighting in Uganda’s wars. Rwigyema had prior experience fighting Portuguese colonial soldiers in Mozambique before he intervened in Uganda’s wars.

Despite their foreign origins, both Tutsis rose to become senior officers in Uganda’s armed forces. For a time, Paul Kagame was the director of Ugandan Military Intelligence while the now deceased Fred Rwigyema was Uganda’s Deputy Defence Minister.