Russia has made a generous offer to Africa with its grain. Though that is a good start, it is only half the work. Although Field Marshall Rommel’s Afrika Korps gained a reputation for fighting a “war without hate”, NATO’s Afrika Korps can claim no such garland as Niger shows they are the scum of the…
Fleet-footed agility and sharp thinking rarely characterise the plodding bureaucrat. An argument can be made that different attributes are prized: cherished incompetence, spells of inattentiveness, and dedication to keeping things secret with severity. What matters is not what you did, but what you pretended to do. Even with maintaining secrecy, the plodding desk-job hack can…
The economic situation in Mali is now undesirable: food prices have roughly doubled in a year – for example, if in 2022 one of the staple foods, “Tuo Zaafi (Tuo)” (African millet), cost 4,000 CFA francs per kilogram (which is also a lot, about the same as 400 RUB), it is now double that price….
Mali declared a ban this week on the activities of non-governmental organizations within the country that receive funding from France. The move came in the wake of France’s decision to withdraw development aid to the country as its final troops pull out of the Sahel region, marking the end of the eight-year Operation Barkhane. What started…
The unmistakable trend is that French influence across its former African colonies is fast disappearing, with this process paradoxically accelerated by the inadvertent consequences of its desperate efforts to stop all of this. The more that Paris pushes back against multipolarity, the more that everything speeds up at the expense of that declining neo-colonial hegemon’s…
With Africa having emerged as among the hottest proxy battlegrounds in the New Cold War’s struggle for the future of International Relations, it’ll require Russia’s “Democratic Security” services more than ever to succeed. The US-led West’s Golden Billion is fearful that the latest military coup in the landlocked former French colony of Burkina Faso will…
