THE AMBROSE EHIRIM FILES

The Secret Dinners Of Cold War Journalism

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:35:07 +0000

How invitation-only reporting took root in Washington’s press corps.

BY KATHRYN J. MCGARR

Last October, Pete Hegseth, known as the secretary of war, attempted to ban all reporters credentialed to the Pentagon who would not sign a pledge to write exactly what the Trump administration wanted. Around forty reporters walked out in protest rather than sign; their access to the building is now the subject of a prolonged legal dispute. Across the administration, we’ve seen officials blatantly play favorites in giving access to sources and information. While the flagrancy is new, controlled access has a history. The idea of certain reporters having privileged access has persisted since World War II, when an informal system of invitation-only information sessions became commonplace in United States military and diplomatic journalism. These meetings were chummy events over dinner, where information shared by officials was either off the record or not for attribution. Reporters at these dinners—all white, all men, all from mainstream news outlets—then got to set the boundaries of what they would (and would not) report to the public in their newspapers.

Invitation-only reporting based around private dinners became one of the most important journalistic conventions of mid-twentieth-century Washington, one that forged an uneasy alliance between reporters and the subjects they covered. As one reporter and attendee recalled decades later, of the dinners, “This was then really a new technique, but naturally we bent to it because we couldn’t escape it.”

The dinners began in a systematic way in November of 1942, in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. There were rumors that top men in the Army and Navy were not getting along, bringing bad publicity to the commanders. A well-connected civilian friend of Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations, invited several reporters to his home in Alexandria, Virginia, for dinner and conversation. Reporters warmed to King after seeing him in this more relaxed social setting. A columnist for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain wrote in his diary that week, “Contrary to previous impression and what I have read, King was not taciturn or difficult but very friendly and appeared to thoroughly enjoy evening.” About a week later, the New York Herald Tribune had a front-page story, written by another of the dinner attendees, that claimed the Army and Navy were getting along just fine. Nothing to see here.

Officials began having even more invitation-only background sessions in both the White House and the newly built Pentagon. Reporters began to tolerate a private conversation about the war happening within Washington and a different, public-facing conversation being written in the newspapers. When reporters were included in top-secret briefings and exclusive social gatherings, they gained status in their papers. Editors and publishers who ran newspapers all over the US liked getting confidential memos labeled “top secret” from their Washington-based reporters, which helped them feel like insiders.

Washington was already such a clubby town—white men of the press enjoyed the National Press Club, the Gridiron Club, and the White House Correspondents’ Association (which allowed women, but not at the annual dinner), among many others—that these semiofficial dinner groups would have seemed like a natural extension. However, from the beginning, some reporters complained to one another and to editors about stories based on information from the dinners being “plants,” with officials using them to get favorable publicity.

The dinners became part of a larger pattern of increased secrecy around sensitive wartime information. At the time, some of the biggest names in the press, including the syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann and the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, Arthur Krock, fretted over the ethics of what they called “pipeline journalism”—certain sources having direct pipelines to certain journalists. Krock, for one, was livid after being excluded from a private briefing. “One hardly can attend them, receive inside information or background, not given to others, and write critically or detachedly of the man who gives the background and who is the host,” he wrote to Lippmann. “The whole business is repugnant to me, as I am sure it is to you. I think it is degrading to permit oneself to be so transparently used,” Krock continued, in his typical caustic tone. Still they could not risk being the only reporters to miss out on potentially newsworthy information.

Quickly Lippmann—and later Krock—got himself invited to the private dinners with King, which the journalists eventually took over hosting. Once the war had ended, these men threw a celebratory dinner for King at the Statler Hotel. The men came from newspapers, magazines, and radio, including the New York Sun, the Washington Post, Newsweek, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, ABC, and CBS. Everyone enjoyed a fancy meal—lamb chops featuring pineapple slices and béarnaise sauce—on their publisher’s dime. They called themselves the “Surviving Veterans of the Battle of Virginia.”

After World War II, these “dope” sessions, as some reporters called them, became routine for all sensitive reporting, especially military and diplomatic, with reporters hosting the guests of honor (sources) at hotels and splitting the bill between their employers. The background rule—under which the information that officials shared was either off the record (couldn’t be used at all) or not for attribution (couldn’t be traced back to the source)—became known as the Lindley Rule, named after one of the regular organizers, Ernest Lindley, a writer for Newsweek. Newsmen policed each other. The chief correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reassured his editor back home that confidential information was safe: “In our own little group which has off-the-record sessions with top officials we drop from the list any person who approaches the breaking of a confidence.”

These dinners (and sometimes lunches) continued on through the most high-stakes moments of the Cold War era. On April 6, 1953, in the middle of US involvement in the Korean War, John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, met with about twenty diplomatic reporters in a private dining room at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC.

The newsmen, all from major mainstream outlets, chatted informally during preliminary drinks and ate a dinner of steak and strawberry ice cream at one long table. They then took turns asking Dulles questions on background. The first: What did Dulles think of the new Russian “peace offensive”? Soviet premier Joseph Stalin had died one month earlier, and his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had launched an effort to ease tensions with the US. Dulles answered that it was probably a “trick or a tactic.” But by the end of the long evening, he had changed his position, saying he felt there was “new Russian friendliness” for which the two-month-old Eisenhower administration should get “90 percent” credit.

In the middle of the meandering, hours-long conversation, while talking about NATO, Dulles mentioned almost off-handedly that if the Soviet Union really wanted to take over Europe, there was probably nothing that could stop it. This was potentially explosive, and as one of the newspaper reporters wrote afterward in his personal notes, it was “agreed informally afterwards among the newspaper men present” that they shouldn’t “rush into print with much of this stuff.” A New York Times reporter wrote to his editor that, “out of a sense of responsibility for national security,” they decided not to publish the bit about an unstoppable Soviet Union “when so much peace talk was in the air.”

By handpicking the “responsible reporters,” white male journalists cut off access to anyone believed to be untrustworthy, in particular women reporters, Black reporters of any sex, and those outside the political mainstream (e.g., communists and socialists).

Many reporters worked outside the private sessions, by choice or by circumstance, which allowed them to be more critical of the US and the Cold War. Some, like Sarah McClendon, who ran her own news service in the Southwest, and Ethel Payne, who worked for the Chicago Defender, simply were not invited on the basis of sex, race, or both. The leftist I.F. Stone opted out entirely, writing for his own I.F. Stone’s Weekly and relying on public documents, such as transcripts of congressional hearings, to support his trenchant critiques.

Detachment is not necessarily a virtue in journalism, but it is in political reporting, where the primary goal is to hold the government to account. Journalists who prioritize source relationships above all else have incentive not to stray too far from dominant narratives.

At times, the controversy over the dinners did spill out into public view. In one episode in 1955, reporters mistakenly reported that the Eisenhower administration believed war with China was imminent. These reports came from dinner with the hawkish Admiral Robert Carney, the chief of naval operations, but because of the Lindley Rule, reporters could not attribute the information directly to him. Instead, the vagueness made it seem as if everyone in the administration shared Carney’s beliefs. The White House had to deny it. After the incident, Eisenhower gave Carney what a reporter in the New Republic called a “public spanking” for having said anything so controversial. Reporters, editors, and publishers sent a flurry of memos to one another trying to figure out where the background system could have gone wrong.

A reporter from the New York Daily News, who had not been invited, enraged Eisenhower at a press briefing by asking: “Mr. President, are we going to have to invite your aides out to lunch or dinner in order to get the news?”

The Carney incident had been so public that reporters then had to be publicly self-critical. But they also knew that the status quo would be hard to change. Robert Riggs, the Washington bureau chief for the Louisville Courier-Journal, concluded in an April 1955 New Republic article: “Despite the fate that overtook Admiral Carney, nothing so mutually advantageous as the Washington ‘private briefing’ will be allowed to die.” He was right, and invitation-only briefings continue to this day.

During the Cold War, the overall effect was pro-administration reporting on the most important issues of the day, including that the war in what was then referred to as Indochina, for example, was going well. That the US was the leader of the “Free World,” and the communists were enslaved. That the US must spread democracy.

Reporters were cautious about not upsetting norms that the Americans were the “good guys” and that capitalism was the only acceptable system. To this day, we speak of a Cold War consensus when, as I show in City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington, there was never more than an appearance of consensus. “The inclination to err on the side of the administration is ever present,” one reporter wrote in a 1953 letter to a historian. He admitted that he could never write exactly what he thought, or he wouldn’t have an audience: “The events as I, and I think most of my colleagues see them, sometimes run counter to the current of American folklore.”

ver the years, journalists at private dinners decided among themselves the most responsible way to report everything from the 1954 CIA-backed coup in Guatemala to the early US involvement in Vietnam. One of the most critical stories about the US to come out of the Vietnam War was by Seymour Hersh, a freelancer at the time he investigated the My Lai massacre; initially, the only outlet to publish his work was an anti-war newswire.

The holes in American folklore grew more obvious in the Vietnam era. But pressure to support the dominant, government-led narrative never truly abated. Too many journalists accepted the administration’s claims in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq War. As Hersh told Jared Malsin in a 2015 interview in this journal, the problem when “it’s all about access” is that “in effect—not everybody, but too many reporters—they could trade, I could almost argue, their integrity for the access. Their curiosity, let’s put it in an easier way.”

Journalists working together do have some control over what kind of information economy they want to exist in. In October of 2025, when those dozens of journalists walked out of the Pentagon, they chose integrity over access in an important and public way. They left together—as a group—and their news outlets supported them. (In March of 2026, a federal judge ruled that the Defense Department had violated the First and Fifth Amendments.) Reporters built the system from which there seemed to be no escape. Maybe they can unbuild it.

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One Health In A Fractured World: Why Global Health Governance Must Adapt To Geopolitical Fragmentation

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:18:17 +0000

BY CLAIRE J. STANDLEY AND ERIN M. SORRELL

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in global health systems and underscored how interconnected drivers such as changes in land usage, urbanization, and climate amplify zoonotic disease threats. One Health, an integrated approach linking human, animal, and ecosystem health, has gained institutional traction via global governance approaches, yet faces persistent structural challenges, including siloed mandates, funding misalignment, and limited enforcement. We argue for pragmatic, polycentric governance—local leadership supported by regional mini-lateral coalitions and existing bi- and multilateral regimes—to operationalize One Health sustainably and equitably.

Introduction

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the weaknesses of global health systems to infectious diseases. However, less recognized was how the emergence of this novel virus highlighted the global changes converging to heighten outbreak risks: increased human-animal contact and agricultural intensification, accelerated population growth and urbanization, and changing weather and climatic patterns. These dynamics are playing out repeatedly, from the devastation to the poultry industry—where migratory birds and marine mammals suffer from rampant H5N1 influenza—to surges in mosquito-borne virus infections like chikungunya and Oropouche across the Americas. While these examples demonstrate that health threats are increasingly transboundary, global governance mechanisms are at risk of fragmentation amid political instability and declining trust in multilateral institutions. This article argues that given current geopolitical fragmentation, One Health governance must evolve from idealistic coordination, toward pragmatic, resilient, and multi-level cooperation.

What is One Health?

The term “One Health” first emerged in the early 21st century due to growing scientific recognition that infectious diseases of wildlife and livestock could negatively impact humans, and vice versa. Since then, the most widely adopted definition is that of the One Health High Level Expert Panel:

“One Health is an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals, and ecosystems.”

Early origins of One Health focused on operational collaboration to contain specific infectious disease outbreaks. Yet, the field has grown considerably, benefitting from formalized, interdisciplinary frameworks and governance systems. The most prominent of these is the Quadripartite, established in 2010 between the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH; formerly OIE), and subsequently joined by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2022. The Quadripartite led the development of the One Health Joint Plan of Action (2022-2026) (OHJPA), providing a blueprint for how these organizations would coordinate to sustainably advance One Health collaboration and implementation, prevent pandemics, and contribute to enhancing resilient health systems.

Since its inception, the Quadripartite has successfully raised the profile of One Health, earning commitments from the G7, G20 and numerous individual countries to adopt the approach in addressing global health threats, particularly for pandemic preparedness and response. The establishment of the One Health High-Level Expert Panel brought geographically and culturally diverse interdisciplinary expertise to the Quadripartite, facilitating better navigation of policy processes and anticipation of implementation barriers. Workshops in different WHO regions further advocated for adoption of One Health strategies, enhanced regional and national coordination, and resulted in the creation of country roadmaps. Yet ultimately, such efforts are limited by the resources of the Quadripartite and critically rely on national ownership, financing mechanisms, and momentum to move from strategy to operationalization.

Intrinsic Challenges with One Health Governance

The effort to coordinate sectors with responsibilities in One Health policy and implementation may appear straightforward in theory, but faces persistent structural problems as well as legal and normative weaknesses in practice.

While broad support for One Health exists across the various sectors involved, they often operate with different mandates, budgets, and data systems, making coordination difficult or ad hoc rather than automatic. Though these operational difficulties are being addressed in some settings through multisectoral national and regional strategies, integration is unlikely to ever be fully equitable. One Health has traditionally been promoted with a human health focus by the Global North, marginalizing local and Indigenous knowledge of the cultural and environmental drivers of emergence. This imbalance is mirrored in funding: expecting the environment, veterinary, and agriculture sectors to contribute personnel, knowledge, and consumables to a human health-centric preparedness and response cycle—without acknowledging fundamental discrepancies in resources and mandates—will not resolve the problem.

Government funding is also often reactive—focused on crisis response—whereas One Health approaches to epidemic preparedness depend on sustained investment in prevention. It promotes monitoring ecosystems, conducting surveillance across animal reservoirs, and detecting early spillover. While One Health encompasses far more than just infectious diseases, this remains its most widely applied use case and the one that has gained the most political traction to date. As such, it has become difficult to advocate for One Health multisectoral funding without a looming global health security threat, resulting in trade-offs between sectors.

Finally, One Health as a global initiative lacks a central governing body with real power. While WHO, WOAH, UNEP, and FAO collaborate via the Quadripartite, no one organization can enforce policy across sectors or countries. Similarly, although OHJPA provides a comprehensive framework for advancing One Health and offers technical assistance to support national implementation targets, its initiatives are non-binding and completely voluntary.

The Added Negative Impact of Global Fragmentation

Global fragmentation is increasingly undermining One Health governance. The shift away from Pax Americana and a US-led world order towards a multipolar system has eroded trust in multilateral institutions, including those of the Quadripartite. The WHO has been most dramatically affected, with the US withdrawal prompting a comprehensive review of its core functions and strategic streamlining in response to new fiscal constraints. There have been knock-on effects across other global bodies: the US presidency of the Group of Twenty (G20) in 2026 has refocused its efforts towards economic growth and prosperity, moving away from prior high-level priorities—such as the Sustainable Development Goals (South Africa) and renewable energy (Brazil)—that were more closely aligned with One Health objectives.

This geopolitical fragmentation has been shaped by the prioritization of national interests, the politicization of global health, and international conflicts. Vaccine nationalism during COVID-19, whereby high-income countries disproportionately over-purchased limited supplies of life-saving vaccines, hampered efforts of multilateral initiatives to provide vaccines to countries unable to afford them directly from pharmaceutical companies, further demonstrating the limitations of global cooperation when it is most needed. The politicization of the origins of the pandemic not only directly influenced the US decision to withdraw from the WHO, but also cast a pall over scientific efforts related to zoonotic diseases. Global health and foreign assistance budgets are easy targets in this period of fragmentation when defense budgets are on the rise, as was the case when NATO members agreed to increase their defense spending to support Ukraine. While defense stakeholders increasingly recognize the value of a One Health approach, their integration into One Health governance needs careful consideration.

Rethinking One Health Governance: From Idealism to Pragmatism

Moving from idealism to pragmatism requires confronting structural, political, and operational realities. One Health, at its core, is aspirational, requiring efficient collaboration, shared priorities, and sustained funding across a variety of sectors. The stark reality is that international governance systems are, as aforementioned, fragmented and unlikely to be sufficient; a polycentric model provides an alternative approach. Referred to as polycentric governance, this model involves systems in which authority is distributed across levels rather than centralized. Each center operates semi-independently, interacting through cooperation, competition, and coordination, while adapting to local contexts and contributing to broader system goals.

For One Health, centers of authority span communities, governments, and international organizations. The approach emphasizes local actors taking the lead, with higher levels providing support and coordination, leveraging existing and functional structures rather than creating new ones. Local communities are on the front lines of spillover—they are often the first to observe emerging risks but may lack the necessary resources to report these events or respond effectively. Governments are the seat of policy and regulation, housing national surveillance systems and allocating budgets for preparedness and response, but, as noted earlier, lack of coordination and siloed reporting systems prevent effective response. Thus, intergovernmental organizations such as the African Union or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can come into play and facilitate coordination between borders. For example, the African Union has a One Health Data Alliance Africa Project, which seeks to “enhance digitalized One Health governance” across the continent. As such, polycentric governance does not replace centralized authority, rather it complements it through a “system of systems.”

One Health events often require decisive action at local or regional levels without waiting for global alignment. Mini-lateral cooperation—small coalitions of middle-powered willing states—help narrow the focus on polycentric governance. It can translate One Health from broad visions into tangible outcomes. Cooperation like this can prove to be quite effective, as One Health challenges are typically geographically and ecologically focused, making global agreements inefficient. Mini-lateral groups are politically aligned sufficiently to cooperate effectively and capable of acting quickly on a shared problem, focusing on specific outcomes rather than broad mandates. One Health mini-lateralism can therefore leverage a variety of platforms including regional networks that share cross-border surveillance data, functional coalitions established for specific technical issues like vaccine research and development, antimicrobial resistance monitoring or climate-health data sharing, or public-private partnerships linking policy to operational action. One example is the newly launched WOAH-PREZODE Working Group, which is convening experts across diverse One Health fields to bridge gaps between scientific evidence and policy formulation. While not automatically resolving the structural challenges highlighted above, such efforts provide stronger opportunities to set shared objectives that rebalance sectoral inequities and prioritize local knowledge while supporting regional priorities.

When pursuing intergovernmental cooperation on One Health—be it at the mini-lateral or multilateral level) —rather than creating new frameworks or initiating new agreements, a more effective strategy may be to mainstream One Health into existing regimes that have authority, financing, and compliance mechanisms, notably climate, trade, and pandemic governance. The goal, then, is to incorporate human–animal–ecosystems linkages where decisions are already being made. Climate agreements and trade frameworks provide clear future opportunities to integrate One Health principles. However, lessons from the 2025 Pandemic Treaty should be taken to heart: while One Health was formally recognized in the Treaty as central to pandemic preparedness, important points related to implementation and funding, especially for lower- and middle-income countries, were pushed to subsequent deliberations and left unanswered.

Finally, these examples underscore the importance of aligning incentives for One Health, both between participating sectors and across levels of polycentric governance. As major powers pivot to bilateral approaches to foreign assistance and health funding, countries must react by identifying areas of convergence with One Health structures and programs. Mini-lateral coalitions can expand through inclusion of emerging economies—providing opportunities to center new voices and advance equity—as well as through the engagement of non-governmental actors: philanthropic entities, industry, and civil society organizations can all play important roles and, in turn, benefit from greater One Health integration.

Conclusion

Experts suggest that there is approximately a 50/50 chance of another deadly pandemic before 2050, and the likelihood is that it will be zoonotic in origin. While the benefits of One Health encompass far more than infectious diseases, the reality is that pandemic preparedness offers a critical incentive for the levels of political and operational commitment needed for establishing sustainable and effective One Health governance. Though some may argue that geopolitical fragmentation makes cooperation needed for a global One Health approach unrealistic, we suggest that flexible, networked governance can replace, and even outperform, simplistic visions of top-down oversight. Global change is accelerating biological and environmental risks faster than our current systems can respond: One Health is the only framework designed to manage these interconnected threats. With appropriate and effective governance to guide implementation, it can provide practical, risk-reducing strategies to strengthen ecosystem health, support productive economies, and bolster national and regional security.

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When Global Trade Becomes A Weapon, How Can African Economies Protect Themselves?

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:13:17 +0000

BY JONATHAN MUNEMO

PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS,

SALISBURY UNIVERSITY

“Today, everyone recognises that trade is as much a security issue as an economic one.”

European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde made this comment in February 2026, while addressing the Munich Security Conference.

Although she was speaking about Europe, her words matter profoundly for Africa.

The continent’s 54 economies face a three-way tension that has no easy resolution.

Firstly, they must stay integrated enough with the world economy to grow. Secondly, they must pull back enough to protect themselves economically against the deliberate weaponisation of external dependencies. Weaponised interdependence is the use of a country’s position within global economic and technological networks as a tool of political influence or coercion against other countries. And thirdly they must remain open enough to diversify beyond commodities – which account for more than 60% of total merchandise exports in 45 African countries – if they are to build lasting prosperity and reduce their vulnerability to commodity price shocks.

As an economist who studies African trade and development, I don’t believe the answer to weaponised interdependence is retreating from the global economy. The real challenge for Africa is navigating this tension between interdependence, economic security, and diversification rather than simply choosing one objective and abandoning the rest. This will be one of the continent’s most important policy tests in the years ahead.

How interdependence became a weapon

To see why this tension is so difficult to navigate, it helps to understand what has changed. When the world economy was governed by shared rules and norms from the 1990s to the 2010s, deeper economic integration had some benefits. Countries that plugged into global supply chains and attracted foreign capital grew faster. Interdependence was an asset.

That is no longer the case. We have entered a new era that is being shaped by the deliberate use of chokepoints – economic and geographic areas that underpin the interdependent global economy – as instruments of coercion. In 2025, China imposed sweeping export controls on rare-earth elements, inflicting pain on importing countries deeply integrated with its mineral supply chains. The United States has repeatedly deployed the dollar and advanced semiconductor technology as weapons against adversaries.

The consequences can be sudden and severe. In early 2026, Iran disrupted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz – the world’s most important geographic chokepoint, carrying roughly 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas on any given day, with no alternative routes.

African countries, including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda – each sourcing more than half their petroleum imports from the Middle East – faced an immediate and unexpected surge in energy costs. Their fiscal positions were ill-equipped to absorb it.

Fertilizer and food prices followed. Financial markets roiled and remittances from diaspora workers in the Gulf region to highly dependent economies such as the Comoros, Gambia, Lesotho and Liberia fell sharply.

The timing was particularly painful. Africa had just achieved its fastest growth in a decade – 4.5% in 2025, according to the IMF. The World Bank has revised this down to projected regional growth of 4.1% in 2026.

Today, the world that made integration so attractive is now vulnerable to deliberate weaponisation by external actors pursuing geopolitical objectives.

The three-way tension, unpacked

The tempting response to weaponised interdependence is to reduce it. Yet history shows that retreating from economic integration can be costly. The protectionist wave of the 1930s – when countries raised trade barriers and turned inward – contributed to the collapse of global trade and deepened the Great Depression.

Integration is not merely a risk. It is a source of the prosperity that makes resilience worth building in the first place.

The World Bank projects that non-resource-rich African countries will have per capita incomes nearly 20% above their 2014 levels by 2026. Abandoning engagement to reduce vulnerability would mean sacrificing the growth needed for long term stability and economic security.

Worse, if African countries attempt to reduce their vulnerability independently, their exits from shared global markets lower the value of these markets for those who remain. That encourages further exits, in a self-reinforcing spiral. This dynamic is already playing out in other countries. US “Buy American” policies have prompted the EU to advance similar “Buy European” measures. Economists call this the “fragmentation doom loop”.

In addition, building alternative supply chains domestically is costly for exiting countries. Replacing established international production networks requires significant investment and can raise costs for businesses and consumers. The IMF has warned fragmentation would reduce incomes and everyone ends up worse off.

Diversification and economic security also pull against each other. Economic diversification would involve shifting African economies away from commodity extraction towards a broader private sector, and spreading trade relationships across multiple partners. It is essential both for long-term prosperity and for reducing exposure to commodity price shocks.

For example, Rwanda and Côte d'Ivoire, which diversified away from commodity dependence, are projected to have per capita incomes more than 45% above their 2014 levels by 2026.

By contrast, Angola and the Republic of Congo, which remained heavily dependent on oil exports, are projected to have per capita incomes more than 25% below their 2014 levels. They have still not recovered a decade after oil prices collapsed.

Natural resources alone generate around 62% of Africa’s GDP, according to the African Development Bank. Moving beyond that concentration requires both diversification and deeper integration which provides access to foreign investment, technology transfer and larger markets.

But deeper integration is precisely what creates the vulnerabilities that great powers have learned to exploit. The US-China rivalry and the Iran crisis have made this plain. The goal of diversification cannot be pursued without the openness that creates security risks. This is a genuine structural tension that policy must navigate.

Strategies for managing the three-way tension

The resolution of these tensions does not lie in choosing one objective and abandoning the others. Three strategies, pursued in combination, can advance all three goals at once.

Pursue security collectively, not unilaterally. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the continent’s most important instrument for avoiding the fragmentation doom loop. An integrated continental market of 1.4 billion people:

creates the scale needed to attract diversified foreign investment

gives African countries the collective bargaining power to negotiate with great powers from a position of greater strength

enables the development of intra-African supply chains that reduce dependence on external actors, without sacrificing the gains of integration.

In the current environment, the AfCFTA is no longer primarily a trade liberalisation project. It is a security strategy.

Make partner diversification targeted. Not all trade relationships carry equal risk. The goal is to engage more strategically in the global economy by expanding trade and investment ties across a broader range of partners, particularly in sectors where multiple suppliers and markets exist. This reduces dependence on any single country and limits the ability of one partner to use economic ties as a source of leverage.

Build indispensability in critical supply chains. The most durable form of economic security is not reducing dependence on others – it is ensuring that others depend on you. Africa holds genuine chokepoint positions in several minerals critical to clean energy technology. Here are some examples.

The Democratic Republic of Congo accounts for roughly 65% of global cobalt production. South Africa dominates platinum-group metals. Guinea holds the world’s largest bauxite reserves. Zambia is a major copper producer and Zimbabwe is one of the world’s largest lithium producers.

The indispensability strategy means building on this: processing cobalt in the DRC rather than exporting raw ore, developing platinum beneficiation in South Africa, and building battery supply chain infrastructure around existing mineral wealth.

Done well, this simultaneously advances diversification (moving up the value chain, away from raw commodity exports), strengthens security (creating dependencies that deter coercion), and deepens integration on Africa’s own terms.

The Hormuz disruption of early 2026 was a warning. It demonstrated that the vulnerabilities created by decades of open integration are real, that external actors are willing to exploit them, and that the consequences for African economies can be swift and severe. But the answer is not withdrawal. Africa’s growth story has been built, in part, on engagement with the world economy. The task is to make that engagement more resilient.

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Politicians Have Long Misunderstood The ‘Working Class’. The Rise Of The Far Right Shows How Mistaken They Have Been

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:00:52 +0000

BY DAVID PEETZ

Class has always mattered, and now social democratic parties that sprung from a working class — including the Australian Labor Party – are finding out why.

Over many years, and in many countries, a growing view among political actors and within political science was that class was losing its punch. The line was something like this. The working class once voted for labour parties. The middle class voted conservative. But over many years) that difference between how the classes voted got smaller and smaller. In some places it disappeared.

The “decline of class” narrative suited the leaders of labour and social democratic parties.

They could safely adopt market-based neoliberal policies, with a human touch added, in the knowledge their base wouldn’t desert them. But their base was changing. It was becoming more middle class, more individualistic, more awake to the benefits of market solutions to complex problems.

Now, those politicians are shocked by the rise of far-right political parties that now claim to represent the working class. In Australia, One Nation is close to matching Labor — in some polls, it is already ahead.

In the United Kingdom, Reform is leading in all the polls, while the governing Labour party is below 20%. In Germany, the neo-nazi AfD is presently leading in all opinion polls, while the Social Democrats are below 14%.

In the United States, the Republican Party has gone full Trump, on an agenda with aspects that look eerily reminiscent of prewar Germany. In France, the National Rally candidate is ahead in all opinion polls for the next presidential election.

‘Blue collar’ is not the same as ‘working class’

In many countries, the labour and social democratic parties are mere shadows of their former selves.

Perhaps the labour parties mistook the decline in “blue-collar” (manual) jobs for the decline of the working class. In Australia, the blue-collar share of jobs fell from 44% in 1979 to 28% in 2025. It’s fallen in the UK, the US and elsewhere.

Union membership, once a mostly “blue-collar” phenomenon, declined in most industrialised countries. It fell from an average of 30% of employees across the OECD in 1985 to 19% in 2005 and 15% in 2023. The fall was even greater in Australia.

But these changes did not reflect how likely people were to identify as working class.

In Australia, national attitude and election surveys give us a good idea of trends in people’s views. Between 1979 and 2007, the proportion of respondents in a standard national survey defining themselves as working class or lower class temporarily grew from 40%, to the low 50s in the 1980s and ‘90s, then back to 44% by 2007. In 2025, after a bit more movement, it was still 44% working class.

A British survey in 1983 found 58% of people claimed to be working class. By 2005, those identifying as working class had barely fallen to 57%. In 2023, still 53% of people identified as working class.

In the US, where the phrase “working class” appeared absent from public discourse for decades until Trump, a differently worded question showed that in 1976, 51% of Americans thought of themselves as either working class or lower class. In 2006, the same survey showed 52% identifying as either working class or lower class. Within this period, numbers had fluctuated from year to year — but always between 48% and 55% expressed working or lower class identity.

A Gallup poll added “upper-middle class” to the options, and the proportion claiming working or lower class status was only 39% in 2006. In 2024, that number was 43%.

In Canada, the proportion identifying as working or lower class was 36% in 1980 and still 36% in 1995. In 2017, a different poll found 37% identified as working class.

In short, while “blue-collar” jobs have sharply declined almost everywhere, the experience of “working class” has been relatively stable, within some fluctuating bounds. Differences in class identity between countries seem more notable than differences over time, perhaps due to how questions are asked or how different cultures interpret them.

This is not to say that giving a “working class” response to a forced-choice survey question is the same as a deeply thought position on class. But if people no longer thought of themselves as working class, you would expect to see some pretty big changes over time in answers to these questions.

How the working class was left behind

Sure, jobs changed, a lot. But there has never been much middle-class glamour in the “white collar” jobs at the checkout counter, behind the hamburger hotplate or in the call-centre factory.

Class relations didn’t weaken. In fact, inequality worsened in many countries. Neoliberal policies, including those adopted by social democratic parties, made the rich much richer, but they slowed the growth in the wellbeing of the majority of people, and left the working class behind.

The proportion that thought big business had too much power, and income and wealth should be redistributed, became larger.

Unions lost ground not because their ideas became unpopular with workers. It simply became much harder for unions to recruit and retain members in the face of increasingly hostile employers, governments and laws.

Working class voters didn’t have solutions to hand. But nor were they offered any by social democratic parties that barely spoke their language. Now the door has been opened to far-right parties, presenting alternatives that appeal to some facing those class problems.

There’s life in class voting yet, just not in the way we thought of it.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Far Removed From Today’s Global Juggernaut, Soccer Was Born In The Well‑Heeled Boarding Schools Of 19th‑Century England

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:59:56 +0000

A soccer match in progress in 1885. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

BY THOMAS ADAM

PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE,

UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS

Over the past two centuries, soccer – or football, as it is called in much of the English-speaking world – has become a truly global phenomenon that connects fans on all continents. It is also, come World Cup time, a deeply nationalist affair that pits teams and their fans from various countries against each other.

Yet today’s deeply competitive professional and spectator sport that spans the globe has far more local origins. As an expert on global history and author of a 2025 book on the subject, I know the game’s roots date back to early 19th-century England – and with a very specific social cause.

When English high school students and teachers created football as a sport in the first decades of the 19th century, it was to provide students at prestigious elite schools such as Eton with an opportunity to let off steam and excess energy. Students at such private boarding schools – they are called public schools in the United Kingdom – came mostly from wealthy families and were sent there not just for their education but also for socializing with their peers.

But boarding school students were often hard to control. Overprivileged students had a tendency to see teachers and headmasters not as authority figures but as people of lower social standing. Rebellions were common and pitted spoiled students against helpless teachers. Enter soccer: A strenuous physical activity such as kicking the ball across a field appeared to teachers as a means to regain control over their students and to redirect their energies.

The origins of soccer

Ballgames that pitted two groups of people against each other were nothing new in Britain.

“Folk football” existed long before it became a school sport. However, these early ballgames were unregulated, raucous and violent encounters of two parties formed by inhabitants of two villages or two neighborhoods. They did not need to involve an actual ball but something that could be kicked across a field or through the streets of a town.

Such events have little in common with modern-day soccer. They could involve hundreds of people. Playing fields were not marked. And the goal was to kick the ball once across a marker, such as a hedge or a field line. These ballgames were not about scoring but about taking on the opposing team by all means available. Such sporting affairs were known to anyone in England in the first half of the 19th century.

The games migrated from there to school grounds.

At Rugby School, a public school in central England whose name was given to the modern game of rugby, students in the 1820s began playing a game that involved the kicking of a ball. Students engaged in these games because they gave them tremendous freedom.

The game was not yet codified, and teachers let students organize games without interfering in their play. Football offered both students and teachers what they craved most. Paradoxically, what for students was freedom was for teachers a useful means of control.

Teachers allowed the game to become a cherished activity of students because it took the students’ minds off other temptations. Tired and exhausted students, teachers reasoned, were good students who abstained from committing mischief and sexual behavior they deemed inappropriate.

The development of different games

Since the game lacked rules, and teachers kept a hands-off attitude toward the game, it gave students an opportunity to make their own rules. And these rules were the result of collective decisions of students.

From the 1840s to the 1860s, students produced rules that regulated how the ball could be handled, how many members a team should have and how scores were counted.

Students at Rugby School were the first to codify the game. These rules of 1844 allowed players to use their hands for controlling the ball. The rules produced by students at Eton in 1847, by contrast, outlawed the use of hands for propelling the ball.

But these were just a few of the many sets of football rules that students wrote in the three decades from the 1840s to the 1850s. And these codes did not yet clearly distinguish between a game that was focused on propelling the ball with hands – a key aspect of the modern game of rugby – versus a game that was focused on using only one’s feet, a key aspect of soccer.

The result was a great diversity of rules for a game that high school students played for fun. However, the game – mandatory for all high school students – was also used as an instrument of institutionalized bullying of younger students by older ones, with physical attacks on younger students built into the game. In effect, football of this time was a participation sport without any spectators.

Students played games on meadows and fields in the near surroundings of the public schools. These playing fields often did not have markings for borders or goals. Walls, trees and bushes marked the borders. Gates and doors were used as goals.

The codification of what became soccer

Public school graduates took their versions of the game with them to the next level. At Cambridge, students began in 1837 to iron out some of the modern-day rules. There, three iterations of unified football rules were created over the course of the next 19 years. The third set in 1856 culminated in a game of kicking a ball with one’s foot.

In 1863, representatives of football clubs from the larger London area met to discuss the formation of a football association and a common set of rules. Ebenezer Cobb Morley, who served as captain of the London-based Barnes Football Club, convinced the other participants to accept unified rules that banned the use of hands for propelling the ball.

The 1863 rules of the Football Association stipulated that players were not permitted to “carry the ball,” to “throw the ball” nor “to take the ball from the ground with his hands while it is in play.” These rules provided the basis for modern-day soccer.

The game’s professionalization

The London rules of 1863 did not replace existing football rules, and these rules did not find acceptance everywhere. The 1863 London meeting did not include representatives of the public schools that were resolved to continue playing football according to their traditional rules. Rather than unifying football regulation, the London variant added just one more set of rules.

However, the London meeting showed a maturing game. The participants did not come from boarding schools but from football clubs that had formed independently of public schools. And these participants were not teenagers but adults.

Morley was 32 years old when he presided over the meeting that had become necessary because football was transforming into a competitive sport that pitted teams of different football clubs against each other. And for such competitive games, unified rules were needed.

In 1872, the honorary secretary of the Football Association, Charles W. Alcock, suggested the creation of the Football Association Challenge Cup Competition.

The introduction of this tournament helped transform football from a pure enjoyment into a competitive sport, first played by amateurs and later by professionals. With growing crowds of spectators came stadiums.

That’s the kind of highly professionalized and dynamic game that will feature in this year’s World Cup. And what a far cry it is from the chaotic boarding school pitches of 19th-century England.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Africa At The World Cup: 10 Teams, Local Coaches And Tactical Depth Usher I A New Era

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:00:34 +0000

Ghana fans will be cheering their team alongside nine other African nations at the World Cup finals. Adera Abdoulaye Dolo/Pexels, CC BY

BY WYCLIFFE W. NJORORAI SIMIYU

PROFESSOR AND CHAIR OF ALLIED

HEALTH STUDIES, STEPHEN F. AUSTIN

STATE UNIVERSITY

The 2026 men’s Fifa World Cup marks a seismic shift in the global football landscape. The decision to expand the final stage of the tournament from 32 teams to 48 has significantly benefited the Confederation of African Football (Caf).

In 2018 and 2022, Africa was represented by five nations; this year, a record 10 teams will take the stage. They are, in order of their Fifa world ranking: Morocco (ranked 8), Senegal (14), Algeria (28), Egypt (29), Côte d'Ivoire (34), Tunisia (44), Democratic Republic of Congo (46), South Africa (60), Cape Verde (69) and Ghana (74).

As a sport scientist who has spent decades researching African football, including the continent’s performances at the World Cup, I view this expansion as both a lasting legacy and a justified reward for African football’s sustained advocacy, boardroom activism, and robust on-field execution. It’s not just a numerical increase; it’s a major structural event.

The narrative surrounding African football has shifted since the hopeful prophecies made by Brazilian star Pelé in the 20th century. After touring the continent in 1977 and witnessing the tremendous talent and established pipeline to European football, he predicted that an African nation would win the World Cup before the year 2000. He later adjusted his timeline to 2010. In 2026 it is a concrete possibility thanks to African football’s tactical maturity.

Here I consider five trends and challenges facing the 10 African teams as they head to the US, Canada and Mexico to take part, and how the event may play out for them.

1. The significance of 10 teams

Until now, Africa’s qualification process for the tournament was arguably the most brutal in world football. Strong teams often missed out on the global showpiece due to a system that allowed no room for error. The jump to nine guaranteed spots – plus a tenth secured by Cape Verde through the inter-confederation play-offs – has finally aligned the continent’s representation with its competitive depth.

This expansion addresses a long-standing “geopolitical bottleneck”. By doubling its presence, Caf ensures that the World Cup is no longer just a snapshot of African football, but a comprehensive gallery.

Fans will witness the return of historical giants like South Africa and the DRC alongside perennial contenders like Egypt and Algeria and contemporary favourites like Morocco and Senegal, creating a diverse tactical mosaic.

2. The ‘Morocco effect’

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was a watershed moment. Morocco’s journey to the semi-finals shattered the “quarter-final ceiling” that had frustrated African ambitions since Cameroon’s 1990 run. This achievement fundamentally altered the performance expectations of the 10 teams heading to North America.

No longer are African teams arriving with the primary goal of avoiding embarrassment. There is a palpable sense of entitlement to the late stages of the tournament.

Morocco enters the tournament not as a “Cinderella story” but as a top-tier seed. This shift from “participant” to “contender” is the single most important development in the African game over the last four years.

3. Old guard meets a new one

The 2026 roster is a fascinating blend of heritage and novelty. The return of South Africa (Bafana Bafana) – after a 16-year hiatus – and DRC (The Leopards) – appearing for the first time since 1974 – adds immense historical weight to the cohort. These are nations with deep footballing cultures that have spent years in the competitive wilderness.

Conversely, the first ever qualification of Cape Verde (The Blue Sharks) represents the “new guard”. A nation with a population of just over 500,000 has outperformed continental powerhouses. Their success is a testament to the efficient scouting of the Lusophone diaspora and a sophisticated tactical identity. Their presence serves as a reminder that, in the modern game, organisational stability and technical clarity can overcome lack of scale.

4. The rise of the homegrown tactician

A quiet revolution has also taken place on the touchline. In previous decades, African federations were criticised for a “white-coach-in-a-suitcase” approach – hiring European managers shortly before major tournaments. Today, the trend has reversed.

The success of Walid Regragui (Morocco) and Emerse Faé (Côte d’Ivoire) has validated the “homegrown” model. Eight of the 10 African teams are led by local coaches or members of the diaspora who share a cultural and emotional connection with their squads.

This technical “decolonisation” has led to better man-management and a more authentic tactical expression. These coaches understand the “transnational dynamics” of players who navigate elite European leagues but return to a different set of expectations for their national colours.

5. Navigating the North American vastness

Of course, there are many challenges. One clear hurdle is logistical. The 2026 World Cup spans four time zones and vastly different climates. The vast distances between Vancouver, Mexico City and Miami will be a test of endurance. African teams, whose administration and organisation have always attracted criticism for ineptitude, will have to step up.

However, there’s a hidden advantage: the diaspora. North America is home to massive African immigrant communities.

In cities like New York, Toronto, Houston and Atlanta, teams can expect significant “home” support. Despite potential visa and travel barriers for fans coming directly from the continent, the local diaspora has the potential to turn stadiums into vibrant hubs of African football culture.

What to expect from the teams

The success of the African cohort will be measured by the opening round. The draw has presented a mix of high-stakes drama and genuine opportunity.

South Africa faces a daunting atmospheric test in Group A, opening against co-host Mexico in Mexico City – a fixture that will require immense mental fortitude. Similarly, Senegal and Algeria face early trials against heavyweights France and Argentina respectively, matches that will serve as early benchmarks for Africa’s elite.

But the 48-team format offers a wider path to the knockout stages. Egypt, drawn with Belgium, and Morocco, facing Brazil, have the technical depth to navigate their pools even if they drop points to the group favourites. For debutantes like Cape Verde, a group featuring Spain and Uruguay is a mountain to climb, but the chance to progress as one of the best third-placed teams keeps the dream alive.

If these 10 teams can maintain the tactical discipline seen in qualification, the 2026 tournament will make Africa a major stakeholder ready to disrupt the status quo.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

How A Proposed Green Card Application Policy Change Would Disrupt Lives By Assuming Legal Immigrants Are Evading The Law

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:24:54 +0000

A draft policy from the Trump administration would make this card much harder to get. Stefano Spicca/Getty Images

BY IRINA D. MANTA AND CASSANDRA BURKE ROBERTSON

More than half a million people rely every year on the ability to apply from within the United States for a green card, the government-issued ID that allows an immigrant to legally live and work in the country long term.

But in May 2026 the federal government issued a policy memorandum – essentially, a draft change to current policy – that could upend this process and deny immigrants the ability to apply for a green card while in the U.S. Instead, they would have to return to their home country to do it.

To see why this matters, picture a British woman, let’s call her Lucy, who comes to the U.S. on a student visa to earn her Ph.D. at Ohio State University. During her studies, she falls in love with Mike, an American engineer, and they marry. Under long-standing practice, Lucy could apply for her green card right in Ohio without uprooting her life.

The new policy memorandum, however, could force families like hers to make wrenching choices, sending one member of a couple out of the country with no guarantee they would be allowed back in.

As law professors who study the legal procedures relating to citizenship and immigration, we see this shift as a significant departure from how the system has worked for decades.

Congress built what’s called “adjustment of status” – the shift from one immigration status to another – into the immigration legal framework as a pathway to permanent residency. A policy memo cannot cut off that avenue.

Instead, what is being proposed by the Trump administration would require congressional action or agency rule-making that follows the proper procedural steps. The hundreds of thousands of people every year who have been clearing the legal requirements of adjustment of status cannot have their rights cut off arbitrarily.

Separation, disruption

Approximately 54%, or 608,260, of the 1.17 million new lawful permanent residents in fiscal year 2023 received a green card from within the United States.

But now, the draft policy emphasizes that those who entered the United States as nonimmigrants – such as people on student visas, who stated that they would be leaving the country once their education was finished – “are generally expected to pursue an immigrant visa and admission from outside the United States if they wish to reside permanently in this country.”

Applying from within the United States, as Lucy sought to do in the hypothetical example above, would be seen by officials as a negative element – a strike against granting the green card – that would need to be balanced out by what officials deem extraordinary counterevidence, such as sufficient family ties, hardship or length of residence in the United States, for the applicant to succeed.

The memo deems application from within the U.S. a red flag, calling such an application an “attempt to avoid the ordinary consular immigrant visa process,” implying that the immigrant hid their intention to immigrate when they obtained the nonimmigrant visa.

If the memo becomes implemented as official policy, individuals like Lucy would be expected to return to their country – in her case, the U.K. – to apply for a green card.

This could take a substantial amount of time. She would thus need to interrupt her studies, which her university may or may not allow for her to complete the degree. Her husband, Mike, would get the choice of being geographically separated from his spouse indefinitely or disrupting his own career in Ohio, with his employer potentially not letting him return to the job. The family would face even more disruption if Lucy and Mike had children.

Unsupported implications

Even if the process to get a green card goes smoothly, it can easily take over a year from applying to receiving the status symbolized by the card.

Spending over a year in the home country while waiting for the application to be resolved is a massive disruption for any individual or family. The policy memorandum justifies this by stating that seeking a green card from inside the United States is founded on applicants’ desire to evade the normal immigrant visa process, “usually accompanied by their violation of our immigration laws.”

In other words, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services believes that certain people applying for green cards from inside the country – the ones who came here saying their time in the U.S. was limited – are trying to cheat the system.

The agency, however, provides no support in the policy memorandum for its claim that most individuals who seek a shift from a temporary status to a permanent one have done anything illegal.

To the contrary, the document acknowledges that such an adjustment of status already can be used only by individuals who have been either inspected and admitted or inspected and paroled, both lawful processes. And it gives no evidence for the accusation that most such individuals have done anything illegal since.

The memo also implies that all applicants for green cards who were previous holders of nonimmigrant visas – such as students and tourists, but also performing artists, athletes coming to compete, diplomats and their staff – should expect greater scrutiny in the future. It treats the move from nonimmigrant to immigrant status as highly unusual. That’s despite the fact that over half a million people a year have routinely benefited from such transitions.

A substantial number of those applicants would now be treated with greater suspicion about their original intentions. They would likely also need to take on tremendous burdens, including spending months or even years separated from a spouse or children while waiting abroad; interrupting or abandoning a degree, a job, or a career; and gambling on whether they’ll be allowed back into the U.S. at all, since consular processing abroad carries the risk of a denial with no easy appeal.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Offscript With Chika Oduah

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:10:50 +0000

Chika Oduah (Wikipedia)

BY ORITSEJOLOMI OTOMEWO

“The way I practice my journalism is to go as close as possible to the source. It’s an influence of my anthropological training, where we go into the field.”

In April 2014, that instinct took Chika Oduah to Chibok, a northeastern town in Nigeria.

Boko Haram had just kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the Government Secondary School, and most articles being published about it were being filed from Abuja, Lagos, London, New York, or Washington. Not many journalists had actually gone to Chibok. An editor at The Guardian reached out to Oduah and asked if she could write something. She looked at the coverage and immediately saw the gap.

She had been attending the Bring Back Our Girls rallies in Abuja and had connected with a man from Chibok who had not been back to his hometown in years. He became her guide. They hired a car and drove fourteen hours north, through increasingly remote and deserted terrain, until they arrived. When they did, she crossed paths with Adam Nossiter, the New York Times correspondent, who had come the same day with politicians and a large entourage. Oduah had come differently. “I like to travel low-key,” she says. “Wear a hijab, speak my small Hausa, and just go.” A local businessman offered her a bed for the night. Before he left her to sleep, he pointed to a machete by the wall and told her to use it if she heard anything. She did not sleep easily. But she got the story.

It was not a one-off. The story of terrorism and its aftermath became a major thread running through her career, one she would return to again and again. But more than any single assignment, Chibok captures something essential about how Oduah works, and why she has spent years building a journalism practice that many of her peers in international media have never attempted.

For most foreign correspondents covering Nigeria and Africa, the job is done at a distance. Stories about the continent are filed from comfortable newsrooms, stitched together from wire copy and phone calls. Oduah has never seen the point of this. She has spent her career working with international media organisations while insisting on doing the reporting on the ground, where the story actually happens. That conviction made her turn her back on a career in the United States and move to Nigeria. It is what now guides her as she builds her own platform, Zikora Media and Arts. To understand where it comes from, you have to go back to a small village on the banks of the River Niger.

Oduah was born in Ogbaru, a rustic community sitting on those banks, as the first daughter of her parents. Life in the village was busy and full of nature. As the first female child, she was expected to be many things at once. That sense of doing several things at the same time stayed with her. “I was raised to be a multitasker. It is why I wear many hats.”

At two years old, she relocated with her family to the United States, settling in Georgia — a state that, with its sprawling greenery and slower pace, carried some of the same rural texture as the village she had left behind.

But Georgia was not Ogbaru, and America was not home. Even as a child, Oduah felt the dissonance acutely. “I felt like a fish out of water,” she says. “The US was not for me. It was a country of corporate slavery and capitalism stripped of humanity. I saw all of this when I was about eight years old and told my parents I was not going to stay.”

Growing up, she was a restless, creative child. She danced, sang, and wrote poetry. By her teenage years, she had started writing articles on current affairs. She had so many interests it was difficult to choose: fashion design, anthropology, fiction writing, activism. Her parents pushed her toward journalism. Her mother first suggested it, and her father convinced her she did not need to be on television to do it. She could write. That was all she needed.

At sixteen, Oduah walked into her first newsroom, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one of the most prestigious papers in the American Southeast. It was there that she began to understand what the craft demanded. She went on to study Journalism and Anthropology at Georgia State University, embracing the multimedia approach that was being pushed hard at the time — learning to write, shoot, edit video, record audio, and produce. It helped that CNN’s headquarters sat a few minutes from her campus. Inspiration was always within walking distance.

In those early years, the stories she wrote were almost always about immigrants and marginalised voices. After graduating, she landed a job at NBC News. But before that, she had spent time in Kenya, working at K24: the country’s first twenty-four-hour news station, drifting from place to place doing documentary and feature work. It was her first real taste of on-the-ground journalism on the continent, and she loved every moment of it.

Back in New York, she joined Sahara Reporters as a creative director, helping build what was then an ambitious attempt at a pan-African television broadcast station. In 2012, she was accepted into Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop, a recognition of the literary ambitions she had never fully set aside.

After she left Sahara Reporters, she decided to return to Nigeria. Her mother cried when she announced she was leaving the US, but her father was supportive. “He was like, that’s my girl. He always loved my go-getter spirit.”

In 2013, she moved to Abuja. The choice was deliberate; Al Jazeera’s African headquarters was in the capital. She had been applying from the United States, but the emails and calls had not been taken seriously. When she showed up in person at the Abuja office, they finally understood she was serious and offered her a job as a producer for the West African region.

As producer, Oduah was responsible for everything: pitching stories to Doha, organising teams, arranging fixers, conducting risk assessments, going into the field, editing the final product. The role took her across Nigeria and into neighbouring countries. She covered the farmer-herder conflict in the Middle Belt, the Benue massacres, and communities in the northeast living under the shadow of Boko Haram. “I have been able to travel across Nigeria more than people who have lived there their whole life.”

After leaving Al Jazeera, she worked as a freelance journalist covering West Africa for several international media organizations including Vice, Voice of America and France 24. It was during this period she found her way to Chibok.

In 2017, she moved to Senegal. The reasons were layered. The first was safety; her reporting on Boko Haram had made certain people unhappy, and she needed distance. The second was language; most West African countries are francophone, and she needed French to cover the region properly. The third was art. Senegal has a deep, living tradition of artistic practice, and she wanted to immerse herself in it.

But it was her frustrations with the international media industry that eventually pushed her to build something of her own. There was the outlet that planned to cover a Nigerian election without telling the only Nigerian on the team. There were the organisations that did not like her dreadlocks and wanted her to look a certain way on camera. And then there was a video of a Burkinabé mystic and spiritual philosopher named Patrice Malidoma, a man who had spent his life bridging African spiritual traditions and the Western world. In the middle of a talk, Malidoma stopped and said, seemingly out of nowhere, that someone was listening who had not been brought to Africa to report on bad news, but to find solutions. Oduah got chills. Shortly after, she learned that Malidoma had died.

She started Zikora Media and Arts in 2023. The name means “show the world” in Igbo. “Africans still apologise for being African,” she says. Zikora is her attempt to change that, through journalism, literature, performance, and events.

Looking ahead, Oduah talks about Zikora the way a young reporter talks about her first big story: as something whose full shape she cannot yet see, but whose direction she is sure of. There is more of the continent to cover, more voices to find, but she wants those voices to speak for themselves.

It is the same instinct that put her in a car for fourteen hours to Chibok, that walked her into the Al Jazeera office in person. The instinct to go close, to go in person, and to show the world whatever she finds there.

SOURCE: COMMUNIQUE

Washington Killed An ISIS Commander In Nigeria, But Has More To Do In West Africa

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Wed, 27 May 2026 16:45:05 +0000

BY SAMUEL BEN-UR

Nigeria’s Christians are among the most persecuted in the world. They face threats from Muslim Fulani herdsmen who have raided villages and killed hundreds of believers. They also face threats from terror groups known around the world for their brutality, such as Islamic State (ISIS), against which a significant victory was recently achieved.

In a joint operation on May 16, U.S. and Nigerian forces killed Abu Musab al-Minuki, a key figure in ISIS and its affiliate, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). The Nigerian military described the raid as a “meticulously planned and highly complex precision air-land operation.” President Donald Trump called al-Minuki “the most active terrorist in the world,” and “second-in-command of ISIS globally.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put the matter in a different light: U.S. forces had hunted an ISIS leader “who was killing Christians.”

Al-Minuki’s death represents a major achievement in Washington’s ongoing campaign to stem the growing tide of Christian persecution and instability in Nigeria. While ISWAP is neither the only nor the most pervasive threat facing Abuja’s Christian community, killing al-Minuki represents tangible progress. To capitalize on this success, Washington should attend to all threats making Nigeria unsafe for Christians and other citizens alike.

Analysts dispute whether al-Minuki was truly ISIS’s global No. 2. What is not in doubt is that one of ISWAP’s most important commanders is dead. His network has helped make Nigeria one of the deadliest countries in the world for Christians.

Nigerian reporting tied al-Minuki to the February 2018 Dapchi schoolgirls kidnapping, when ISWAP terrorists abducted more than 100 students from the Government Girls’ Science and Technical College in Yobe State. Leah Sharibu, a Christian girl who reportedly refused to renounce her faith, remains in captivity and has become a symbol of Nigeria’s persecution crisis.

In December 2019, ISWAP released a video of its terrorists executing 11 blindfolded Christians in northeast Nigeria. The killers called the murders “a message to Christians all over the world.” The next year, ISWAP abducted and executed Ropvil Daciya Dalep, a Christian university student, declaring that Christians “must know that we will never forget their atrocities against us.”

ISWAP also carried out the Pentecost Sunday massacre at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in 2022. Gunmen disguised as worshippers detonated explosives and opened fire during Mass, killing at least 40 people and wounding more than 100. In 2026 testimony before the Federal High Court in Abuja, a witness identified the attackers as members of an ISWAP-linked cell based in Kogi State, operating under the alias “Al-Shabaab,” and tied to the broader command network al-Minuki helped oversee.

To describe all this merely as “insecurity” is to miss the point. Nigeria’s Christians are not the only victims of jihadist violence. Muslims in the northeast and northwest have also suffered grievously at the hands of Boko Haram, ISWAP, bandits, and other armed groups.

While organized Islamic terrorists may make headlines, they are not the greatest threat to Christians in Nigeria. Instead, the greatest threats facing Nigerian Christians are from militant gangs of Fulani herdsmen.

This is especially true in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where armed Fulani militant networks have attacked Christian communities in Benue, Plateau, and surrounding states. The Fulani are an ethnic group of about 25-40 million in West Africa, historically defined by cattle-herding. While many of them no longer practice pastoralism as a way of life, their group identity is still strongly associated with raising livestock. Land, water, grazing routes, and criminality all contribute to the anti-Christian violence perpetrated by some Fulani militants, and yet these factors do not tell the whole story.

Instead, as scholars of international religious liberty such as Baylor’s Paul Marshall have shown, there is a significant element of anti-Christian violence inexplicable by material explanations alone, something a commonly used phrase like “farmer-herder conflict” works to obscure.

In the case of the Plateau State Massacre in 2023, Fulani gangs killed nearly 200 Christian men, women, and children on Christmas Eve while reportedly shouting, “Allahu Akbar, we will destroy all Christians.” Policymakers and journalists should not hide behind sociological euphemisms to explain away attacks that have clear religious motivations.

The Nigerian government’s response has also often been a mix of incapacity and denial. Abuja resists the “Christian persecution” label even as it often fails to prevent attacks on communities and subsequently lies about the scale of and motivations behind massacres and kidnappings. Village communities complain that security forces arrive late or not at all.

In the northeast, ISWAP survives because it exploits weak governance, borderland sanctuaries, and inconsistent intelligence coverage. The result is a state that can sometimes strike terrorists but often fails to protect Christians from slaughter.

Increased cooperation between Washington and Abuja is a start, but Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s government must publicly and accurately diagnose the challenges facing its people. Killing al-Minuki wasn’t significant purely because he was an archterrorist. He also perpetrated atrocities, including the massacre of hundreds of Christians, though Abuja has yet to highlight this fact.

Nigeria’s Christians need a government willing to name their persecutors, protect their villages, rescue their children, prosecute their attackers, and accept help when its own capabilities fall short. The United States cannot solve Nigeria’s religious violence for Nigeria. But it can make clear that anti-Christian persecution is not a peripheral humanitarian concern; it is central to Nigeria’s security crisis and to America’s counterterrorism interests.

The United States should create a Nigeria religious-violence targeting cell inside the embassy in Abuja, linking State, Defense, Treasury, and intelligence officials working with trusted Nigerian civil society groups and church networks. Its job should be to map ISWAP, Boko Haram, Fulani militant, and bandit networks that attack religious communities. It can then identify commanders, financiers, arms suppliers, cattle-rustling facilitators, ransom brokers, and corrupt local officials, and feed that evidence into Treasury and State sanctions packages.

The State Department should also make any major expansion of U.S.-Nigeria security cooperation contingent on Abuja producing a public, incident-level accounting of attacks on Christian communities, including listing the perpetrators, the religious identity of victims where relevant, security response times, arrests, prosecutions, and convictions.

Al-Minuki’s death will not bring Leah Sharibu home or rebuild every burned church. But it proves the men who organize this violence can be found. The question is whether Washington and Abuja will treat that success as final—or as the beginning of a serious campaign to defend Nigeria’s most vulnerable communities.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

The 1994 World Cup Helped Rescue ‘The Beautiful Game’ From Mediocrity. On Its Return To The US, Expect More Of That Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:53:28 +0000

BRAZILIAN CAPTAIN DUNGA RECEIVES THE WORLD CUP TROPHY FROM VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE AFTER DEFEATING ITALY IN THE 1994 WORLD CUP FINAL AT THE ROSE BOWL STADIUM IN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA. BRAZIL WON THE WORLD CUP ON A PENALTY SHOOT-OUT.

BY CESAR R' TORRES

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF KINESIOLOGY

AND PHILOSOPHY, PENN STATE

Ahead of the 1994 World Cup – the first staged in the United States – players were asked to do something they never had before: sign a fair play declaration. The document, in which the soccer stars of the day pledged to respect the rules and opponents, was part of a plan by governing body FIFA to restore soccer’s reputation as “the beautiful game.” And expectations ran high before kickoff.

After all, it could not be as bad as the previous edition of the tournament, held in Italy four years earlier. That dour affair left a sour taste in the soccer world. Noting that it had the lowest goals per game in World Cup history, Eduardo Galeano, known as the game’s global poet laureate, wrote that Italia ’90 consisted of “boring soccer without a drop of audacity or beauty.”

The remarks not only referred to the aesthetics of the game – tedious matches devoid of skillful merit that were unpleasing to watch. They also pointed to its ethics – questionable behaviors and strategies that belittled soccer and its practitioners. This was an era in which wasting time, intentional fouling, theatrics and defensive schemes predominated.

The state of soccer after Italia ’90 required a holistic approach to understanding and improving the game.

For almost 30 years, I have been studying the ethics and aesthetics of soccer as both a philosopher of sport and an aficionado of the beautiful game. In that time I have seen how thoughtful changes to the rules shaped the game for the better. It has left me hopeful that, borrowing from Galeano, soccer is not “condemned to mediocrity.”

FIFA’s response to an ugly tournament

Reviewing Italia ’90, Los Angeles Times sportswriter Grahame Jones urged that something had to be done to increase goal-scoring and put an end to “the cynical, don’t-lose-at-any-cost approach” that dominated the game.

FIFA was not oblivious to such criticism. This was strikingly evident in the governing body’s technical report of the tournament, which described the final between Argentina and West Germany – an ugly 1-0 victory for the latter – as “a dreadful advertisement for the game of football.”

The report was not wrong. Looking back, the final is marked out by intentional fouling, the first red card in a World Cup final and plenty of simulation, including diving – a ploy players use to deceive referees and get a favorable call. Indeed, the incident resulting in the penalty from which West Germany scored is widely seen as a case of diving. That match illustrated the unimaginative and negative soccer played throughout the tournament.

Sepp Blatter, then FIFA’s general secretary and later its reproved president, concluded that “something is wrong with this game.” His main concerns, shared with many within the soccer community, were the time-wasting, intentional fouling and theatrics that were extensive in Italia ’90.

To address these concerns and improve the game, FIFA established a commission composed mainly of former players and coaches. Largely based on the observations of this group shortly after the 1990 World Cup, FIFA and the International Football Association Board, the body that oversees the game’s rules, decided to implement changes.

One key change was the adoption of a three-point system for wins during the group phase of the 1994 World Cup instead of two. This meant that teams were rewarded more for winning, encouraging imaginative and positive play over unimaginative and negative play aimed at sneaking a win or grinding out a draw.

Another change was the refinement of the offside rule to make it less restrictive for forwards trying to score. In addition, referees were instructed to apply the rules regarding fouls and misconducts more strictly – a move meant to protect players and their inventiveness.

However, the most momentous change was the introduction of the backpass rule, which would eventually revolutionize the game. This rule prohibited goalkeepers from receiving the ball with their hands if a teammate deliberately kicked it to them. It was planned to curb typical time-wasting that was orchestrated by goalkeepers and defenders and was painful to watch.

As a whole, the aspirations of these changes were to improve the aesthetics of the game, by promoting matches with plenty of forward-looking and creative play that was pleasurable to watch, as well as its ethics, by discouraging and sanctioning behaviors and strategies that disrespected soccer’s defining skills and opponents.

All four of these changes were in place by the time 24 nations competed in the nine U.S. venues during the 1994 World Cup.

So, too, was FIFA’s requirement that players sign its fair play declaration. Although the latter was largely a symbolic gesture intended to emphasize desired behaviors and strategies and minimize skulduggery, the tournament was nonetheless an improved spectacle.

In its technical report of the tournament, FIFA proclaimed that “USA ’94 was much better than Italia ’90,” with “more goals, fewer fouls, more attacking play and almost no ugly incidents between players.”

While for FIFA it was “most encouraging to see that the new measures … were so successful,” it admitted that the final between Brazil and Italy, won by the former in a penalty kick shootout, “did not live up to expectations,” with “few highlights in terms of pure skills.”

A mediocre final aside, USA ’94 was seen favorably. George Vecsey, reporting for The New York Times, spoke for many when he said, “It was a very good World Cup.”

What to expect in Canada/Mexico/USA ’26?

Much has shifted in soccer since USA ’94. But the game has definitely benefited from the changes introduced ahead of that tournament and some that came after.

In 1998, for instance, FIFA introduced the six-second rule, which prohibits goalkeepers from controlling the ball with their hands for more than six seconds. Eventually, new sanctions for actions such as diving along with the use of video assistance for referees were also brought in. Other developments have helped advance the game, from better training methods and medical care to innovative tactics and skill improvement, expanded youth talent identification and development, and data-driven match plans.

Clearly, the level of the game has been elevated. FIFA considered the last World Cup, held in Qatar in 2022, to have “produced arguably some of the most intricate and entertaining technical and tactical football that the World Cup has ever seen,” culminating in “a scintillating game” that many consider as “one of the best FIFA World Cup final matches ever witnessed.”

Given the current state of the game, it is reasonable to expect exciting, enjoyable-to-watch soccer at the upcoming World Cup, co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. This does not mean that time-wasting, intentional fouling and theatrics – as well as occasionally prosaic play – will not rear their ugly heads. Such tactics have not been, and probably will never be, eradicated from the game. Consider, too, relatively new forms of trickery, such as manipulating substitution procedures or spying on rivals.

Yet, while there are still some who embrace the “dark arts” of soccer, such practices do not seem to have the favor they once had. Indeed, there is a widespread belief that soccer is experiencing another golden age. And even though soccer has many ethical and aesthetic flaws, both on and off the pitch, the beautiful game seems to have been largely restored.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

In Senegal, A 2,000‑Year‑Old Iron Workshop Sheds New Light On The Past

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:00:33 +0000

Slag shaped like the seeds of the rattan palm reflects a unique cultural choice. © David Glauser, Fourni par l'auteur

BY MELISSA MOREL, ANNE MAYOR AND LADJI DIANIFABA

How was iron produced 2,000 years ago in Senegal? A recent study at the Didé West 1 archaeological site, in the Falémé Valley in eastern Senegal, sheds light on an ancient iron production technique.

Passed down from generation to generation for nearly eight centuries, this technology appears to have been developed to meet local needs. African archaeology specialists Anne Mayor, Mélissa Morel and Ladji Dianifaba explain the significance of this discovery and what it reveals about the transmission of technical knowledge over the long term.

What did you find?

For over 2,000 years, metalworkers produced iron in what is now Senegal. By studying the remains they left behind, we have been able to reconstruct their technical choices, the natural resources they used, and, to some extent, aspects of their way of life. Beyond their scientific value, these studies also highlight the expertise of ancient blacksmiths, since iron production represented a major technical and social transformation, particularly for agriculture.

In eastern Senegal, in the Falémé Valley, within the Boundou Community Nature Reserve, many ancient iron production sites have been identified in recent years. Archaeological surveys and excavations carried out by an international research team involving scholars from the universities of Geneva and Fribourg in Switzerland, as well as the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, revealed at least five distinct technical iron traditions.

The new study focused on one of these iron production techniques (named FAL02) identified in the region, which is represented at around 100 sites.

The site of Didé West 1 (DDW1), the largest and best-preserved of these sites, stands out for two major reasons. First, it provides one of the earliest known dates for iron-smelting furnaces in Senegal. Second, it documents a long sequence of metallurgical activity spanning nearly 800 years, from 400 BCE to 400 CE. These radiocarbon dates were obtained from charcoal directly associated with the furnaces.

The exceptional preservation of this site allowed us to document this technique in detail, trace its transformations over time, and better understand the choices made by the metallurgists.

How were you able to prove it?

The main evidence of ancient iron metallurgy comes from slag, which is the waste produced when ore is transformed into metal. During the smelting process, this slag flows like molten lava within the furnace before solidifying into rocky masses. Once the operation was completed, the slag was discarded and gradually piled up into large heaps.

Our study of the Didé West 1 slag heap revealed 35 furnace bases, attesting to repeated activity over several dozen generations. Certain technical features define this tradition, including multi-perforated tuyères (clay pipes pierced with holes to allow air to circulate within the furnace), as well as the use of African palm nuts as packing material at the bottom of the furnace. This system appears to have facilitated the separation of metal from slag.

By combining these observations, we were able to reconstruct how this technique worked. The metalworkers used small circular furnaces equipped with a removable chimneys rather than permanent shafts. The iron ore likely consisted of laterites (a type of soil) collected from the immediate surroundings. Taken together, these elements reflect a high level of technical expertise.

Who were the people behind this technology?

Research on African societies during the first millennium BCE and the first millennium CE comes with several challenges. Written sources are scarce, and organic materials that could provide information about housing or diet are poorly preserved. Even iron artefacts are usually too degraded to survive.

On many sites, only pottery fragments remain. It is therefore still difficult to identify precisely the populations behind the FAL02 technique. This specific technical tradition was recognised through the shapes of the furnaces, tuyères, and slag found at the sites. Iron production techniques are not merely technical processes. They reflect traditions, choices and know-how specific to each cultural group.

Analysis of the slag volumes also helps estimate how much iron was produced. At Didé West 1, the data point to modest and irregular production, likely seasonal. These elements suggest that the activity was intended to meet local needs, rather than large-scale production for export.

Why this matters

The origins of iron metallurgy in west Africa are still debated. Two major hypotheses continue to be discussed. One argues that ironworking spread from the Hittite world in Anatolia (in present-day Turkey) via the Maghreb or the Nile Valley. The other suggests an independent invention in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, the available evidence does not allow a definitive conclusion.

However, several ancient iron production sites dating from the first millennium BCE have been identified in sub-Saharan Africa, including in Nigeria, Niger, Togo, and Burkina Faso, and now in Senegal. These discoveries tend to strenghten the case of local development.

Within this context, the dates obtained at Didé West 1, reaching at least the 4th century BCE, make it one of the earliest known ironworking techniques in Senegal. The site therefore contributes important new data to a still limited body of evidence and helps document the early development of metallurgy in the region.

What happens next?

This study marks an important milestone, but several questions remain unanswered. The next challenge is to better understand the other iron production techniques identified in the Falémé Valley. At least four other traditions have been recognised.

Some of these techniques were in use at the same time, revealing a complex metallurgical landscape where very different traditions coexisted. This diversity raises several questions: which groups of metallurgists were behind them? How can we explain their transformations? Why do certain techniques disappear? Were some techniques more efficient than others?

The study of the FAL02 technique over nearly 800 years demonstrates that these practices evolved, with phases of continuity and transformation. By cross-referencing this data with findings from the study of ceramics and settlements, it becomes possible to better understand the societies that produced this iron and how they changed over time.

These remains allow us to move beyond the purely technical question: they offer insight into settlement dynamics, the circulation of knowledge and expertise, and long-term societal transformations, even before the emergence of medieval kingdoms and the expansion of trans-Saharan trade.

We hope that future research will help to answer some of these questions.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

The Sahel Region Is Less Secure Than Ever: Foreign Forces Just Add To The Cycle Of Violence

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:28:40 +0000

French soldiers on patrol in Diabaly, Mali, 2013. Issouf Sanogo/AFP via Getty Images

BY NINA LILEN

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR,

LUND UNIVERSITY

Several of Mali’s major cities experienced coordinated attacks in April by a new coalition of jihadists and separatist groups.

As the coalition took over the town of Kidal in the north of Mali, images of Russian troops being escorted out of the town after negotiations were cabled out across global media.

Russia, now in the shape of Africa Corps and previously the Wagner Group, has been the Malian military’s external security partner since the beginning of 2022. It replaced French and European troops from the counter-terrorism operation Barkhane and Taskforce Takuba. France had deployed a force of 5,000 troops from 2014 to 2022. European special forces numbered 1,000 between 2020 and 2022. Both missions were forced to leave as relations between France and the Malian junta grew tense.

The strategic realignment, from western and multilateral forces to Russian troops, expanded in the region. In Burkina Faso, which experienced two coups in 2022, the French troops were expelled at the start of 2023, as 200 Russian troops moved in.

In the summer of 2023, the Malian authorities also kicked out the decade-old 13,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission. Niger’s junta, which took power the same year, followed suit and expelled the EU’s operations in the country six months later, before accepting a few hundred Russian troops.

During the past decade I have researched external security interventions in the Sahel and analysed their justifications, development on the ground, and consequences for political and security environments.

I conclude from my research that the external interventions have not stabilised the region. More than a decade after the first major interventions, the Sahel is more fragmented, militarised and violent than before.

Yet the persistence of insecurity also serves political purposes.

For military juntas, the jihadist threat justifies continued rule and repression. For Russia, the region has become a showcase for anti-western influence and security partnerships in Africa. For western actors, jihadist expansion, migration concerns and fears of regional instability are used as reasons for security engagement despite repeated failures.

The complex interactions between these actors have resulted in a continuous, strategic circle of violence, where civilians are the first victims.

On the ground

On the ground, interventions have often evolved in unpredictable ways through ad hoc decisions and informal interactions between local and external actors.

For example, they have shared logistical and medical assistance and intelligence.

More broadly, the external interventions strengthened militaries as political actors, reinforcing an already biased civil-military balance across the region.

“Security in the Sahel” became the moniker that framed the western and multilateral interventions in the region from 2013 onwards. Improving the capacities, capabilities and professionalism of the national security forces became the official objectives of these interventions, closely linked to the broader aim of defeating the jihadist insurgencies.

Framing the intersecting crises in the Sahel as a security issue also meant that security actors had the task of resolving it. The importance, status and budgets of the national militaries thus increased as the security situation deteriorated. A heavily tilted civil-military imbalance was the result.

As military officers took over power through coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, a strategic realignment towards Russia began, to maintain military rule.

The Russian Wagner group allowed the newly installed juntas to entrench their power, while “deprofessionalising” the forces through harassment, attacks and massacres of civilians.

Research shows for example that civilian targeting accounted for 71% of the Wagner Group’s involvement in political violence in Mali between December 2021 and July 2022. This strategy of attacking civilians has made recruitment easier for jihadist groups. They could increase their ranks by exploiting grievances.

The latest attacks in Mali in April 2026 demonstrate the military junta’s failure, together with its Russian security partners, to contain the jihadist groups’ expansion.

They also reveal that Russia is in the country mainly to keep the military junta in power. Assimi Goïta, Mali’s military leader, reconfirmed the partnership with Russia after the attacks in spite of their failure on the battlefield.

The military leader needs regime maintenance more than ever, and the Russians need to be in the country for continued geopolitical influence on the African continent.

Conclusion

The result is that while all external actors claim to fight instability, the current regional order depends on continuing insecurity.

Stabilisation risks becoming less about resolving conflict than about managing insecurity in ways that sustain regimes, partnerships and geopolitical influence.

Foreign interventions, in combination with national actors’ ambitions, have helped to transform the region into a space of militarised regime survival, jihadist expansion and geopolitical competition between Russia and western democracies.

As military approaches have repeatedly proven insufficient to solve the intersecting crises in the Sahel, pressured military juntas may now be forced to negotiate with jihadist groups. That is likely to result in new, hybrid spaces of power and governance.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Mali’s Security Crisis Holds Warnings For Nigeria: Here’s Why

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Mon, 25 May 2026 02:31:23 +0000

Nigerian soldiers prepare to patrol in Maiduguri. Audu Marte/AFP via Getty Images

BY SAHEED BABAJIDE OWONIKOKO

RESEARCHER, CENTER FOR PEACE AND

SECURITY STUDIES, MODDIBO ADAMA

UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, YOLA

Mali and Nigeria, two of the countries in the Sahel region of west Africa, are separated by approximately 1,000 kilometres, with the Niger Republic between them. They differ in population size and government, but they face some of the same threats.

Mali has a population of about 22.4 million, while Nigeria has about 223.8 million. While Nigeria has been a democracy since 1999, Mali has had a military government since 2020.

The two are similar in that they are threatened by multiple armed groups operating in their territories.

Three armed groups – Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP/ISGS), Jama'a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) and the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) – are shaping the conflict in Mali.

This reached a new high in April 2026 when Jama'a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin and the Azawad Liberation Front carried out coordinated attacks across Mali.

The northern cities of Kidal and Mopti, as well as military bases in Sevare and Gao, were captured. The heart of Bamako, the capital city of Mali, was also struck, leading to the death of the defence minister, Sadio Camara.

Nigeria too has been threatened by jihadist insurgence and banditry in the north as well as secessionists and militancy in the south. Jama’at Ahl al-Sunna li al-Da’wa wa al-Jihad (JAS) and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) are active in the north.

Nigeria lost two brigadier generals fighting the insurgents in the north-east between November 2025 and April 2026.

The weakness of the state plays a significant role in the vulnerability of both countries to attacks. As a scholar who has followed the unfolding events in the Sahel, I draw lessons for Nigeria from the April attacks in Mali.

Those lessons include the possibility of alignment among armed groups, the danger of the jihadists advancing to other Sahelian countries, the audacity of the groups, and the possibility that gains of JNIM in Mali could incite rival groups in Nigeria.

Key lessons for Nigeria

The first lesson concerns armed groups teaming up to fight the state. The April attackers were a combined force of FLA and JNIM. These groups share a common aim: securing enclaves within Mali. They joined efforts to carry out the attacks, each focusing on the areas they wished to control.

In the same vein, Nigeria has battled many armed groups. Competition, rather than cooperation, has defined the relationship between these groups, especially in northern Nigeria. This has always been to the advantage of the Nigerian state. The erstwhile charismatic leader of terror group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau, survived for more than a decade but died during clashes between his group, JAS and ISWAP members.

This led to a decline in Boko Haram’s activities, although they are now gradually resurging.

However, there is evidence of an unfolding alliance between terrorists in the north-east and bandits in the north-central and north-west areas of Nigeria. Such alliance have often been in terms of tactical cooperation as well as exchange of members and arms.

There is also a possibility of closing ranks and joining forces between Boko Haram and ISWAP, especially if leaders who favour working together with ISWAP take over Boko Haram from Bakura Doro, the current leader of JAS, after the death of Abukakar Shekau. If this happens, it may escalate terrorist activities that may be difficult for Nigeria to manage.

The second lesson is that the audacity of the JNIM/FLA coalition and the results achieved can motivate related groups to act in other parts of the Sahel. The al-Qaeda-linked and ISIS-linked terrorist groups have been involved in a competition for control of the Sahel for a long period.

This comes in the form of direct armed attacks against each other, competition over territory and recruiting, and attempting to demonstrate the ability to cause more violence than the other. This has led to an increase in jihadist attacks.

JNIM’s takeover of some cities in Mali may encourage its ISIS-affiliated rivals in the Greater Sahara and Lake Chad to also increase their violence.

In the Lake Chad Region, ISWAP has intensified attacks against military formations while also building parallel states in many areas of the Lake Chad basin, with Nigeria being the most affected.

Lastly, with the capture of Kidal and attacks near Bamako, JNIM may be close to capturing Mali. If Mali falls, it could be a training ground for terrorists in the Sahel. This fear was the reason Nigeria mobilised its forces for a peacekeeping mission in Mali in 2012. And if Mali falls, Burkina Faso and Niger will be threatened.

The threat to Niger is a significant problem because it is a buffer zone for Nigeria. Meanwhile Nigeria is a major target of the jihadist insurgents in their move to extend towards coastal west Africa.

What should Nigeria do?

Mali’s experience could turn the lens on Nigeria. Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have opted out of the Economic Community of West African States, Ecowas. But Nigeria and other countries in the region should not abandon the breakaway states at this stage. Necessary regional support should be galvanised and Nigeria can still play a leading role in this.

In my view, Nigeria also needs to rejig its counter-terrorism to be more responsive. Rather than its current defensive posture, which gives jihadists the opportunity to plan, Nigeria ought to adopt sophisticated and strategic offensive counter-terrorism that takes the war to the jihadists.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Ebola Outbreak In The DRC: Four Reasons It Will Be Hard To Contain

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:53:19 +0000

A road leading into Goma, the capital of the province of North Kivu in DR Congo. Picture by guenterguni/Getty Images

BY JIA B. KANGBAI

SENIOR LECTURER,

NJALA UNIVERSITY

By the second week of the latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo it was already clear that containing the spread of the haemorrhagic disease was proving to be difficult.

On 17 May 2026, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. This is its highest level of global health alert. It is mostly reserved for an extraordinary disease outbreak or event that is a public health risk to many countries through international spread and hence requires global coordinated efforts.

According to the WHO, as of 19 May 2026 the DRC had recorded more than 500 cases and 130 deaths, while its neighbour (Uganda) had recorded two cases and one death.

These statistics are huge considering that the current outbreak was only declared on 15 May. The largest Ebola outbreak was in west Africa from December 2013 to March 2016. It caused 28,652 infections resulting in 11,325 deaths in 10 countries; 99% of the fatalities were in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Infectious disease outbreaks are nothing new for the DRC, a central African country. Last year, while other parts of the world were shaking off the global mpox outbreak, the DRC was still struggling with it.

But the current Ebola outbreak in the DRC has potential to become huge and of long duration.

I am an infectious disease epidemiologist with experience of dealing with the Ebola outbreak in 2013-2016 in Sierra Leone.

In my view there are four reasons while this outbreak will be hard to contain:

late detection and insecurity

misdiagnosis

cultural factors

shortage of global health funds.

Late detection

One of the challenges is the time between a person being infected and being diagnosed (identifying the disease in a laboratory). This detection lag is a major problem because to control the spread of the disease, infected individuals need to be isolated. Ebola is highly contagious.

Late detection was responsible for the early deaths and increased number of Ebola cases in Sierra Leone during the 2013-2016 outbreak. Early cases went unnoticed there because Ebola was new in the country. Clinicians and laboratory scientists were totally unfamiliar with it.

The DRC is familiar with Ebola outbreaks and has witnessed more than any other country.

But in the DRC, late detection is fuelling the rapid spread of the disease and is primarily due to insecurity in the region.

The time it takes to identify an infectious pathogen in the laboratory depends on how long it takes for the pathogen to replicate to detectable level, the type of laboratory tests used, and (for some diseases) the development of antibodies. Ideally, for Ebola virus it varies between one and 32 days.

The first confirmed case was a resident of Goma, a town which lies on the border with Rwanda and is highly unstable. Fighting between DRC government forces and rebels (believed to be backed by Rwanda) has been going on around Goma for a long time.

The instability and volatility of the epicentre of the outbreak is having a major impact. Under those conditions, an infectious disease thrives and outbreaks mostly go unnoticed.

The number of Ebola cases and deaths that have been registered in the current Ebola outbreak in the DRC is difficult to place within the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model, a tool used in epidemiology. Ebola’s R0 (basic reproduction number, a measure of disease transmission) ranges between 1.5 and 2.5, which means within a susceptible Goma population, a single infected person can spread the virus to an average of 1.5-2.5 Goma residents.

However, the current Ebola incidence and deaths in the DRC exceed the expected number of secondary infections based on Ebola’s basic reproduction number. As of 21 May there were over 136 suspected deaths, 35 confirmed cases, and more than 600 suspected cases caused by the Bundibugyo strain in the ongoing outbreak in the DRC.

Misdiagnosis

The delay in diagnosis may also have been due to subtle early Ebola symptoms that can be misdiagnosed. Both malaria and typhoid have identical fever symptoms.

During the early days of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, many nurses working at the Kenema Government Hospital and the Lassa Fever Hospital lost their lives because they misdiagnosed the disease as Lassa fever. Ebola and Lassa fever belong to the same class of viral haemorrhagic fever diseases since patients present with similar symptoms and pathophysiologies (what the disease does to the body).

The other challenge with diagnosis in this outbreak is that it is a different virus to the one treated in the most recent Ebola outbreaks. Bundibugyo virus was first identified in Uganda in 2007. Unlike Zaire Ebola virus disease, which was discovered decades ago, the relative newness of Bundibugyo Ebola virus disease means it’s less researched, especially in terms of vaccine and medicine development.

Cultural factors

Other factors affecting the spread are cultural practices such as ritual burials. Ritual burials are common in many African countries, like Sierra Leone and the DRC. These are ceremonies born out of the belief that death is a sacred passage to another world or ancestral realm. Mostly it starts with communal grieving and wake keeping, followed by the ceremonial preparation of the body.

In Sierra Leone a ritual burial of a high priest who died of Ebola in the southern town of Moyamba during the 2013-2016 Ebola outbreaks led to the death of scores of people who took part in ceremonial preparation of his body. It is not surprising to learn of relatives setting Ebola hospital tents on fire simply because they were prevented from handling the corpse of their loved one.

Shortage of global health funds

The cuts in global health funds and the ending of many projects through the dissolution of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is greatly affecting the operations and effectiveness of public health activities around the world.

Most global health security projects aimed to prepare for and mitigate any future disease outbreak.

Sierra Leone and other countries affected by the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreaks benefited immensely from international donor (including USAID) support during that outbreak.

Unfortunately, the DRC will have less international support to help fight this outbreak. The country has long experience in tackling disease outbreaks (especially Ebola) but the lack of experts and logistics on site implies an extended delay in managing this situation. The DRC has the people and the necessary labs and facilities. The major challenge with the current outbreak is that it started in an insecure environment where access to testing facilities are scarce, hence the late detection.

Additionally, the country is about the size of western Europe (including France, Germany, Spain, the UK and Italy). This vast size, coupled with insecurity, will make it difficult to channel logistics across the affected regions.

What’s needed

Tackling the current Ebola outbreak in the DRC requires a rapid, multi-tiered response. It should focus on rapid case detection, multinational support, swift collaborative surveillance and community engagement.

Over the past years the DRC has served as a scientific base for major international research institutions that work on infectious diseases and medical microbiology.

In the absence of a vaccine or medication, the health authorities should embark on community engagement to raise awareness and sensitisation. They must also enforce public health laws, especially those targeting cultures that promote unsafe burials and elevate the risk of Ebola infection. This is to prevent human transmission as many people might still be out there undetected.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Figueroa Street And The Ethical Duty Of Care

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:23:35 +0000

Looking back at a New York Times magazine story to examine what responsible coverage of sex trafficking looks like—and what it doesn’t.

BY NINA ALVAREZ

Last fall, the New York Times magazine published a story by Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, a national health reporter, about the commercial sexual exploitation of children on a fifty-block stretch of Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles known as the Blade. To report the piece, Baumgaertner Nunn embedded with vice investigators for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as they carried out undercover operations. She also interviewed dozens of people—trafficking survivors, aid workers, experts, officials. Accompanying the text were photographs by Katy Grannan, an art photographer who contributes frequently to the Times, depicting Black and brown women and girls, baring skin, in platform heels, most in police custody, some in handcuffs. The headline asked, “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of LA’s Figueroa Street?”

The piece quickly received praise from many journalists. This spring, it was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. But Alia Azariah, a survivor advocate, said that, when a girl depicted in the story came across a post promoting it, she reached out to her, saying she was scared that she would be identifiable—including to the people who trafficked her. And as it turned out, this was not the only negative response the piece received. Advocacy organizations contacted the Times privately over several weeks post-publication, expressing concern about the reporting and photographs, wanting to know how consent was obtained, and asking Baumgaertner Nunn to reconsider elements of the story.

Five weeks after publication, no changes had been made. Twenty-two organizations that work on survivor and foster care sent a joint letter to Jessica Dimson, the director of photography at the Times magazine, citing the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. The groups focused on the pictures, which, they wrote, “do real and lasting damage” and should be removed from the internet. Though the subjects were generally shot from behind or in profile, they could very well be recognizable to anyone familiar with the Blade. “Using identifiable images of young people who are being detained, pursued, or exploited, particularly when minors may be involved, is not responsible journalism or simply news reporting in the public interest,” the letter read. “It is re-exploitation.” The captions on the images were concerning, too—referring to “a stable of a dozen girls,” echoing the dehumanizing language of traffickers.

The magazine declined to take the images down. Dimson’s position was that the photographs had been published with care and that readers needed to see what was happening, noting in her reply to the organizations that their mission was different from that of advocates. The response did not address the matter of consent. When CJR followed up to ask about the photography process, Dimson responded by email: “We applied scrupulous editorial judgment,” she wrote. “We considered and discussed the circumstances in which each photograph was taken, and all of the platforms on which they were published. We weighed matters related to consent—which we ensured was given for every photograph we published—as well as privacy, safety and long-term impact. These are questions we always ask, but when a story involves vulnerable populations we take them especially seriously.”

Margaret Sullivan, a columnist who writes on media, politics, and culture for The Guardian US and a former Times public editor, said that it was “unusual to have that many groups with a common base of understanding, to get together and protest so strongly and so vehemently. I think it’s certainly noteworthy.” Had Sullivan still been the public editor, she said, she would have made the joint letter public and written about it; the role no longer exists.

I can recognize some of my own instincts in the Times’ choices. Almost twenty years ago, I reported and filmed Very Young Girls, a documentary about children in the process of exiting sexual exploitation in New York City. It has since been used for policy work and law enforcement training, and still circulates around the anti-trafficking field. I am proud of what it accomplished. But I would not make the film the same way today. When I worked on the documentary, the girls I filmed were criminalized. They are now recognized as victims. New science has documented the lasting impact of chronic sexual violence on brain development, on decision-making, on the capacity for genuine consent. New legal protections exist. And new journalistic standards have been built—specifically to ensure that a survivor can say yes only when she is truly ready.

That change has been visible, in many ways, through the coverage of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Miami Herald investigation did more than expose a decades-long trafficking operation and the prosecutors who let it go unpunished; it shifted the framing dramatically. Our field has come a long way in managing the undeniable tension between the need to cover the story of commercial sexual exploitation of children and the risk such coverage can pose to people living in a dangerous situation.

Even so, the attention surrounding Epstein also reveals a persistent gap in public perception and understanding. The story inspired global outrage in large part because it involved extraordinarily powerful men, elite institutions, private jets, a private island, and mostly white victims who, years later, were able to come forward publicly, be believed, and seek justice. Barely heard in the national conversation are the thousands of children who are being trafficked right now—today, tonight—in cities, suburbs, rural communities, and tribal lands across the United States. This scourge falls most heavily, as violence generally does, on children of color, LGBTQI+ youth, and children from lower-income communities. Many of them cannot safely tell their stories. They may not know they have a story to tell—they might just think this is normal.

The Times piece about Figueroa Street entered that realm; as Baumgaertner Nunn reported, the Blade is “one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States.” But the story was built largely on a ride-along with police, outdated tropes, and images that risk causing harm. There are alternatives that operate through a framework of care. “I hope journalists covering trafficking or any story involving people who’ve been deeply harmed really sit with the potential impact of their reporting,” Kay Buck, the chief executive officer of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), said. “Behind every award, accolade, or spike in website traffic is a real person reliving one of the worst moments of their life.”

Access

In 2023, Baumgaertner Nunn received a tip about a surge in sex trafficking of minors on the Blade. According to the Times, she spent the next two years reporting the story. The result is a narrative shaped almost entirely by four sources: two LAPD vice officers; Shannon Forsythe, the founder of Run 2 Rescue, a faith-based nonprofit; and a trafficked nineteen-year-old named Ana. The police played a crucial role, by providing access. “It took years of building trust and getting officers to agree to a ride-along,” Baumgaertner Nunn told KTLA, the local LA TV station, in an interview promoting the article. In an email (later shared with CJR) to Kristen Caloca, a media consultant who works with CAST, which has a long history of working in Los Angeles, Baumgaertner Nunn wrote, “It was eye-opening for me to discover through my reporting that law enforcement was the group on the front lines of the rescue efforts here.”

In the story’s climactic scene, on a Saturday night in January of 2025, Forsythe, riding with an undercover vice unit, spots Ana. She bolts from the car and chases her down the street while traffickers jump out of their cars, yelling. Ana is described calling out, “I can’t do this right now. Leave me alone. You’re going to get me in trouble.” Forsythe grabs her by the wrists and does not let go. They wind up at the police station, where Elizabeth Armendariz, an LAPD officer, refers to Ana as a cooperative “suspect” while another officer makes sure she counts as “a rescue.” At 2:18am, in a fluorescent-lighted interview room, Armendariz offers Ana an ice cream sandwich, then presses her for information on her traffickers.

The word “rescue” here is not neutral. “Rescue” is a law enforcement term—one that positions police as saviors, young women and girls as objects of intervention, and arrest-based operations as a necessary response to trafficking. Survivors and advocates have spent two decades pushing back against this language and approach. The general consensus in the field is that it fails those it claims to help: according to Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services, three out of four people picked up on juvenile rescue operations return to their traffickers—a number the story reports, appended with a note from Brandon Nichols, the director of the county’s DCFS, saying that “our social workers do everything possible, as many times as necessary, to help these young people safely leave their captors and begin healing on their own terms.”

Stephanie Richard—the director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School, who has been working on anti-trafficking in LA County for twenty years—wrote to Baumgaertner Nunn a few days after the story was published. “Your piece raises urgent questions about trafficking in Los Angeles,” she said, in an email shared with CJR. “But it also reinforces carceral myths that many survivors and advocates have spent years working to dismantle.”

When CJR asked Baumgaertner Nunn about the rescue framing, she replied, “We explain in our piece that investigators refer to juvenile pickups as ‘rescue ops,’ and much of our article is dedicated to showcasing why these operations do not lead to lasting escapes. The piece’s headline is not a declaration but a question. Many people who read the full story recognized an underlying truth in response to that question: When a girl permanently escapes the Blade, it is never because law enforcement or an aid organization ‘rescues’ her. It is because she has been given the necessary tools to choose a new path without fear of retribution, and she has drawn on her own strength to believe that she can and should do it.”

Access in and of itself can have news value. When, in April, Poynter gave the story the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence, the judges praised Baumgaertner Nunn for spending “years gaining trust and embedded with investigators on undercover operations.” Yet it is worth noting that she was not the first journalist to visit Figueroa Street: six months before her piece was published, the Times of London ran its own—same ride-along, same organizations, same cast of characters, including a survivor whose circumstances were strikingly similar to Ana’s. Samuel Lovett, the reporter, told me that he was introduced to Run 2 Rescue, and Forsythe, by the LAPD. The article followed the same rescue narrative. The access was not, apparently, hard to obtain. In the wake of a change in California law—the repeal of an anti-loitering rule disproportionately used to arrest Black, brown, and trans women based on appearance—this story was being offered. (The LAPD did not comment.) Its frame is one that journalists would be wise to identify and scrutinize.

Meaningful Consent

Baumgaertner Nunn writes that Ana was thirteen the first time she was trafficked. When Ana was nineteen—and had been trafficked a second time—Forsythe asked if she wanted to come back home. “I waited to meet a subject like Ana,” Baumgaertner Nunn told CJR, “who presented an extremely rare opportunity: an adult survivor who, by all ethical guidelines, could fully and knowingly consent to participating, had a rich support system, and had specific protections in place.” Baumgaertner Nunn described waiting months before approaching Ana about being profiled, ensuring that she had “surpassed an array of clinical markers that protect against re-trafficking.” When asked to identify those markers, and how they were assessed, Baumgaertner Nunn declined. “Ana is not publicly disclosing personal details about her life after the article’s closing scene,” she replied, “so we are not at liberty to discuss them either.”

The phrase “clinical markers” carries weight in the fields of social work and trauma psychology; Baumgaertner Nunn has a master’s degree in public health, and that is her beat. But experts who study trauma caused by chronic sexual abuse say there is no standardized list and that the process of assessing when a survivor is truly ready to tell their story publicly isn’t straightforward. Several studies document how trauma causes lasting changes to the parts of the brain that are central to informed, autonomous decision-making; a longitudinal study conducted at Duke University in 2014 found that only 22 percent of those who had been chronically abused or neglected “achieved resiliency” by the time they reached young adulthood. The central factors on which most survivor advocates rely to determine readiness for journalistic coverage are time and independence, including an absence of reliance on an organization that has been providing support.

I learned about the challenge of meeting this standard through my work on Very Young Girls. When I made the film, I had every permission in place, from judges, lawyers, even parents. My colleague and I were embedded in a court-mandated program in which the subjects were enrolled, and they said yes to being in the documentary. Nevertheless, I got it wrong because, as it turned out, some of the girls were not done—they were still at risk, still vulnerable to their traffickers, still living through trauma. They were in their program, still dependent on the organization whose implicit message—however unintentional—was that participation was part of recovery.

Trafficking survivors are groomed to be people pleasers as a survival mechanism. Caloca, of CAST, often works with survivors and the providers who support them in preparing to tell their stories. Consent, she said, is “about whether they can say yes and make that choice freely and understand the long-term consequences of that choice.” Baumgaertner Nunn said that she did not rely on Run 2 Rescue for access: “I object to the practice of using advocacy groups as proxies for consent,” she told CJR. “I believe there are no shortcuts to building trust, particularly with vulnerable groups.” She added, “I am still in touch with Ana, and she has repeatedly conveyed that she considers her participation in this project to be an empowering part of her own healing journey.”

Barbara Friedman, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, serves as the director of the Irina Project, which monitors media representations of sex trafficking. A recent study she coauthored with colleagues at Kent State University and CAST showed that, of forty-nine trafficking survivors surveyed, 53 percent felt pressured to share private details, 50 percent said their story was misrepresented, and 38 percent said their story was shared without their consent. “There is little doubt that these trafficking victims are recognizable to others, including their traffickers,” Friedman said. The study recommends that journalists use power-sharing models when reporting on survivors, such that sources are given meaningful agency over how their stories are told. “People think that when you share your experience, that it’s somehow life-giving, or that there are no repercussions outside of the emotional toll of telling it in the moment,” Azariah, the survivor advocate, said. “But it’s not the case at all.”

The Most Vulnerable

Typically, journalists discuss with their sources the terms of identification. Different outlets maintain different approaches to naming survivors of sexual abuse. Many news organizations grant anonymity in such cases, particularly when the individuals who have been abused are not available to speak about their experience. The Times does not allow pseudonyms, but in past coverage it has protected sources, including by identifying survivors of childhood sexual exploitation using just their initials. In the Figueroa Street story, Baumgaertner Nunn writes that “Ana’s full name, as well as those of other trafficking victims in this article, are being withheld for their safety.” But as Leslie Heimov, the executive director of the Children’s Law Center, an organization that represents dependency clients in LA County, put it, “How many Anas with no front teeth and a colostomy bag do we think there are on the Blade? I’m going with one.”

Baumgaertner Nunn identifies girls by their legal first names and their ages. Two are fifteen; another is seventeen; Ana’s younger sister, who is a minor, is woven into Ana’s story. (The Times also produced a supplementary video with original footage depicting a fourteen-year-old, who had been contacted via the internet, being detained through a sting operation and taken to a police station.) These are children who are experiencing chronic rape. Baumgaertner Nunn reports that more than half of the girls pulled from the area were in the foster care system—framed as a systemic problem, in effect a pipeline to trafficking. LA County has spent years building infrastructure to address this concern, through an anti-trafficking task force, a First Responder Protocol, and contracted service providers vetted by DCFS. Effective or not, none of that infrastructure is examined in the piece—and the story neglects to note that Run 2 Rescue was neither vetted to engage minors nor part of the protocol.

The foster system is referenced as context for vulnerability. It is also a fact with legal implications. In California, foster youth don’t simply lack adult guardians. They have an appointed network with legal standing: lawyers, social workers, judges, probation officers—all of whom are responsible for protecting children’s interests. In addition, according to California’s Local Rule 7.3(c), a journalist who will likely encounter foster youth during coverage of LA County is required to petition the juvenile court before proceeding. A petition triggers notifications to DCFS, the dependency lawyers for the county, county counsel, and parents’ counsel; they may make objections, then a judge decides and, if approved, compels all parties to cooperate. There is no indication in the story—nor any record with DCFS—that this standard was met for any of the three girls mentioned.

It may be right for journalists to be skeptical of meeting a court standard, and if Baumgaertner Nunn otherwise obtained reporting materials directly from the police, she would be well within her First Amendment rights to use them. The Times position, communicated to advocacy organizations and to CJR, was that consent had been obtained—for the reporting and for every photograph published. Even so, the journalism ethics question at hand is how material should be used. “Consent while people were being detained, pursued, and in crisis—it would be challenging to obtain meaningful consent,” Caloca said. Consider a scene in which Baumgaertner Nunn describes a seventeen-year-old meeting with an officer at the police station, “curled up with a Cup Noodles and a new teddy bear.” At one point, the officer leaves the room, as does a support volunteer who was accompanying them, Baumgaertner Nunn writes; then “the video camera kept rolling, and the girl sat quietly alone.”

Michael Nash, who served as presiding judge of the LA County Juvenile Court for fourteen years, told CJR, “A juvenile interview—recorded or not—is a juvenile record.” That typically means it cannot be shared. Over the course of his career, he worked to create a process that would allow openness to the press because, he said, “confidentiality does more to protect the system, which is far from perfect, than it does to protect the children.” As Heimov put it, “I don’t want a world where reporters think they can’t talk to kids in foster care because they’re in foster care.” The key is informed consent and consideration of potential long-term impact. It’s notable that, apart from traffickers and buyers, the LAPD sergeant who connected Ana with Forsythe is the only figure in the story who is granted anonymity.

Who Is Seen, How

The photography access offers an explanation. Grannan arrived on Figueroa Street with no prior relationship with the subjects, more than a year after Baumgaertner Nunn began her reporting. When reached to discuss the assignment, Grannan described visiting the Blade and asking several women if she could photograph them. “Some agreed and others declined,” she said. Then she went out on a ride-along, staying in a police car during stops until officers verified the ages of potential subjects and confirmed she could photograph them. “Officers assured each person they would remain anonymous and their faces would never be revealed,” Grannan said. She noted that she was assured by officers that all of her subjects were eighteen or older. But people with direct knowledge of individuals portrayed in the story say otherwise, and survivor advocates note that on-the-spot age verification checks by police cannot reliably determine a person’s status, since girls on Figueroa Street often use fake IDs to avoid being taken into the station. As Baumgaertner Nunn writes in the story, the recent change in California law has meant that, in order to bring anyone into the station, “officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage—but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell.”

Legally, on a public street, a photographer would be entitled to snap away. But Tara Pixley—a visual journalist and the director of the master’s in journalism program at Temple University, who has published extensively on journalism ethics—believes that in telling stories about vulnerable and traumatized people, especially minors, journalists need to employ an ethics-of-care framework. The way Grannan’s photographs depict girls on the Blade—including an arrest, shown first as a wide shot, and then as a close-up of handcuffs and painted nails against a girl’s barely covered behind—is problematic not just because of the content, but also its cumulative effect. “An ethics of care would push against that narrowing, asking how images might instead interrupt voyeuristic looking and expand the viewer’s moral imagination,” Pixley said. More than that, “an ethics-of-care framework in photojournalism asks us to consider how images function in the lives of real people, not only how effectively they illustrate a story. It prioritizes minimizing harm across the entire visual process: how sources are approached, how photographs are made, how images are edited, and how they ultimately circulate in public.”

That the ride-along images were almost entirely of Black and brown girls and women reflects an important reality. The story makes no mention of it, however, nor does it ask about the underlying reasons. “There was not even a mention of the systemic factors that create vulnerabilities,” Rhonelle Bruder—a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, currently a teaching fellow at Harvard, focused on gender-based violence and human trafficking—said. “Black girls and girls of color are disproportionately sex-trafficked. We’re not talking about why. It’s just about them girls.” Dom, someone I met making Very Young Girls, was twelve when she was first trafficked. When I showed her the Figueroa Street story, she smirked, then chuckled. Then she pointed to the pictures, and yelled: “I hate these! They can’t do something else?”

When asked about the images in the Figueroa Street story, Grannan said, “My mission here was to visually document the reality of the young women who are visible in plain sight.” She noted that this was her first police ride-along, said that she does not consider herself a photojournalist, and described “conflicted feelings about the process, since prior to this story, I have always photographed and filmed people who gave explicit consent.” In a subsequent email, she wrote, “The magazine applied extraordinary support and care to this story—more than any other I’ve worked on with them in over twenty years” and said that she sought guidance from an experienced photojournalist, spoke with the reporter, and consulted with the LAPD vice unit sergeant and Forsythe.

Together, the images echo tropes that have long been used to justify the policing of trafficked people, particularly young women and girls of color. “It is always the bodies of young Black women that are plastered all over the internet so that legislators can pass more laws that increase policing of these same communities,” Leigh LaChapelle, the director of policy and advocacy at CAST, said. “It is a vicious cycle.”

Alternatives

In 2020, when Karen de Sá became the executive editor of The Imprint, a nonprofit digital publication, she brought more than two decades of experience leading investigative reporting on child welfare for the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle. At The Imprint, before any story involving a child currently in the system is published, at least one member of that child’s legal-protection network—a lawyer, social worker, judge, probation officer—is contacted and their involvement confirmed. For adults, she set another standard: even willing subjects who were abused as children cannot be named without editorial discussion. And crucially, The Imprint practices a “no surprises” policy, requiring reporters and editors to walk story subjects through every passage describing them before publication. Subjects also have the right to change their minds about their participation.

Cathy Otten, a British journalist who spent years in Iraqi Kurdistan reporting on Yezidi women enslaved by ISIS, has worked through questions of consent and duty of care in her teaching and her reporting. Consent, she said, is an “ongoing conversation”—not a “yes” in the moment when approached by an officer, fixer, NGO, or authority figure. In practice, for her, consent means being explicit at the outset that she is a journalist and making clear where exactly the work will appear, in what language, on what platforms, and what she cannot promise in return. It includes a frank discussion on risks, contemporary and long-term. She uses pseudonyms as a blanket policy and asks survivors to choose their own.

Otten acknowledged that it isn’t easy to execute any of this in the field, on deadline. Even the most careful reporters, she said, can “get pulled along” by the trauma narrative or the rescue arc. “We’ve all fallen for that,” she said, “as filmmakers, photographers, writers.” Otten believes that “do no harm” might be too lofty a goal, because “human interactions are fraught.” The standard isn’t perfection, but rather a discipline not to make life worse for the people trusting you with their stories.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Combating Kush in West Africa: A Conversation with Dr. Kars de Bruijne

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:56:55 +0000

A young man rolls a kush joint while others sleep in Freetown, Sierra Leone. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

In this interview, Dr. Kars de Bruijne shares his insights regarding the ongoing kush epidemic in West Africa. Dr. Bruijne argues that the rise of kush in Sierra Leone represents a broader trend towards synthetic opioid drug usage in low-income countries. Although kush remains embedded in local West African economies, Dr. Bruijne highlights how regional and international organizations can play a role in training law enforcement, providing medical support, and facilitating information sharing to prevent a further entrenchment of kush in the region.

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs: Can you please provide a brief overview of the kush epidemic? What is kush, and when did it first start appearing in West Africa?

Dr. Kars de Bruijne: Kush is a cheap synthetic drug that emerged in Sierra Leone in 2016 and quickly spread to neighboring countries, including Liberia and Guinea. Kush became increasingly prevalent between 2020 and 2022, and it remains a source of major concern across West Africa.

Until last year, the composition of kush was the subject of significant speculation. Rumors abounded that kush contained rat poison and ground human bones. To rectify these rumors and determine kush’s true makeup, the Global Initiative on Transnational Crime and my organization, the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingendael, conducted a research project. We identified two main variants of kush. The first contains synthetic cannabinoids, and the second contains synthetic opioids called nitazines. Nitazines can be more potent than fentanyl, and as a result, they are more deadly when consumed. This finding was particularly shocking and helps to explain why symptoms of kush consumption—such as dozing off and standing immobile for over 30 minutes at a time—are disturbingly similar to fentanyl.

GJIA: Why has Sierra Leone, as opposed to other coastal countries in West Africa, become the epicenter of the kush epidemic? Did any socioeconomic or political factors make Sierra Leone particularly conducive to the rise of kush?

KB: Rather than a particular factor endemic to Sierra Leone, I would argue that kush demonstrates the global threat posed by the rise of cheap synthetic drugs entering low-income markets. I think that kush is a starting point, and that similar epidemics will continue to emerge in impoverished regions worldwide.

That being said, two factors can help contextualize the rise of kush within Sierra Leone. First, there exists Sierra Leonean diaspora communities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and these communities facilitated the initial export of substances required to produce kush. However, these communities alone are not solely responsible for kush’s emergence. The second factor is Sierra Leone’s persistent gang problem, which became increasingly severe under the last regime. When the new government was elected in 2018, gangs aligned with the opposition were seen as a threat. Whether intentionally or accidentally, the rise of kush helped reduce the gang threat. It mollified gang leaders by providing an alternative way to make money, and it provided the gangs’ “foot soldiers” with a cheap drug to consume for enjoyment. I have heard one explanation for the government’s slow response which points to an implicit recognition that drug consumption had a positive effect on the security problem that the government inherited. Conversely, the government likely did not foresee kush becoming as problematic as it eventually did. Kush consumers were going missing and dying on the streets, but addressing the kush epidemic was not seen as a priority until several years after it emerged.

GJIA: In the recent report that you co-authored on kush, you mentioned that the Sierra Leonean government declared tramadol use a national emergency in 2016. How does the ongoing kush epidemic differ from the tramadol epidemic?

KB: The main difference between tramadol and kush is that tramadol can be used for legitimate medical purposes. Tramadol is commonly sold in pharmacies, and people in Sierra Leone are able to purchase it without a prescription. As tramadol usage worsened, pharmacy boards played an important role in regulating the inflow of tramadol. Pharmacies also staunched the flow of tramadol by raising prices. As tramadol prices increased, the consumption rate decreased.

Unlike tramadol, kush is an illicit drug whose production is firmly rooted in local communities. Kush production generally involves drug peddling and local cartels, so cracking down on production involves a significant law enforcement response. Since the kush production and distribution business is so localized, it is much more difficult to beat than tramadol. For example, a local community leader may be a prominent gang member with the power to co-opt local law enforcement into ignoring kush production. These local protection structures, combined with the challenges of detecting sellers and hideouts, present significant obstacles for combating kush. Likewise, the “cooks”—those who distill kush’s ingredients into its drug form—often operate out of small sheds and use cheap tools, which makes it harder to identify supply lines.

GJIA: You mentioned that materials required to produce kush are imported from abroad. Do you foresee a risk of kush, in turn, being exported to Latin America, Europe, the United States or other drug markets?

KB: Latin America, Europe, and the United States are all fairly saturated drug markets, in which users are accustomed to and can afford particular drugs. Since these markets have more options available, and users tend to have a comparatively higher income, it would be very difficult for kush to infiltrate them.

However, there may exist a relationship between the markets for opioids and nitazenes. Since the Taliban is cracking down on heroin production in Afghanistan, there has been an expectation that the global supply of heroin will decrease in the coming years. Some observers predict that nitazenes will replace this deficit. Although this possibility should not be ruled out, I do not foresee nitazenes in Western markets being sold in the form of kush. In the United States, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, nitazenes have already emerged in oxycodone tablets and other synthetic opioid medicines. These substances will likely continue to increase in popularity as heroin becomes more scarce and expensive.

GJIA: To what extent are West African terrorist groups involved in the trafficking of kush? Do you see potential for terrorist organizations to get involved?

KB: There is a preconception that Sahelian terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State affiliates, are involved in the drug trade. In reality, very little evidence indicates that this is true. Armed forces will occasionally find cannabis when they raid a terrorist camp, but in general, drug use is considered haram—forbidden—under Islamic law. When I speak to smugglers, they emphasize the importance of concealing drugs and avoiding detection when moving through terrorist-controlled territory.

GJIA: Do you think that regional bodies, such as the Economic Organization of West African States (ECOWAS) have a role to play in addressing the kush epidemic?

KB: Yes, ECOWAS definitely has a role to play. ECOWAS must draw attention to the crisis and reduce its spread by enacting early warning procedures. For example, in November 2024, a series of raids on kush production sites in Sierra Leone displaced some important players to other countries in the region. Through a regional body like ECOWAS, officials from neighboring states can collaborate and coordinate their response to this dispersion.

Outsiders should also play a role in staunching the epidemic. From what I have observed, the substances that give kush its potency are not produced within Sierra Leone. Rather, these ingredients are shipped from the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and China. Law enforcement in these countries must crack down on illegal exports and develop stronger oversight mechanisms for monitoring the outflow of goods to international markets.

GJIA: What steps can international organizations, such as the United Nations (UN), take to aid West African states in reducing the severity of the epidemic?

KB: The two UN branches that can have the greatest impact on the kush epidemic are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office of Drug Control (UNODC). One of the challenges in countering kush is the lack of access to medicines that can help people who use drugs to detox. The WHO should help local authorities establish rehabilitation clinics, where kush users can obtain medication to fight their addiction. The UNODC can play a dominant role in providing law enforcement training. Fundamentally, mitigating the kush epidemic requires preventing the drug from crossing borders and infiltrating new markets in West Africa. To achieve this goal, the UNODC can promote information sharing between different law enforcement agencies and train law enforcement officials to identify and interdict kush shipments.

GJIA: Lastly, you mentioned that you recently travelled to Sierra Leone to research kush. Did you see any differences between the current environment in Sierra Leone and your past trips?

KB: One change that I immediately noticed was a substantial increase in the price of kush, which far outpaced inflation. While kush is still a widespread problem, higher prices will likely facilitate a decrease in consumption rates. Secondly, the drug market in Sierra Leone has become increasingly diversified. Tramadol remains rampant, and marijuana—which became nearly obsolete amidst the rise of kush—appears to be regaining a share of the market. Although kush remains a deadly, unsolved, and extremely complex problem, these observations lead me to believe that the situation has marginally improved. This improvement may signify a short-term change, but it does not guarantee that kush is on the decline. Given the push-and-pull dynamics of regional drug markets, West African countries must remain vigilant to prevent the situation from worsening again in the future.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Interview conducted by Sydney Pappas.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Africa’s Capital Must Stay Home To Plug Its Financing Gap: How It Could Be Done

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:36:16 +0000

The African Union resolved in 2024 that its member states should redirect reserves held overseas back into the continent. Li Yahui/Xinhua via Getty Images

BY MISHECK MUTIZE

POST DOCTORAL RESEARCHER,

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS,

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Africa is providing cheap liquidity to wealthy nations. In return it is paying huge interest rates to external institutional investors at the cost of its own development.

For instance, African central banks export their reserve funds for safekeeping. Sovereign wealth funds and pension fund managers invest only in investment-grade European and United States institutions. The most popular one is risk-free US treasuries, where they earn 3.5% annually on average. These are perceived as the safest instruments, easily convertible to cash without losing value.

The same European and US institutions then reinvest the same capital back to Africa at a high return for themselves. They purchase high-yielding bonds issued by African governments. Cumulatively, Africa has raised more than US$200 billion through sovereign Eurobonds since 2003. African countries are paying between 9% and 15% through Eurobond issuances.

Based on my expertise researching African financial markets, I argue that African countries can close their financing gap if they change regulations and investment policies.

Channelling a portion of Africa’s domestic funds to the continent’s development finance institutions would create a huge pool of domestic resources. This will make a significant impact on development. It would not jeopardise the central banks and asset managers’ need for safety of their funds. This would be a practical step towards a self-sustaining African financial ecosystem.

Africa’s capital strength

African central banks hold an estimated US$530 billion in reserves offshore. This is an international financial practice promoted by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and credit rating agencies. Central banks are required to maintain enough US dollar reserves to pay for four to six months of imports.

The sovereign wealth funds of 20 African countries now have approximately US$109.8 billion in total assets under management. Adding other assets of African origin, the amount climbs up to an estimated US$1.2 trillion.

The latest report by Africa Finance Corporation estimates Africa’s domestic capital base at US$4 trillion. These are funds owned by African institutions and individual citizens in the form of reserves, collected deposits, premiums and savings.

Other countries such as China, South Korea and Japan used domestic resources and state-directed finance to aggressively drive their own industrial transformation.

This hasn’t been the case for African countries. The continent’s financing gap is estimated at US$280 billion annually for infrastructure and trade. That’s the amount African countries need every year to build roads, electricity capacity, ports, railways, manufacturing industries and trade connections necessary for African economies to grow and compete globally.

In addition, despite a huge domestic capital stock, African countries pay high interest rates when they borrow abroad.

A system designed for capital flight

The reason for Africa’s capital flight is systemic. Africa’s financial institutions, including central banks, are required by national regulations and investment policies to invest in investment-grade rated instruments. The only investment-grade ratings recognised by the IMF and World Bank are those issued by Moody’s, S&P and Fitch. This means the majority of African assets are excluded from the safe asset category.

The result is that African capital exits the continent. This has left African financial markets with fewer participants and investment instruments. Shallow financial markets make it difficult to finance industrialisation, infrastructure and job creation.

The absence of deep and liquid domestic financial markets becomes the justification for continuing to invest abroad. This is why African countries have remained heavily dependent on foreign capital and external debt despite growing domestic savings.

African central banks reserves

Three African leaders – the presidents of Ghana, Kenya and Zambia – have called for the continent’s foreign reserves invested overseas to be reinvested in African institutions.

At the 2025 Africa Financial Summit, central bankers agreed that it was time for African governments to place a portion of their foreign exchange reserves with domestic institutions.

Channelling a portion of these funds to African development institutions would be a practical step towards a self-sustaining African financial ecosystem. It would not compromise the effectiveness of central banks and other financial institutions. Instead, it would:

deepen domestic financial markets

bolster sovereignty

reduce dependence on foreign financial centres

strengthen local capital markets.

The Central Bank Deposit Programme by Afreximbank is a good example. Launched in September 2014, it invests in trade and development finance. The programme has mobilised over US$44 billion – about 9% of central bank reserves. Participating central banks have earned 6% to 6.5% – much higher than what investments in Europe and the US offer.

The programme’s performance demonstrates that African reserves can be safely and productively invested within the continent.

AU investment policy shift

It is for this reason that in February 2024 the African Union called on member states to redirect all their reserves back into the continent.

This was a landmark but long-overdue correction in the stewardship of Africa’s financial resources. It was more than an investment policy shift. It was a bold declaration of confidence in Africa’s own institutions and financial markets.

Since then, the AU’s own portfolio of resources has been fully reinvested in African-owned financial institutions. This declaration did not require ratification by AU member states.

What more needs to change

Building an African financing architecture demands a fundamental shift in how African assets are valued, regulated and invested. It means redefining risk for African markets. It also means developing regional investment-grade benchmarks and modernising prudential rules so that African capital can work and grow on the continent.

African capital markets remain shallow not because capital is scarce, but because risk perceptions are distorted. The rising discontent from African policymakers on the cost of capital makes the case even more compelling.

This is why a transformative project such as the Africa Credit Rating Agency has gained support in its pre-establishment phase.

African regulators and reserve managers must act decisively in the following ways:

change reserve management frameworks to allow more investment in African assets and regional financial institutions

formally recognise domestic credit ratings that offer contextually sensitive and empirically grounded assessments

reform IMF-driven constraints that exclude reserves placed in African institutions from being accounted as official reserves

allow rapid liquidity across borders when needed. This can be done while maintaining global standards to prevent illicit flows and regulatory breaches.

Africa cannot build credible domestic markets if its own capital is absent from the story. Investment is ultimately an act of confidence in the institutions behind the assets. The continent needs to invest in itself.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

The ‘Warrior Ethos’ Promises Victory — History Says It Leads To Defeat

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Fri, 22 May 2026 02:04:04 +0000

Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena watch a parade held in Hitler’s honor in 1938. Behind them, from left: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess. Bettmann/Getty Images

BY JOHN BROICH

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTOTY,

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

At Marine Corps Base Quantico in September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised assembled generals “maximum lethality” and no “stupid rules of engagement.” Under his leadership, the newly rebranded Department of War would “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill.” Troops would be held to the “highest male standard,” he said. “Weak men won’t qualify.”

Hegseth also restricted anonymous whistleblower and discrimination complaints and limited how long past misconduct can be held against a service member, weakening internal rules and oversight processes the military had built over decades.

Months later, with the Iran war underway, he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the U.S. was “punching (Iran) while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” He has also said the U.S. will give “no quarter, no mercy” to its enemies, language legal experts say can constitute a war crime under international law.

Hegseth calls his military doctrine the “warrior ethos.”

Historians of fascism have catalogued similar rhetorical patterns — strongman posturing, contempt for constraint — for decades.

I’m a historian of race and nationalism and author of “Blood, Oil and the Axis,” a book about World War II and nationalism in Iraq and Syria. I’ve studied how fascist regimes fight. At its core, fascism is ultranationalism fused with a cult of masculine strength, racial hierarchy, paranoia about socialism and contempt for democracy. It also has a theory of war: Victory belongs to the ruthless and the ideologically pure. Rules are for the weak.

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan all built their military strategies on some version of this ideology in the run-up to the Second World War. And in each case, the strategy failed, undone by its own contradictions.

The fascist theory of war

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

The closed circuit

Consider Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Before becoming Hitler’s foreign minister, he was a wine salesman whose years in Canada became his qualification for understanding America. He attached himself to Hitler and was rewarded with a top seat in his government, where Ribbentrop’s signature contribution was overruling the diplomats who warned that Americans would fight if pushed too far by the Axis.

The Nazi view prevailed: Americans were too racially mixed, too soft, too consumed by money to be dangerous. When Germany declared war on the U.S. four days after Pearl Harbor, it did so partly on that disdain for what Hitler called a “mongrel nation.” Ribbentrop was among the most consequentially wrong foreign ministers in modern history – he’d also misjudged Britain’s willingness to join the war over the invasion of Poland – still, he kept his job.

The ideology that produced Ribbentrop’s overconfidence also produced the Nazi theory of the Eastern Front: that Slavic peoples – fundamentally inferior and tainted by Bolshevism – would collapse within weeks. But the Red Army didn’t collapse. Hitler fired the officers who reported as much and demanded more of the same operations that had already failed. Operation Barbarossa, which was supposed to take weeks, stretched to years.

Attempting to match Hitler’s conquests and assert dominance over the Mediterranean, Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 with shorthanded divisions, in mountain terrain and at the start of winter, because he believed Italian spirit would overwhelm Greek resistance in two weeks. His generals had doubts, but many did not express them. The Greeks counterattacked, but Mussolini blamed his generals’ “insufficient will,” the only kind of failure his theory allowed. Germany had to intervene.

What the leader said happened

Connected to the fascist superiority complex is a contempt for feedback, creating a closed information system that can’t register failure, tolerate disagreement or revise a plan. Strategy requires accurate reporting, even when the news is bad, and the willingness to be wrong. Fascist regimes punish the first and refuse the second.

German high command was still reporting a controlled advance in November 1942 when its 6th Army, some 330,000 soldiers, was being encircled at Stalingrad. Hitler had declared the city practically taken; the press never reported the Soviet counteroffensive that surrounded it. When the remnants finally surrendered on Feb. 2, 1943, it was a turning point in the war – Germany’s first catastrophic defeat on the Eastern Front, from which the Wehrmacht never recovered.

Mussolini bragged about his mighty army of 8 million soldiers while 3.5 million – the real number – were being routed on three fronts in as many years.

Imperial Japan fused racial supremacy with a military code that forbade surrender and treated anyone who did as subhuman. Loyalty to the emperor was absolute; questioning his depiction of reality was betrayal.

In that environment, officers had every incentive to lie up the chain of command when reality on the ground did not match what leaders wanted to hear. For example, after the Battle of Midway, a catastrophic defeat for Japan in June 1942, naval headquarters filed reports that bore little resemblance to what happened. Later that year, the Imperial Navy told Tokyo they had sunk twelve American ships near today’s Taiwan when they had merely damaged two.

Two years of retreat later, the kamikaze program – which sent some 3,900 pilots to their deaths in suicidal crashes against Allied ships – was the logical conclusion: Let pilots prove their loyalty by dying.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

AI Can Design Cities, But Can It Understand What Matters To People? 10 Ways To Keep Humans In Control

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:10:13 +0000

Cottonbro Studio/Pexels, CC BY

BY ABEER ELSHATER AND HISHAM ABUSAADA

Generative AI (GenAI) is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content – like text, images, or ideas – by learning patterns from existing data. GenAI, particularly through large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek, is rapidly becoming part of everyday urban design research and practice.

The models can summarise literature in seconds, generate policy scenarios, and help draft complex narratives.

For urban designers and researchers working under pressure, this feels like a breakthrough. But beneath this efficiency lies a deeper question: are we enhancing urban design knowledge, or quietly reshaping it in ways we do not fully understand?

Urban design is an academic and professional field concerned with shaping the physical form and experience of cities. It looks at the relationships between buildings, spaces, people and activities within broader urban systems.

The field has evolved differently across regions, reflecting diverse historical, political and spatial contexts. For example, in Europe, urban design has often been shaped by post-war reconstruction and rehabilitation of the destroyed urban forms, while in the United States it has been influenced by urban renewal policies and large-scale redevelopment. Urban design is not a fixed set of principles, but a context-dependent theory and practice that responds to specific local challenges and conditions.

GenAI is now widely used in urban design to help with analysis and decision-making. For instance, researchers use machine learning to study pedestrian movement and traffic patterns from video data, which helps planners create safer and more efficient streets.

Some studies use GenAI to create and test different urban design options, such as changing land use, building density, or access to green spaces, so designers can quickly compare choices. In environmental planning, GenAI models can simulate urban heat or air quality, helping with climate-sensitive decisions. These examples show that GenAI provides ways to test ideas and handle complex challenges, rather than replacing designers.

Our work as urban designers and researchers has always depended on interpretation, context and ethical judgment. Cities are not just datasets; they are lived environments shaped by history, culture and power. When LLMs enter this space, they influence how problems are framed and how solutions are imagined. Their use therefore should not be just technical, but should be managed critically. Each theory developed for a particular city or place evolved to address the needs of specific groups of people within a distinct context and for a particular purpose. LLMs need to be developed faster to have this sensitivity about people and place history.

Our recent research was motivated by the rapid and often uncritical integration of LLMs into planning research and practice. The work asks a central question: how do these tools reshape the way urban knowledge is produced, interpreted and validated in a discipline that depends heavily on context, judgment and field-based understanding?

Our key finding is that LLMs can be very helpful; they can speed up writing, support analysis and help explore ideas. However, they also carry important risks, especially when their outputs are treated as fully correct or used without considering context.

We propose some cornerstones for responsible use. These are not strict rules, but practical guides to keep human judgment central, ensure ideas stay grounded in context, and maintain responsibility in planning research and practice.

10 cornerstones

Research sovereignty should remain with the human. The direction of inquiry must always come from the researcher. If planners begin by asking the model what to study or how to frame a problem, they risk producing inconsistency and generic outputs.

Engagement with GenAI is critical, not passive. LLMs generate plausible text based on patterns, not verified truth. This means every output should be tested and refined. Accepting it at face value risks embedding hidden biases and weak assumptions.

Knowledge should be grounded in context. Cities are deeply specific. A recommendation that works in one place may fail in another due to social, political, or cultural differences. LLMs tend to produce generalised solutions without understanding local realities. Planners must anchor these suggestions in field knowledge and community insight.

Everyone should be careful. They should not trust GenAI too quickly. In planning debates such as zoning or rent control, LLMs can sound very confident, even when they are wrong. Sometimes they may even give references that do not exist. This can spread incorrect information and weaken trust in research.

While any of the LLMs can assist in identifying and organising sources, they cannot replace the critical judgment required to assess accuracy, context and fit. The responsibility for validating references remains with the researcher.

Planners must recognise that LLMs do not “remember” in the way humans do. They lack continuity across conversations and can lose track of earlier assumptions. AI forgets things. Maintaining coherence in long-term research, therefore, depends on the researcher, not the tool.

A subtler issue is rigidity. LLMs often repeat dominant ideas or default solutions, even when the context differs. For example, when asked how to improve a congested street, an LLM may suggest widening roads or adding car lanes, even where such interventions could harm walkability and heritage value. Breaking out of these patterns requires active intervention.

We can understand GenAI as a partner in thinking, but not an equal one. The planner must decide what matters, whose voices are included, and what ethical priorities guide the work.

Effective use of GenAI requires strategic manoeuvring. This means combining AI-generated insights with collected data, community engagement and professional judgment. The value of LLMs lies not in replacing urban design processes, but in enriching them, if used carefully.

Academic integrity is non-negotiable. Urban design research is not just about producing text; it is about engaging intellectually with people, places and consequences.

Why this matters

GenAI in urban design is like fire – powerful, but dangerous without human control.

Used well, GenAI can help urban designers think more broadly and act more effectively. Used poorly, it risks reducing urban design to automated generalisation, detached from the lived experience of cities.

The future of urban design is not about choosing between humans and machines, but about designing thoughtful collaboration between them. The challenge is not whether machines can think, but how we think with them.

READ RIGINAL STORY HERE

A Draft African Charter On ‘Family Values’ Is On The Cards: Why It’s Flawed And Dangerous

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:50:56 +0000

African Union Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A draft charter wants African governments to ‘protect’ the family by engaging in several regressive actions. Wikimedia Commons

BY CATRIONA MACLEOD, GODFREY KANGAUDE AND NICOLA JEAREY-GRAHAM

A series of conferences held in Entebbe, Uganda, between 2023 and 2025 have resulted in a draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values. The meetings were organised by the Inter-parliamentary Network on African Sovereignty and Values, which organises continental conferences for African legislators and faith-based advocates. Supported by international conservative groups like Family Watch International and heavily promoted by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, the aim of the drafters of the charter is to convince African governments to sign on to it.

The draft charter is situated within the current global movement to the right, which prioritises nationalism, tougher immigration policies and an erosion of social values like gender equity. Framed as an effort to “protect” the family, it urges governments to adopt a series of regressive measures.

These include:

opposing comprehensive sexuality education

rejecting the sexual and reproductive health and rights agenda, especially abortion (under any circumstance)

establishing African “sovereignty” over health, food, education and economic development

preserving African cultural values, traditions and the role of elders.

Several legal responses have been set out by African rights institutions, such as Afya Na Haki. These show the clash of many of the draft charter’s proposals with continental legal provisions.

We are researchers with extensive experience in sexual and reproductive health and rights. Here, we address the inaccuracies contained in the charter. We are particularly concerned about the implications if it is adopted.

Decades of scientific evidence produced on the African continent and elsewhere suggest that the measures, if adopted, will cause significant harm.

Reproductive health and rights

The draft charter declares, among other things, that African countries shouldn’t ratify any agreements that reference sexual and reproductive health and rights. It also calls for eliminating comprehensive sexuality education and any form of abortion service provision.

At a very basic level, disregarding sexual and reproductive health undermines obstetric and gynaecological care, childbirth and fertility treatments. It also affects the prevention and treatment of HIV and sexually transmitted infections. It harms access to contraceptive services and family planning, as well as reproductive cancer care. No African country would sensibly contemplate this.

Additionally, the draft falsely claims that the sexual and reproductive health rights “agenda” promotes abortion on demand. Yet, the UN’s definition of “reproductive health” encompasses comprehensive abortion care within countries’ legal frameworks.

The draft charter encourages states to define all related terms to clearly exclude any rights to abortion. No exceptions are specified. This would include cases where the pregnant person’s life is at risk, as well as pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

This stance contradicts understandings of abortion within African countries. A 2025 survey conducted across 38 African countries found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of citizens say abortion is justified if the woman’s health or life is at risk. Nearly half (48%) justified abortion in the case of rape or incest.

The draft also flies in the face of recent changes in African law. Globally, Africa, compared with other regions, has had the largest number of countries liberalising abortion laws since 1994.

Implementing the draft charter would additionally lead to a significant increase in maternal mortality from unsafe abortions. It’s important to note that the proportion of unwanted and unsupportable pregnancies that end in abortion is consistently similar across countries with liberal or restrictive abortion laws. This means that restrictive laws don’t reduce abortion rates. They merely drive abortion underground, rendering it unsafe.

Already, sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 29% of the global unsafe abortions and 62% of abortion-related deaths. Further restrictions on comprehensive abortion care (including post-abortion care) would drive up maternal morbidity and mortality.

Comprehensive sexuality education

The draft charter argues for abstinence-focused sexuality education. It falsely claims that comprehensive education would sexualise African children, undermine their innocence and violate parental rights.

Comprehensive sexuality education is a curriculum-based, scientifically accurate process of teaching and learning about the cognitive, emotional, physical and social aspects of sexuality. It encourages abstinence but also provides teaching, in an age-appropriate manner, on contraception and ways to avoid sexual risks. These risks include infections and unplanned pregnancies.

Research conducted over three decades indicates that comprehensive sexuality education provides more positive outcomes than abstinence-based sexuality education. These outcomes include reducing early and unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases (including HIV). It also helps delay early initiation of sexual activity and reduces intimate partner violence.

In claiming that comprehensive sexuality education undermines children’s innocence, the draft charter conflates “innocence” with ignorance. Children have a natural curiosity regarding sexual issues once they reach puberty. They will seek out information where they can (including social media). One of the ways of protecting them from sex-related harms is to empower them with age-appropriate knowledge about sexual issues. And the skills to avoid sexual risks.

Comprehensive sexuality education also recognises that parents often struggle with talking to their children about sexual matters. It therefore offers an important source of trustworthy information for children and adolescents. Further, while the family is of pre-eminent importance in society, it can also be the site of child abuse, child neglect and intimate partner violence.

Definition of family

Finally, the draft charter defines the family as based on marriage between a man and a woman. This definition of family as nuclear and heterosexual is not an originally African one.

In precolonial Africa, the practice of polygyny/polyandry was prevalent. This presented a clear contrast to the nuclear, monogamous model. In reality, family structures are highly diverse in Africa. They include many multigenerational, single-parent, re-constituted and same-sex parent families.

The draft charter dresses up its provisions in the language of ubuntu. This is a relational, inclusive and dynamic ethical philosophy. In doing so, it distorts the essence of ubuntu by converting this philosophy into a rigid, exclusionary and state-focused ideology.

What next

The draft charter threatens to undermine the rule of law and the shared legal principles that underpin the international treaty system. It claims to defend African sovereignty.

But true sovereignty means honouring the treaties governments have freely adopted. These include the Maputo Protocol, which guarantees women extensive rights, including reproductive health choices and protection from violence. The African Children’s Charter similarly enshrines children’s rights to protection, development and well-being.

The draft charter is not defence of African values. It’s a legal coup against them. It should be dismissed outright by all African governments.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Texas Tech’s New Limits On How Faculty Teach Gender Identity And Sexual Orientation Challenge More Than Free Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:41:01 +0000

Texas Tech University’s main campus is in Lubbock, Texas. David Kozlowski/Moment Mobile via Getty Images

BY HENRY F. FRADELLA

PROFESSOR OF CRIMINOLOGY

AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE,

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Texas Tech University, a public university in Lubbock, announced in April 2026 that its five schools would phase out all academic credentials centered on sexual orientation or gender identity. The new policy, detailed in a six-page memo on April 9, also requires instructors to use “alternate materials” when courses address these topics.

Texas Tech, led by former Texas Republican state legislator Brandon Creighton, is not the first university to try to restrict instruction on gender, sexual orientation and other topics in recent years.

In 2023, for example, Florida passed legislation that banned students at public universities from majoring in critical race theory, gender studies, queer theory and intersectionality.

Texas Tech, however, goes further with this new memo. It also bars graduate students from writing “degree-culminating” theses or dissertations on sexual orientation or gender identity, something no other major public university system appears to have done.

As a scholar who studies the intersection of law, science and public policy, I doubt the policy would survive a possible constitutional challenge in court, given First Amendment freedom of speech protections. Even if courts ultimately strike the policy down, though, it may still leave a lasting mark, by signaling that some universities are willing to prioritize politics over independent academic inquiry.

Texas Tech’s policy shift

Texas Tech’s policy, which will begin taking effect in June 2026, requires faculty to teach in compliance with a 2025 Texas law that declares there are “only two human sexes.”

The law echoes the language of an executive order the Trump administration issued in January 2025 that said “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.”

Despite that air of certainty, there is substantial scientific literature that shows people’s biological variation does not fit a strict binary model.

Texas Tech faculty will soon be largely prohibited from teaching about gender fluidity or gender as a spectrum. There are narrow exceptions to this rule, such as discussions about intersex traits, so long as instructors do not “advocate for or validate sociological frameworks.”

Although current faculty may continue researching “topics of their choosing,” new faculty will be hired “in alignment” with the memo.

Students, meanwhile, can continue to conduct “general independent student research,” and write standard term papers, for example, on one of these subjects. But students cannot write graduate theses or dissertations on sexual orientation and gender identity.

By legal standards, these new policies are not neutral, curricular decisions. This is because the state of Texas favors one viewpoint – that there are only two biological sexes – that this public university system now reflects.

For nearly 60 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the idea of viewpoint discrimination at universities. This discrimination occurs when the government or another authority allows speech favoring one opinion, while restricting speech expressing an opposing opinion.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees the region where Texas Tech is located, has also long recognized that “classroom discussion is protected activity.”

In a statement to the Associated Press in April, Creighton said that the school is “focused on ensuring our academic programs are rigorous, relevant, and produce degrees of value.”

He added that this focus “is matched by our unwavering support for the First Amendment and the open exchange of ideas that define a public university. Texas Tech will continue to be a national leader on both fronts.”

Part of a broader story

The Texas Tech policy is the latest example of a broader political effort to reshape what public universities may teach and research.

Several other public universities have also recently limited programs or coursework involving gender and identity studies.

In 2022, Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act, restricted instruction perceived as endorsing certain race-related concepts in classrooms and workplace training sessions. Some faculty members left Florida public universities, citing concerns about censorship and political interference in higher education.

In 2022, federal judge Mark Walker called that Florida law “positively dystopian” and barred its enforcement, holding that the state cannot grant academic freedom only to viewpoints it favors. The restrictions remain blocked, pending appeal.

Texas A&M English professor Melissa McCoul sued that university after she was fired in September 2025, following a classroom discussion she led about gender identity.

Texas A&M later eliminated its women’s and gender studies degree program in January 2026.

The University of Texas at Austin consolidated four ethnic studies departments and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department into a single Department of Social and Cultural Analysis in February 2026. The university is also reviewing which majors, minors and courses within that new department students may pursue and enroll in.

These changes reflect a broader political climate in which some politicians and university leaders increasingly frame gender identity and other academic subjects as ideological positions, rather than scholarly areas of research. That trend has intensified alongside the Trump administration’s executive orders, actions and rhetoric surrounding gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Limiting academic research

Texas Tech was established in 1923 to prepare students for technical and agricultural professions, and “elevate the ideals, enrich the lives, and increase the capacity of the people for democratic self-government.”

That mission reflects the American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The statement describes universities as dedicated to “the common good” through the “free search for truth.”

Universities are therefore expected to pursue scholarly inquiry according to disciplinary standards and academic expertise, not partisan priorities. That commitment is reflected in the thesis and dissertation process, through which faculty evaluate students’ ability to conduct independent research and contribute to disciplinary knowledge.

Although disfavored on some Texas and Florida campuses, topics such as HIV disparities in LGBTQ+ populations continue to be studied elsewhere as public-health subjects. The same is true for suicide risk and family rejection among LGBTQ+ adolescents and services for transgender youth.

With such lines of inquiry curtailed, some Texas Tech students now question whether the university can still provide an “honest education.” Some Texas Tech faculty members are openly discussing looking for other jobs.

Restricting academic independence

A September 2025 survey by the American Association of University Professors documented the toll of political interference on university faculty across the country, including in Texas.

One-quarter of the 1,100 Texas professors and researchers surveyed said they are seeking jobs outside the state. More than 60% said they would not encourage graduate students or colleagues to work at a university in Texas.

When the state decides which questions may and may not be researched, it is doing more than shaping curriculum. It is regulating the boundaries of knowledge itself by determining what future scholars may study and what universities are permitted to discover.

That – more than any single line in a memo – is what I believe should concern anyone who cares about the integrity of higher education. And it is precisely the danger longstanding First Amendment protections for academic freedom were designed to prevent.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

Agriculture In Africa: Science And Research Can’t Make An Impact Without Investment And Good Policies

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:28:02 +0000

Women rice farmers in Senegal. Photo by Alvo Pavan, via Getty Images

BY PAPE ABDOULAYE SECK

CHERCHEUR ACADEMIE NATIONALE,

DES SCIENCE ET TECHNIQUES

DU SENEGAL (ANSTS)

Agriculture is the lifeblood of Africa. More than 60% of African households depend directly or indirectly on the land for their livelihoods. And the continent has nearly 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land.

Farming is a fragile sector, however. It has to deal with climate change, market volatility, weak infrastructure and demographic pressure. Addressing these challenges requires political commitment and investment. It also requires science, innovation and high-quality research.

I have been involved in scientific research, particularly agricultural research, for more than four decades. My roles have included researcher, member of multiple science academies, director general of the Africa Rice Center/CGIAR, and Senegal’s minister in charge of agricultural research.

Throughout these years, one criticism has repeatedly surfaced: agricultural research is often perceived as expensive while delivering little for people. This perception is widely shared and frequently echoed in political and media debates.

Based on my experience, I believe the criticism rests on a questionable assumption: that the impact of science depends exclusively on those who produce it. When innovations fail to change the world, scientists themselves are often presented as the culprits.

The reality is far more complex. The history of agricultural transformation across the world shows that research alone never changes societies. Impact follows when an agricultural ecosystem effectively connects science to producers, markets, finance, institutions and public policy.

International institutions have highlighted the difficulties many developing countries face in turning scientific knowledge into development. The reasons include weak innovation ecosystems, too little infrastructure and limited institutional coordination.

An example of what success looks like is the Green Revolution in Asia. Scientific breakthroughs improved wheat and rice varieties which transformed agriculture. It was not simply because the science was strong. There were other factors too. They included governments investing in irrigation, extension services, rural infrastructure, credit systems and market organisation.

In India and Vietnam, for example, science operated within a coherent system linking researchers, farmers, institutions and markets.

Science generates knowledge, informs policies, stimulates innovation and opens new possibilities. But it does not change societies on its own.

The missing parts

Recent decades have brought advances on a number of fronts. In seeds, irrigation, soil fertility management, climate adaptation, biotechnology, digital agriculture, agroecology and sustainable food systems.

African researchers, universities and international agricultural research centres have contributed enormously to this progress.

Rwanda and Ethiopia provide useful examples of how coordinated ecosystems can speed up change. In both, stronger links between research, extension systems, public investment and farmer support mechanisms have made a difference. They have contributed to faster uptake of new technologies. And they have led to productivity gains in several strategic crops such as maize, rice, cassava, beans and soybeans.

Another example is rice. During my years at AfricaRice, I saw major scientific advances in rice research. This included the development of New Rice for Africa varieties. ⁠ These resulted from years of scientific work combining the high productivity potential of Asian rice with the resilience of African rice, particularly its tolerance to drought, poor soils and local climatic stresses. It wasn’t easy, because the two rice species are genetically distant.

Farmers quickly took up the new varieties. Farmer incomes and food production improved in countries where governments, seed systems, extension services and development partners worked together. In Uganda, Guinea and several west African countries, coordinated programmes helped accelerate adoption among smallholder farmers.

These examples show that effective agricultural innovation will only be adopted and scaled if several conditions are met together. These include:

access to inputs and technologies

accessible financing

efficient extension services

functioning infrastructure

organised markets

coherent, predictable public policies.

Without these conditions, innovations often remain confined to research stations, pilot projects or scientific publications. Where seed systems, rural financing or market organisation are weak, good science makes little difference.

In several African countries, farmers aren’t using improved seed varieties because they can’t get certified seeds at scale. Likewise, promising innovations in irrigation, post-harvest technologies or digital agriculture have struggled because of weaknesses in infrastructure, rural credit or institutional coordination.

What’s needed

Debates on agricultural research in Africa must go beyond simplistic criticism. Agricultural research should not be viewed as a cost. Rather it is a strategic investment in food security, economic sovereignty, environmental sustainability, public health, social stability and human dignity.

Blaming science for lacking impact masks the weaknesses of broader development systems.

As Africa faces the defining challenge of the 21st century – feeding its population without destroying the planet – it would be a mistake to weaken scientific research. The continent must instead strengthen alliances between science, policy, finance, private sector actors, farmers, universities and civil society.

Across Africa, emerging innovation platforms show that when these actors work together, scientific advances can create tangible economic and social change. The challenge now is to broaden this beyond isolated successes.

In the end, the impact of science is a collective responsibility.

And science can only change the world when societies decide to give it the means to do so.

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A Football World Cup Is A Global Cultural Exchange. How Will That Work In Trump’s America?

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:10:09 +0000

The FIFA 2025 Peace Prize was awarded to President Donald Trump ahead of a divisive World Cup outing. Aaron Schwartz/Getty Images

BY CHUKA ONWUMECHILI

PROFESSOR OF COMMUNICATIONS,

HOWARD UNIVERSITY

The most culturally diverse men’s football World Cup in history is taking place in the United States at a time when foreign nationals feel less and less welcome in the country.

The 2026 competition kicks off on 11 June with games in Canada, Mexico, and the US. The US will host by far the largest number of matches, including the championship game. The 2026 cup is also hosting the largest number of competing teams in history – 48.

Over its near century-long history, the competition has remained the premier sporting event, attracting the largest number of travellers. Some spend huge sums of personal savings to be at the matches to cheer on their country and favourite teams.

Held every four years, the International Federation of Association Football (Fifa) World Cup is a mega sporting event that serves as a large avenue for cultural meetings and exchanges.

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar attracted 1.4 million visitors to a country of slightly over 2 million people. The number of travellers for the 2026 World Cup is expected to drop to 1.2 million due in part to the activities of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Still, the number remains significant.

As a professor of intercultural communication, with decades of research connecting culture to communication, I have found the World Cup of particular interest. The number of global travellers to the World Cup brings with it cultural communication exchanges that cannot be overstated.

Intercultural communication involves contact between people with differing beliefs, values and norms. Cultural communication theorists define such exchanges over a short period as the earliest stages of acculturation, called the honeymoon stage.

It is an important stage of cultural encounter that helps advance social comfort and learning. It eases anxiety in a different cultural environment. These encounters go beyond the stadiums that will host games. They include encounters in neighbourhood stores, transport systems, bars and hotels, among others. Even for those watching remotely.

Matches on the field have the power to rise above the politics of the day and bring cultural unity.
Football and cultural exchange

Cultural encounters at previous World Cups have led to the spread of fan culture across the world. Think of the spread of the stadium wave or use of the vuvuzela, a coloured plastic horn.

The wave involves sections of fans in a stadium standing up by turns. This provides a spectacle that is believed to have spread to most of the world after magnificent wave scenes at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico.

At the 2010 World Cup, a South African fan tradition of blowing the vuvuzela spread to the rest of the world. There were vigorous attempts to clamp down on it because it was so noisy. But a few fans have kept the tradition alive.

Cultural exchange remains a critical aspect of a World Cup. The 2026 event will be no different. While most media reports focus on the vivid exchanges like the wave and vuvuzela, there are others that happen at the interpersonal and small group levels. Those exchanges can be just as long lasting. They include friendships, cultural learning, and the countering of cultural loathing and stereotyping.

How will that work in the US?

The US is a strong location for such cultural exchange. The country has historically accepted the largest number of migrants in the world and the resulting interactions have led to indelible cultural impact over generations. There is, for instance, a large Asian population in the north-west parts of the country and a large Mexican population in the south.

Yet, in 2026, the US has created an unwelcome situation for potential travellers. ICE raids on suspected migrant populations have dominated the news for months. This has an impact on numbers.

Hotel bookings are far below expectation in 11 US host cities. One report claims there is a booking pace “below expectations, trailing even a typical June or July without any major events”. Human Rights Watch has urged Fifa to pressure the US government to establish an “ICE Truce” during the competition.

An expensive trip

Fans hoping to attend the World Cup are also reportedly concerned about ticket and transport prices. Recently, Fifa’s marketplace, which serves as a resale platform, advertised “four tickets to the final at a cost of $2.3 million each”. While Fifa does not control pricing on its resale site, it takes 15% of the purchase fee from the buyer and 15% from the seller. This means Fifa would make US$690,000 if just one of the tickets sold at that price. It’s a staggering sum for a football match.

Fifa president Gianni Infantino defended the high cost of tickets by claiming it was the cost of doing business in the US market. Yet, such prices are nearly five times higher than the last World Cup in Qatar.

The New Jersey transport system eventually set train roundtrip transport at US$105 after a public outcry after an initial plan to increase the fare to US$150. The fare normally costs US$18.

The high costs and hyper immigration control associated with attending the World Cup in the US are likely responsible for the dampened hotel bookings.

Global broadcasts

There are even concerns with global broadcasts of games. China and India, the two most populated countries in the World Cup, may not often reach the final stages, but they are avid viewers of the games. Neither has access as Fifa has yet to reach TV and digital coverage agreements with providers in those countries. At the 2022 World Cup, the two countries reportedly accounted for 22.6% of total global TV reach. China alone accounted for 49.8% of viewing hours on digital and social platforms. The dispute involves the huge sums Fifa is asking for broadcast rights.

There are cultural exchanges that the World Cup provides even for those who watch from home in different parts of the world. While not as powerful as cultural learning through in-person contacts, there are still opportunities to learn, depending on the focus of the media coverage.

The men’s World Cup, which celebrates 100 years in 2030 and is co-hosted by an African country (Morocco), remains a key event in fostering cultural understanding and exchange. While the 2026 World Cup will do this, it has also brought to the fore the event’s ability to create division.

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100 Million African Children Are Not In School. What’s Driving The Trend And How To Reverse It

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:38:12 +0000

Schooling at a Sudanese refugee camp in Chad. Photo by Joris Bolomey / AFP via Getty Images

BY MOSES NGWARE

SENIOR RESEARCH SCIENTIST,

AFRICAN POPULATION AND

HEALTH RESEARCH CENTER

Many countries across Africa have embraced universal basic education policies in recent decades. But recent data has revealed that more than 100 million children and adolescents remain out of school, out of a total potential population of 469 million. The latest statistics suggest that after some years of progress, the situation is deteriorating. Education and youth empowerment scholar Moses Ngware and his co-researchers recently carried out an analysis of trends going back 25 years. Their main findings are set out below.

What are the school attendance trends in Africa across all age groups?

In 2000, the number of out-of-school children in primary school, lower secondary and upper secondary was above 100 million. It was down to about 90 million in 2014, and then up again to 100 million by 2025.

Viewed against Africa’s high population growth of above 2.5%, these absolute numbers suggest that school participation is not keeping pace.

Nevertheless, between 2000 and 2024, the proportion of out-of-school children and adolescents declined at all education levels. It fell from 37% to 20% for primary schools; from 47% to 35% for lower secondary and from 56% to 47% for upper secondary school-age children. This is despite the absolute numbers of out-of-school children remaining high.

Countries that showed greatest improvement included Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Madagascar and Mozambique. Improvements were driven by at least two main factors. First, targeted policy responses that enabled them to achieve good coverage in a short time. Second, a strong political will combined with a multi-sectoral approach. The approaches included combining conditional cash transfers for households, food supplies, expanding access to schools and implementing universal education policies that reduce cost of schooling for households.

On the other hand, there are countries that made little or no progress. They include Angola, Cape Verde, Lesotho, South Sudan and Zimbabwe. The main drivers of the low progress are:

political instability, as seen in South Sudan

poor economic performance, as witnessed in Zimbabwe

the high opportunity cost of schooling, as seen in Lesotho, where boys drop out due to poverty related coping mechanisms, including herding cattle, with only one in every five boys completing grade 12.

What are the notable changes in recent years?

In the past five years, we have seen a steady increase in absolute numbers of out-of-school children and adolescents from 95 million to 100 million, with an average of about 1 million children either not transitioning from primary to secondary school or leaving school or not joining school at all.

There are two main drivers of such a trend. First, finance – the fizzling effect of the universal basic education subsidies of the early 2000s. These subsidies made basic education affordable to many households. Of the 42 African countries with free education in their policies, only three were in a position to offer free schooling in 2025. Donor funding of education by multilateral organisations has also been reduced, with education aid in Africa declining by 7% in 2024. Second, the negative impact of COVID-19, with about 10 million who left school due to the lockdowns never to return, for various reasons, including forced marriages among girls and child labour for boys.

Across all the schooling levels, higher than before rates of out-of-school children and adolescents were observed in the Sahel region, in Central African Republic, Chad, Mauritania and northern Nigeria. These countries or regions are characterised by politically motivated violence, harsh climatic changes and a history of low school participation.

Why is school completion important for societies?

The main benefits to societies of school completion include transition to decent work, girls’ empowerment, and improved health outcomes. An additional year of schooling increases an individual’s lifetime earnings by about 10% on average, with a potential to increase an individual’s purchasing power. Such benefits can also trickle down to households through providing household financial stability and enhanced family support.

For girls, school completion is critical for participation in decision making at societal level. Research shows that a woman’s power to make decisions, such as education for her children or where to invest, increases with education attainment. This has a bearing on economic independence and gender equity within the society.

Furthermore, and related to these two benefits, children of mothers who have completed secondary education have a 45% lower under-3 mortality rate. This implies that such children have about half the risk of death before age 3 compared to those born to mothers with no education.

What are the gender dynamics?

By 2025, the proportion of males that were out of school, at 51%, was only slightly higher than that of females. However, the out-of-school female rate was on the rise – up by two percentage points in 10 years.

If this growth continues, then the proportion of out-of-school females will overtake that of males in the coming years. This will compound the vulnerabilities disadvantaged girls face in their schooling journey and transition to work.

In addition, the gains made in the last three decades in closing gender gaps in education will be eroded. Eroding the gains made in education has severe consequences, especially for girls. For instance, we are likely to see an increase in females getting married much earlier, and child bearing among adolescents may also increase.

What lessons can we learn from the better-placed countries?

There are a number of important lessons to be learnt from countries that have lowered the number of out-of-school children and adolescents.

First, Algeria, Ghana, Kenya and Rwanda have relied on a strong national policy framework backed by political good will, high-level central coordination and donor-partner support.

Second is the importance of targeted social support such as school feeding and conditional cash transfers. Close evaluations using hard data are needed.

Third is the elimination of significant direct fees or levies at basic education level, with timely financial disbursements and school supplies.

Fourth is the lesson that affirmative action for vulnerable populations is an invaluable investment. These populations include disadvantaged girls, children from remote rural areas, children with disabilities, and children from poor households.

Finally, there are other interventions that can add value depending on the context. These include reducing travel distance through expanding infrastructure, and flexible school entry, such as late entry to improve participation. Another is catch-up programmes, which means accelerating progression to recover lost time and learning.

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Millions Of Farmers In Africa’s Great Lakes Region Face Rising Temperatures. Study Predicts How Crop Disease And Pests Could Spread

noreply@blogger.com (Ambrose Ehirim) — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:05:39 +0000

Planting groundnuts on a family farm in Uganda. Badru Katumba/Getty Images

BY ROMARIC ARMEL MOUAFO TCHINDA, AARON I. PLEX SULA, JACOB ROBLEDO BURITICA AND KAREN GARRETT

Farming in the Great Lakes region of Africa (which includes Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Kenya) is challenging because of changing environments and ongoing social and political tensions. These tensions include conflict over resources. As a result, agricultural productivity is low and there’s a high rate of food insecurity there.

It’s difficult for farmers to manage their farms well when they don’t have enough high quality seed and then also experience extreme weather conditions like floods, drought and heat waves. Armed conflict and crop diseases and pests make the situation worse by damaging crops. Losses to disease and pests are often higher in low-input agricultural systems, where there is limited access to agricultural infrastructure and inputs like fertiliser and pesticides, as is common in sub-Saharan Africa.

We are part of a team of plant pathologists who study crop diseases and pests and then come up with strategies to manage and prevent losses. In our latest research, our team sampled 27 crop pathogens and pests on banana, cassava, potato, and sweet potato crops across altitudes in Burundi and Rwanda.

We then used machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, to see how these pests and diseases may spread when the climate warms more. We wanted to identify high-risk locations and potential shifts in particular pathogens and pests under climate change scenarios.

In “climate matching” studies like this one, researchers evaluate a set of species – in our case, pathogens (disease-causing organisms like viruses or bacteria) and crop-damaging organisms like aphids and weevils – and consider how these species may change across a region as climates change. Information about pathogens and pests at a lower altitude gives a preview of the future at higher altitudes, as the higher altitudes become warmer.

Our research found that hotter temperatures are likely to change the distribution and dynamics of crop pathogens and pests in the Great Lakes region. Climate change may allow them to spread to new altitudes and regions where they were less common in the past. This would affect food security crops that are key to the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers.

Climate change can push crop pests uphill into new farmland

We used a modelling toolbox to identify which cropland areas can make it easier for pathogens and pests that target specific crops to spread.

Our research shows how parts of Rwanda, Burundi and the surrounding area can be pathways for pests and disease to spread through crop fields.

Higher temperatures can make this worse. Pathogens and pests like particular conditions. Higher temperatures may allow crop pathogens and pests to spread to new regions where they were less likely to thrive in the past.

We saw that, as the hills and mountains in the Great Lakes region heat up, 44% of the 27 pathogens and pests could become more common at higher altitudes. This means smallholder farmers will need to adapt.

Another important finding is that not all pathogens and pests will become bigger problems. We found evidence that 17% may become less common at higher altitudes. This is because conditions may become a bit too hot for them. It’s important for national agricultural programmes to know which pathogens and pests they need to plan for now and in the future.

How farmers can adapt and protect their crops

Our results provide a foundation for future work to improve decision-making tools that predict where and when crop diseases and pests are likely to occur. Our findings can be used to develop tools for growers and policymakers to make decisions based on climate change realities.

Farmers and agricultural stakeholders – extension specialists, government agencies and humanitarian groups – need to adapt so that they can protect crop health and productivity. They can do this through climate-smart agriculture (which involves adopting farming practices that increase food production, help crops adapt to climate change, and protect the environment). At the same time, farmers can implement better crop management practices to reduce food insecurity while building resilience to climate change.

As the world heats up, it’s going to become more important for governments to carry out regular pest and disease surveillance, and forecast where plant diseases need management. Knowing which diseases and pests are likely to spread more will be key to planning how to adapt.

There are many opportunities for improving disease surveillance, predictive modelling, and sustainable pest management strategies. When long-term, high-resolution disease and pest data are available for more regions, predictions and strategies can be improved. Farmers will know in advance if they need to grow disease-resistant varieties or change which crops they grow.

However, many national plant protection organisations face resource limitations, personnel shortages, and insufficient infrastructure. This limits their ability to implement comprehensive monitoring and response programmes.

Another problem is that when crops are poorly managed or abandoned during disasters, pathogens and pests can spread more easily throughout the region.

With better information, government agencies and humanitarian organisations can plan in advance to target the most important pathogens and pests, and work to protect the locations that will be hardest hit.

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