MAYOR OF IGBOS

Study geopolitics long enough and you stop looking for the good guys. Every actor on the board is protecting something it owns. Countries, sponsors, companies, all of them moving to keep what they have. No country wants you better off because it cares about you. Nobody stops a war out of concern for innocent civilians. When they use that language, listen for what they want. War is an industry with shareholders. Global military spending hit a record $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh straight annual increase. The hundred largest arms companies booked $679 billion in 2024, the highest figure SIPRI has ever recorded, up 26 percent in a decade. A Czech firm, Czechoslovak Group, grew its arms revenue by 193 percent in one year making artillery shells for Ukraine. Your ally's help is somebody's order book. Insecurity has suppliers. A ragtag militia does not stumble onto AK-47s and anti-tank missiles in the bush. Every rifle left a factory with a serial number on it. Somebody shipped it. Somebody signed an end-user certificate swearing it was bound for a legitimate army, and SIPRI found export certification practices deeply inconsistent, which is the polite way of saying the paperwork is a formality. The guns often come from closer to home than you think. Conflict Armament Research examined weapons seized from jihadist groups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger between 2015 and 2023. At least one fifth had been diverted from the state custody of eight North and West African countries. They came out of government armouries. And after Libya collapsed in 2011, weapons looted from Gaddafi's stockpiles turned up with armed groups in Mali, Niger, Chad, Cote d'Ivoire, the Central African Republic and Syria. A war Africa did not start is still killing Africans fifteen years later. We have had years of financial sanctions on terror organisations, and the weapons keep arriving. The money never touches the banks anyone is watching. Artisanal mines in JNIM's areas produce up to 725 kilograms of gold a year, worth roughly $34 million, moving out through the UAE, Turkey and Switzerland. Between 2017 and 2023 the group carried out 845 of the 1,100 recorded kidnappings across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. In Youwarou district in Mali, cattle theft alone brought in $739,200 in 2021. Gold, ransoms, livestock, fuel, cigarettes. Cash that walks across a border and never becomes a wire transfer. Geopolitics deserves serious attention from anyone who wants their country back. That means dropping the emotional defence when our favourites get caught. They did it to protect their interests. Their rivals do the same. Morality is what states say. Interest is what they do. Stop reading the press release. Follow the money instead.