War’conomics and a labelled genocide
A Region Insecurity, poverty, death, banditry, kidnapping, and ransom have become tragically familiar refrains. This grim reality was underscored by the massacre of 26 farmers in the village of Dembo, which followed an attack on the town of Makande, where bandits killed dozens and abducted women, teenage girls, and children. An even more gruesome attack […]
A Region
Insecurity, poverty, death, banditry, kidnapping, and ransom have become tragically familiar refrains. This grim reality was underscored by the massacre of 26 farmers in the village of Dembo, which followed an attack on the town of Makande, where bandits killed dozens and abducted women, teenage girls, and children. An even more gruesome attack unfolded in Barsalogho, where approximately 400 people were massacred during an assault that lasted well over eight hours. Subsequently, over 20 travellers were killed near the town of Komabangou, and more than 50 worshippers were massacred in a mosque in Unguwar Mantau.
Yet, to view these events as disconnected tragedies is to misunderstand them entirely. Dembo is in Mali; Makande is in Chad; Barsalogho is in Burkina Faso; Komabangou is in Niger; and Unguwar Mantau is in Nigeria. This geographic spread reveals the truth: we are facing a single, regional crisis with multidimensional tentacles. Therefore, any attempt to frame this crisis as a genocide targeting a single religious group is not merely diversionary; it is a willful diversion from the empirical reality on the ground.
The shared social and economic conditions across the region have created an ideal breeding ground for the recruitment of vulnerable populations, serving as cannon fodder for both local and international, state and non-state actors entangled in this intricate web of geopolitics and conflict-driven economies. While we await an Overton Window that allows for an honest, mainstream conversation about the region’s underlying socioeconomic realities, thousands are being killed, millions displaced, and hundreds of millions trapped in crushing hardship.
The regional socio-economic dynamics of conflict cannot be understood, let alone addressed, through a narrow, locally confined lens. The notion of rigid borders in Sub-Saharan Africa and the West African Sahel is artificial, rendering purely national solutions inadequate. Likewise, attempts to impose kinetic responses through a fragmented coalition of non-aligned states have consistently failed to yield meaningful or sustainable results.
In August 2024, the heads of government from three African countries formally notified the United Nations Security Council, denouncing the involvement of foreign states in arming and supporting rebel groups across the West African Sahel. A year later, in August 2025, international news agencies reported that the Sudanese government had destroyed an aircraft belonging to a Middle Eastern national carrier at Nyala Airport in Darfur, with more than 40 South American mercenaries reportedly on board. Across Northern Nigeria, local communities have repeatedly testified to the presence of bandits and terrorist elements of foreign origin.
The message is clear: this is a regional crisis shaped by international geopolitical interests, one that extends far beyond Nigeria’s borders. Understanding and addressing it requires a comprehensive geopolitical and regional framework, not a nation-centric lens.
On War’conomics
What we are witnessing is not merely conflict, but the emergence of a political economy of war and conflict unfolding on a geopolitical scale. Our collective failure to address its root causes, for fear of political backlash, is drowned out by the wailing it produces. The larger this war economy grows, the more it usurps power from the legitimate states of the Sahel, making it increasingly uncontainable.
Throughout history, war has served as a brutal sociopolitical mechanism for destroying old systems and creating new ones. The economics of conflict reshape markets, distort labour organisation, alter trade flows, redistribute wealth, and redefine established authorities. This pattern holds in West Africa’s Sahel. The prolonged failure to organise the region’s land, trade networks, and human capital has created an unsustainable social condition. Conflict has become the catalyst, triggered by socioeconomic distress. The consequences are stark: the destruction of lives and capital, the reallocation of resources, and the creation of new markets, both black and grey. Unlike natural disasters, conflicts and proxy wars are almost always human-engineered, shaped by local dynamics as well as regional and international strategic interests. Socio-economic instability, when unaddressed, readily mutates into violent conflict, as the Sahel illustrates with stark clarity.
The Ant Mill
In a world driven by coastal, credit-based economies, hinterland nations across Africa struggle to maintain social order amid overwhelming economic pressure. It is no coincidence that all Sahelian states face similarly brutal political and social realities. The primal instinct, driven by hardship, has been activated across the region. A state can function as a state only when it maintains a legitimate monopoly on violence, and justice is the foundation of that legitimacy. For this reason, attempts to frame this insecurity as genocide against a single religious group are not only inaccurate but also unjust, distracting from the structural forces driving the crisis.
Textbook remedies and PowerPoint solutions built on politically convenient data and flawed assumptions have consistently failed to produce the desired results. Security and economics are social phenomena, and social phenomena cannot be reduced to abstract models. Sustainable peace is possible only within a just society. Economics, on the other hand, is ultimately a human experience; without fair, contextually grounded social and economic models, conflicts inevitably arise as alternative structures in the pursuit of equilibrium.
The closest parallel in nature to our current predicament is the phenomenon known as the “ant mill” or “death spiral.” When ants lose their pheromone trail, they begin circling endlessly, following one another until they collapse from exhaustion. This is the state of the West African Sahel and Northern Nigeria today – trapped in a cycle of chaos after failing either to integrate into the post-colonial coastal, credit-based economic order or to develop the region’s historic trans-Saharan economic systems. The result is a profound distortion of the region’s natural socioeconomic compass, producing pervasive and multidimensional hardship.
Compounding this crisis is the global surge in demand for gold by global central banks, international actors, and private wealth, driven by an increasingly unstable world order. This demand has injected immense value into artisanal and illicit mining, further fuelling the Sahel’s war economy.
The Fix
The solution cannot be purely kinetic. The time has come for a comprehensive, region-wide socioeconomic approach. Single customs unions and unified market blocs are needed to integrate economies, diversify production, reorganise labour, and redistribute wealth more equitably. Investments in transport corridors, cross-border trade networks, and other critical infrastructure would strengthen property rights and enable the consistent administration of justice.
Equally important is the need for educational systems that embrace local languages through multilingual instruction. Recognising indigenous languages as official languages and integrating them into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics can democratise knowledge, expand access to emerging skills, and accelerate participation in the global economy. These reforms would substantially reduce the multidimensional hardship that makes the region vulnerable to insecurity and destabilising foreign interest.
What we are witnessing today is mounting global tension as the assumptions underpinning the old international neoliberal order collapse. This is not the end of history; this is the end of the end of history.
To overcome the multidimensional crisis and the insecurity this collapse fuels, we must create an Overton Window that permits open, mainstream discourse on alternative systems. The neoliberal system as we know it is in crisis, and the crisis is the neoliberal system itself.
What is unsustainable cannot be sustained.
Shamwil Mukhtar is a member of the Daily Trust Board of Economists