Dean N Onyambu

Anyone who knows me knows this is my favourite photo. President Frederick Titus Jacob Chiluba leaned in, I stood tall, and my mother watched as power shook hands. It was one of those fully parent driven events. I just knew my mum was excited that the Zambian president was coming to Kenya. This was in the early 1990s, not long after Chiluba had succeeded Kenneth Kaunda. At that time he represented hope, a fresh chapter for Zambia after nearly three decades of one party rule. For Zambians living in Nairobi it was a moment of pride, a chance to meet the new leader who carried so much promise. My mum, working at the British Council, insisted I be there. She had come to Kenya for further studies, met my dad, and built a life here, but her roots and her pride in Zambia’s future carried her to the airport that day with me in tow. I did not grasp the gravity. I was just a child being taken to meet a visiting head of state. Yet today, when I look back, I see more. I see posture, symbolism, and history in a single frame. Chiluba leans forward, extending authority. I stand upright, unintimidated, hand outstretched. My mum looks on, smiling, the bridge between heritage, identity, and a moment of recognition. This photo reminds me that we rarely understand the weight of moments while we are in them. Their meaning unfolds years later when life teaches us how to see. For my mother, this was pride. For me, it became perspective. Power bends, youth rises, and the witness in the background holds both stories together. Sometimes leadership is exactly that: recognising when to lean in, when to stand tall, and when to simply bear witness so that others can remember.

@GBUnitedx @Its_Roddie 24 matches. 5 draws, 5 losses. So 14 wins?

🚨🚨 Referee Stuart Artwell, who oversaw Manchester United's game against Bournemouth on Friday night, has officiated 24 Manchester United matches across all competitions. A review of the numbers reveals that United players were given 2 red cards, while opposition players received no red cards. Additionally, United players received 46 yellow cards compared to 8 for the opposition. Manchester United's results in these matches were 5 losses and 5 draws. This dude is a big Man Utd hater

An off ramp? A TACO? Another bait and switch? Brent cratered ~$16/bbl on Trump’s latest post talking about “very good and productive conversations” with Iran.

This 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Fertilizer prices have moved up to their highest levels since September 2022, rising 44% YoY. About a third of global fertilizer supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz. This will drive food price inflation higher in the coming weeks/months. Video: youtube.com/watch?v=L3o7T1…

Hal Brands is right, and Michael Every saw it early. The analytical failure worth naming is this: a significant number of commentators, some with serious credentials, begin their analysis from a position of personal contempt for the man. That is a valid emotion. It is a catastrophic starting point for synthesis. When your opening assumption is that there is no plan, you will not see the plan when it is published, budgeted, and executed in front of you. The strategy documents say it plainly. The trade architecture says it plainly. The force posture says it plainly. Disliking a leader is not the same as understanding what that leader is building. The former is sentiment. The latter requires structure. Confusing the two does not make you principled. It makes you blind to the sequence you are living through. The people most confident there is no strategy are often the ones least equipped to recognise one that does not look like the last one.

1/4 I am a little surprised by these comments from the governor of the PBoC. According to Yicai, yesterday he said that "the world’s major deficit countries are the same as 40 years ago because of the inherent flaws in the international monetary system." yicaiglobal.com/news/major-def…

In the East African: —At least 18 African countries have signed US health deals worth ~$12.2B, with African governments contributing ~$7.5B, but concerns are rising over conditions tied to data and pathogen sample sharing. — Nigeria leads with $5.1B, followed by Kenya ($2.5B), Uganda ($2.3B), Mozambique ($1.8B) and Ethiopia ($1.5B).

Hanson nails Gulf shifts (intercepts, UAE reaffirming $1.4T US investment, calls to degrade Iran further) and military facts: A-10s/Apaches in low-level ops confirm southern air defenses are degraded. Al Jazeera opinion pieces now highlight US strategy "working" to erode Iran's power projection—clear signal flip. But Europeans? Mostly public "no" to military help, rejecting Trump's Strait demands as not their fight. Regime fall "pretty soon" overreaches; war's ~4 weeks in, Iran's still launching missiles/drones amid high costs on all sides. Sharp on actions-over-words, but timeline and ally unity optimistic. 7/10.

@ImtiazMadmood @grok Critically assess Hanson's views. Rate them out of 10.

Hanson, who’s studied how wars end for 50 years, says the tide has turned in America’s favor against Iran. Forget the rancid propaganda flowing from all quarters related to the Iran conflict and how it is going - Hanson says look at how everyone else is behaving. Hanson’s Key Points: • Europeans: They never touch a conflict until they smell victory. Early on? Crickets. Now they’re quietly moving assets and offering support. Pure calculation — they’ve read the battlefield and decided which side wins. • Gulf petro-states: Saudis, Emiratis, Qataris survive by reading the room perfectly. They’re expelling Iranian attachés, silently intercepting Iranian missiles over their capitals, and the UAE just reaffirmed its $1.4 trillion investment commitment to the U.S. mid-war. These are not gestures — they’re bets. And they’re all-in on America. • Al Jazeera: The Qatari state network that usually bashes U.S. actions (and hosts Hamas offices) is now calling America’s bombing campaign “brilliant” and “underestimated.” When the outlet that hosts both the biggest U.S. air base and Hamas praises U.S. effectiveness, the message is unmistakable: they think we’re winning. • Military reality: A-10 Warthogs and Apache gunships are now flying strike missions inside Iranian airspace at will. These slow, low-flying platforms only appear when enemy air defenses are effectively gone. Confirms what’s really happening on the ground. Iran’s only play left is rope-a-dope: drag it out, hope U.S. public opinion flips, pray midterms pressure Trump to quit. VDH’s verdict: If Trump sees it through — and he will — the regime falls. Not in years. Pretty soon. Bottom line: Watch what people do, not what they say. Every player with skin in the game is betting on America. The signals don’t lie. - @EnergyAbsurdity

The Economist's latest cover reads: "Operation Blind Fury." The implication: irrational, dangerous, blind. Pause on that word. Blindness in public analysis is rarely accidental. It is structural. It comes from incentives, from habit, and from the cost of interrogating the framework that gives an institution its authority. The Economist spent two decades advocating open capital accounts as a condition for growth. The countries that achieved the most significant poverty reduction, China, South Korea, Taiwan, were integrated into global trade from the start. What they sequenced was capital account opening: directed credit first, coordinated industrial policy, financial flows last. Where capital accounts opened prematurely, as in 1997, it produced crisis. The Economist framed the Asian crisis as crony capitalism, not a failure of the capital mobility framework it promoted. That framing protected the prescription. Publications invested in a conclusion have structural reasons to defend it. The same condition operates closer to home. In Ghana, Bank of Ghana data shows manufacturing's share of domestic credit fell from 24.9 per cent in 1999 to 11.4 per cent by 2023. Agriculture fell from 11.8 per cent to 4.1 per cent. Capital crowded into government securities. The fiscal dominance that preceded the 2022 debt crisis was visible in that allocation data for years. It was reported as a banking statistic, not interrogated as structural dysfunction. The Bank of Central African States (BEAC) introduced foreign exchange regulations in 2019 to rebuild reserves that had fallen to roughly three months of import cover, well below the IMF's recommended five. Reserves rose to 4.95 months in 2022 on oil prices, then fell to 4.12 months in 2023. The majority of Cameroonian businesses cited foreign currency access as a critical constraint. When confronted with the outcome, the BEAC governor blamed oil and gas operators. Coverage reported the regulation. It did not interrogate the result. In Zambia, the February 2026 MPC cut rates by 75 basis points. The direction was defensible. The magnitude assumed confidence in a CPI instrument where food carries a 53.5 per cent basket weight. When harvest cycles drive measured disinflation, the headline cleans up faster than household reality. The press release did not address it. What connects these cases is that too much financial coverage treats the announcement as the analysis. Publications like Business Daily Africa do the harder work. They remain the exception. The Economist's blind spots are partly ideological. African journalism's are largely structural. Both produce the same outcome: the arithmetic goes unexamined. The blindness stays where the incentives are. Structure Before Sentiment. Sources: BoG credit data; BEAC MPC communiqués; IMF CEMAC Staff Reports; ZamStats CPI Bulletin; Canary Compass, "The Forecast Is Not the Evidence" (2026).

A fair number of you got this wrong.

@MuisiNza Grievance.

@InfinitelyDean Very long cosmetic claim. For 65 yrs who held power and was making decisions: pro western like you. Who signed treaty upon treaty and systematically dismantled african capabilities to conform to IMF/WB policies and adjustment plans: people like you. But still lecturing 🙂‍↔️

Unfortunately, this is the default African technocratic position, particularly among those who went to university in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Many of them studied in the West. The niche, elite, reformist intellectual position of that era was to be anti-West, and they seem to have kept it. They came home and taught the same thing. That is why anti-imperialism, which in African economic discourse is functionally anti-Western, has such deep roots. It is also grievance-led, to the extent that it has not yet recognised that the imperialist extracting value from Africa right now is China. David lists "responsiveness, value for money, customer service" as the reason Chinese contractors dominate. The framing is emotionally satisfying. It is structurally incomplete. Chinese dominance in African infrastructure is vendor financing. Chinese policy banks fund the project. Chinese contractors build it. Chinese equipment fills it. Chinese supply chains service it. Africa owns the road. The industrial learning curve stays in Guangzhou. The "value for money" is a tied procurement model where the money circulates back to Chinese firms before the ribbon is cut. The "conditionality" that African elites resent, competitive tendering, transparency, enforceable standards, is precisely what lowers the cost of capital. African Eurobonds yield 9.1 per cent. Latin America pays 6.5 per cent. Asia pays 5.3 per cent for comparable ratings [Feb 2026]. That premium reflects governance risk, not Western interference. Chinese financing avoids the lecture but delivers inflated prices through tied procurement, not improved creditworthiness. The deeper question: what happens after the road is built? China's household consumption sits at 39.9 per cent of GDP. Its goods trade surplus exceeded USD1.19 trillion in 2025. 89 per cent of Africa's exports to China are extractives. 94 per cent of China's exports to Africa are manufactured goods. Africa exchanges rocks for finished products. If Africa wants to move beyond extraction, to process its own cobalt, refine its own copper, it needs markets that can purchase what it makes. Those are absorber economies: the US at 68 per cent household consumption, the EU at 52 per cent. China cannot absorb African manufactures because its own industrial capacity already exceeds domestic demand. Selling value-added goods to a competitor whose policy is designed to dominate those same markets is a dead end. Chinese contractors are not treating Africa as valued customers. They are treating Africa as a valued input. One builds capacity. The other feeds an export machine that sells finished goods back to the continent it extracted from. The question is not who builds the road cheaply. It is whether the road leads to industrial capacity, or to a port where unprocessed minerals leave and finished goods arrive. I wrote about this in "The Forced Choice." canarycompass.com/p/the-forced-c…

@hoomansv Unpredictability.

What’s going on here

@waluwande x.com/i/status/20348…

Yes, Kenya used to have an operating oil refinery. The country also used to have sisal and cotton industries. Kenyan leaders prefer to buy, not to manufacture.

@adamscochran @chischans

It’s important to note: * This is from US officials * It’s the same statement and demands they made last weekend. * Iran claims no contact still. * The US has deployed more troops who won’t arrive till April. * Trump is desperate to pump the stock market. Take with a grain of salt.

@MAD4safari 😂😂😂

Zambia Airways has adopted the 24hrs economy already. Plane just left Livingstone.

@chischans As you rightly pointed out.

@InfinitelyDean What could have precipitated this willingness to talk? They have a winning hand insofar as I can tell and they are going to make a ton of money.

This reading is supported by emerging reports. US officials have indicated there is "room to negotiate" on returning frozen Iranian assets, suggesting the reported terms are a starting position.

@InfinitelyDean And then there's the aspect of broken trust. Negotiation, it seems, has become a tool to lull the other party in to complacence.

The Trump Administration has begun initial discussions on what a potential peace deal with Iran might look like, per Axios. The Kobeissi Letter summarised six reported terms. These are not the full proposal. The actual text has not been published. The six terms: no missile programme for five years, zero uranium enrichment, decommissioning of Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow, strict observation protocols on centrifuges, regional arms control treaties with a 1,000 missile cap, and an end to proxy financing. Four questions structure how nuclear agreements should be assessed, each requiring separate evidence: enrichment, weaponisation, delivery, intent. The 2015 JCPOA scored roughly two out of four. It capped enrichment at 3.67 per cent and monitored weaponisation through the most comprehensive IAEA inspection regime ever applied to a non-nuclear-weapon state. Those were real achievements. But it left the missile programme completely untouched. Resolution 2231 downgraded binding prohibitions on Iranian missile activity from "shall not" to "called upon." It managed intent through incentive structure rather than verification. It contained sunset clauses, with enrichment caps expiring in 2030, centrifuge restrictions between 2023 and 2025, and missile restrictions in 2023. The arms embargo expired in 2020. Iran formally terminated the agreement in October 2025. And the deal did nothing about proxy financing. A deal that constrained one dimension of threat while resourcing another through sanctions relief was a structural flaw. The proposed terms attempt all four dimensions. Enrichment eliminated, not capped. Facilities decommissioned, not constrained. Missiles halted and regionally capped. Proxy financing prohibited. On paper, it addresses every structural criticism levelled at the JCPOA. The question is whether these terms are designed to be accepted, rejected, or negotiated down. Iran rejected zero enrichment in Geneva. It rejected facility decommissioning. It offered instead to reduce enrichment to low levels under IAEA supervision, a position that mediators described as going beyond the 2015 deal. The Omani foreign minister assessed substantial progress and flew to Washington to convey this to the White House. The US negotiating team assessed otherwise. Neither assessment should be accepted uncritically. There is a third reading. This administration has a documented pattern of opening at extreme positions and settling lower. If that applies here, the question shifts from "will Iran accept" to "what does the settlement look like." Zero enrichment negotiated to capped low-level enrichment under IAEA supervision is a tighter JCPOA. Decommissioning negotiated to mothballing with permanent inspectors strengthens access beyond 2015 levels. A binding missile restriction replacing Resolution 2231's "called upon" language addresses the delivery gap for the first time. A negotiated-down version could be stronger than the JCPOA on all four dimensions while remaining achievable. Two concerns with the terms as summarised. First, the five-year missile restriction creates the same sunset problem the JCPOA was criticised for, on a shorter timeline. The JCPOA's missile restrictions ran eight years. This one runs five. Second, the monitoring language is vague. The JCPOA's verification regime was its strongest dimension: IAEA, Additional Protocol, continuous surveillance. "Strict outside observation protocols" does not specify the IAEA, does not reference the Additional Protocol, and does not address undeclared sites. If the full proposal contains stronger provisions, this concern falls away. If not, the proposed framework may be weaker on the one dimension the JCPOA got right. This caveat applies throughout: we are assessing a summary, not the document. The terms are more ambitious than the JCPOA. Whether they are more achievable depends on whether they are a final position or an opening one. #StructureBeforeSentiment