Yes-Men with Missiles: Taiwan at the Edge of Xi’s Silence

 

Xi fires generals, crowns loyalists, and silences dissent. History shows what comes next: overconfidence, miscalculation, and war. Taiwan sits in the crosshairs while truth is purged from China’s command room.

I keep hearing that China is the world’s safe bet, the steady hand in a chaotic age. I don’t buy it. Not now. Not after watching Xi Jinping rip the top off his own military and call it discipline. When a leader starts firing generals instead of listening to them, history doesn’t whisper. It shouts.

On January 24, China’s defense ministry quietly confirmed what insiders already feared. Two of the most senior generals, including Zhang Youxia, were under investigation. This was not routine. This was seismic. The last time China purged its military leadership at this level was 1971, when Mao’s chosen heir Lin Biao died fleeing an alleged coup. That episode ended in paranoia, paralysis, and decades of scars. I look at today and feel that same chill. When the palace goes silent, the storm is already inside.

The purge is not happening in isolation. In 2025 alone, Chinese authorities investigated over 1,000,000 people for corruption and political deviation. That is 60% more than just two years earlier. Those numbers are not about cleaning house. They are about fear as policy. The Communist Party sits above the law, beyond the reach of a free press, policing itself with purges instead of sunlight. Cadres retreat into tight circles, trust evaporates, reformers freeze. Power becomes lonely, and loneliness breeds bad decisions.

Nowhere is this more dangerous than inside the 2,000,000-strong People’s Liberation Army, the force meant to fight China’s wars. The PLA’s own newspaper accused the fallen generals of insubordination and of poisoning the army’s “political ecology.” That phrase stuck with me. It sounds clean, even noble, but it hides something ugly. Politics is now valued more than experience. Loyalty matters more than judgment. Obedience outranks truth. A sharp knife in the wrong hands still cuts the holder.

On paper, China looks terrifying. Its navy is larger than America’s. Pentagon estimates say Beijing plans 9 aircraft carriers by 2035, compared with America’s 11. Its nuclear arsenal is projected to reach at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, double what it held in 2023. Hardware sells fear. Numbers impress. But wars are not spreadsheets. They are chaos, friction, and human error. And that is where Xi’s purge becomes truly dangerous.

I keep coming back to Taiwan. American officials believe Xi has ordered the PLA to be capable of taking the island by 2027. Some analysts think Taiwan could not hold out long without outside help. The United States approved an $11.1bn arms package in December, but there is no treaty that forces Washington to fight. That gray zone is exactly where miscalculation thrives. When leaders believe their own propaganda, they roll the dice with other people’s lives.

The seas around China are already a pressure cooker. The Taiwan Strait is a constant flashpoint. The East China Sea simmers with disputes involving Japan. The South China Sea stays hot with overlapping claims. Chinese jets buzz Western aircraft. Warships shadow each other at dangerous distances. One collision, one misread signal, one nervous trigger finger, and the world holds its breath. In moments like that, a leader needs advisers who can say “stop.” Who will say it now?

Zhang Youxia once could. He had something rare among China’s top brass: real war experience, earned fighting Vietnam in 1979. That conflict should still haunt Beijing. China went in confident and came out bloodied, exposed, and humiliated. Superior numbers and revolutionary pride did not save it from logistics failures, poor coordination, and fierce resistance. Overconfidence turned into a lesson written in graves. The past does not forgive those who ignore it.

I also think of Russia. I think of Ukraine. Moscow marched in with swagger in 2022, expecting Kyiv to fall in 3 days. It did not. Russian forces underestimated Ukrainian resistance, overestimated their own readiness, and paid the price. By 2024, independent estimates put Russian casualties, killed and wounded, well over 1000,000. Equipment losses ran into the thousands. Sanctions hollowed out the economy. Prestige burned. Xi has studied this war. He has heard Western leaders warn him what an attack on Taiwan would do to China’s economy. And yet he is building a system that punishes dissent and rewards silence.

Since 2022, Xi has ejected 5 of the 6 uniformed officers on the Central Military Commission, the PLA’s highest command body. What remains is Xi himself and a political commissar focused on fighting graft, not fighting wars. This is not a team. It is an echo chamber. Imagine a crisis over Taiwan erupting at sea or in the air. Missiles lock on. Ships maneuver. Allies debate. Phones ring. Xi asks for advice. Who tells him the truth? Who tells him the risks are enormous even with all that shiny hardware?

I write this  because neutrality feels dishonest. I am worried. Not because China is weak, but because it is strong and increasingly blind. Yes-men in uniform are not a sign of confidence. They are a confession of fear. Power that cannot tolerate dissent is power afraid of its own reflection.

Xi prizes obedience. He is 72. Few doubt he will use the next party conference to cement his rule. Stability, he will say. Certainty, his spokesmen will repeat. But certainty without humility is a trap. History shows it again and again, from Vietnam to Ukraine. Overconfidence is the deadliest weapon a leader can wield.

If Xi truly wants to secure China’s future, he should remember this: armies do not fail first on the battlefield. They fail first in the mind, when truth is replaced by loyalty and caution by applause. The world should worry, not because war is inevitable, but because the guardrails are being quietly removed.

 

 

This article is part of a larger idea I explore in “China’s Military Mirage: The Overestimated Power of the People's Liberation Army (PLA)”, one of my short books on Google Play. Read it here on Google Play: China’s Military Mirage.

 

 

Two Million by Spring: Russia’s Slow Collapse

 

When casualties reach two million by spring, the Russia-Ukraine war stops being war and becomes a warning: nuclear powers can rot, panic, and explode outward.

I keep staring at the number because it refuses to behave like a number. Two million. It doesn’t sit quietly on the page. It paces. It sweats. It growls. By spring of 2026, this year, that figure may stop being a warning and start being a fact: 2 million soldiers killed, injured, or missing in the Russia-Ukraine war. Not rumors. Not vibes. A body count so obscene that history itself flinches and looks away.

This isn’t a war anymore. Wars have arcs, fronts, victories, endings. This is something colder and uglier, a slow-motion collapse of a nuclear-armed power bleeding itself dry in public while the world pretends the math still makes sense. I hear people say “attrition” like it’s a strategy. Attrition isn’t a strategy. Attrition is what happens when nobody knows how to stop the machine and nobody wants to admit they built it.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies didn’t scream when it released its numbers. It didn’t have to. The data did the screaming. By their estimate, Russia alone suffered about 1.2 million casualties between February 2022 and December 2025, including as many as 325,000 dead. Ukraine, with a smaller army and population, absorbed between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, including up to 140,000 deaths. Stack those numbers together and you’re already flirting with 1.8 million. Keep the current pace, and spring tips it over the edge. Two million. The kind of figure that turns generals into accountants and soldiers into inventory.

I have seen this movie before, just in black and white. In World War II, the Soviet Union lost an estimated 26 to 27 million people, military and civilian combined. That trauma became the spine of modern Russian identity. “Never again” wasn’t a slogan. It was a scar. And yet here we are, watching Russia rack up the largest military losses suffered by any major power since that war, all for territorial gains measured not in miles, but in meters. Fifteen to 70 meters a day in key offensives. That’s not a blitz. That’s a funeral procession inching forward while the band keeps playing.

I imagine a soldier on the line muttering to himself, half joking, half broken, asking what kind of empire moves at the speed of a parking lot. Nobody answers him. The drones buzz. The artillery answers instead.

What makes this worse isn’t just the scale. It’s the silence. Moscow hasn’t released meaningful casualty figures since September 2022, when it claimed just under 6000 deaths. That number has aged like milk in the sun. Kremlin spokespeople dismiss outside estimates as unreliable, insisting only the Ministry of Defense can speak the truth. But the ministry doesn’t speak. It locks the door and turns up the radio. In the gap, independent groups like Mediazona and the BBC have pieced together over 160,000 confirmed Russian deaths by name, using obituaries, social media posts, and local records. That’s not propaganda. That’s bookkeeping done with trembling hands.

Ukraine plays its own careful game with numbers, constrained by morale and security. President Zelenskyy said in early 2025 that more than 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed. Even that figure, sober and restrained, points to a nation paying in blood for every square inch it refuses to surrender. When a smaller country absorbs half a million casualties, that’s not resilience alone. That’s existential hemorrhage.

People love to say Russia is in no rush to settle. Of course it isn’t. Empires rarely hurry to admit they’re shrinking. But the battlefield tells a different story. A 1000-kilometer front line locked into a grinding stalemate. Advances slower than almost any major offensive in the last century. This isn’t momentum. This is inertia powered by bodies. When the drumbeat doesn’t change, the march becomes a trance.

Meanwhile, the war leaks into everything. Apartment blocks on the outskirts of Kyiv turn into graves overnight. Ballistic missiles and swarms of drones trade places in the sky like vultures arguing over a carcass. Oil depots burn. Infrastructure bleeds. Civilians die in twos and nines, small numbers that add up to a permanent ache. The front line isn’t just a line on a map. It’s a pressure wave rippling outward, warping politics, energy markets, food supplies, and nerves.

And hovering over all of it is the unspoken nightmare. Russia is not just any wounded giant. It’s a nuclear-armed one. History tells us what happens when great powers feel cornered. Imperial Japan in 1945 kept fighting as cities burned. Nazi Germany fought street by street long after defeat was certain. The lesson isn’t that desperation guarantees escalation. The lesson is that rational cost-benefit thinking erodes under humiliation and loss. A drowning man doesn’t negotiate with the water.

I hear the counterargument already. Russia has manpower. Russia has depth. Russia can sustain this. That line worked in 1943. It worked because the Soviet Union was fighting for survival against an invading army that aimed to exterminate it. Today, the story is inverted. Russia is the invader, and the losses aren’t forging unity so much as hollowing out a generation. Demographers have warned for years about Russia’s shrinking population. Add hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed men of fighting age, and the long-term damage becomes structural. Economies don’t just lose workers. They lose fathers, engineers, teachers, and future births. You can draft men. You can’t draft time.

The truly terrifying part is how normalized this has become. Two million casualties doesn’t trigger emergency summits. It triggers panel discussions. Analysts talk about “sustainability” as if this were a supply chain problem. I catch myself doing it too, slipping into abstraction because the raw truth is unbearable. But abstraction is the luxury of those not being shelled.

By spring, when the ground thaws and the casualty count likely crosses that line history swore it would never see again, we’ll still argue about credibility and narratives. We’ll still debate who’s winning. But the ledger will be clear. A nuclear-armed power will have sacrificed more soldiers than any major power since World War II for gains so small they have to be measured with a ruler. That’s not strength. That’s decay with a flag draped over it.

I don’t pretend to know how this ends. Wars like this don’t end cleanly. They curdle. They metastasize. They dare someone to make a catastrophic choice just to break the stalemate. That’s the reckoning lurking behind the number. Two million isn’t just a count of the dead and broken. It’s a warning flare arcing into the dark, telling us the rules are dissolving. When the graveyard grows faster than the map, the map is lying.

And if we keep pretending this is just another conflict, history won’t forgive us. History already knows where this road leads. It’s been here before. It just hoped we’d learned enough not to walk it again.

 

 

I couldn’t let this go, so I wrote “Putin’s Dangerous Gamble: How the Invasion of Ukraine Backfired on Russia”  to work through it honestly and completely. Read it here on Google Play: Putin’s Dangerous Gamble.

 

 

Obi Aguocha Must Be Out of His Mind, for Defending Fear as Freedom in Anambra

 

Every Monday, Anambra buries billions—and Lawmaker Aguocha brings the shovel. Fear rules, and fools call it peace.

I have heard a lot of bad takes in Nigerian politics, but Obi Aguocha’s statement about the Monday sit-at-home policy takes the crown, the robe, and the whole damn throne. What Lawmaker Obi Aguocha is saying is complete nonsense. I mean, not the polite kind of nonsense—the full-blown, head-scratching, jaw-dropping type that makes you wonder if the man even lives on the same planet as the rest of us. Either he’s too dumb to understand how this ridiculous Monday sit-at-home order is destroying businesses and jobs in Anambra State, or he needs to see a doctor for a cognitive check. Because there’s no other explanation for a supposed lawmaker defending paralysis as policy and fear as freedom.

For three years now, the South-East Nigeria (comprising of Anambra, Enugu, Imo, Abia, and Ebonyi States) has lived under a weekly hostage situation dressed up as solidarity. Every Monday, markets lock up, schools shut down, and streets look like scenes from a post-apocalyptic movie. It’s like God pressed pause on development and forgot to unfreeze it. All this because a group of gun-toting thugs decided that staying home equals liberation. And instead of fighting for sanity, Obi Aguocha is here defending it like it’s some sacred cultural festival.

Let’s be real. The Monday sit-at-home order started as a protest—fair enough. Nnamdi Kanu’s arrest stirred emotions, and the people wanted justice. But what began as a political statement has become an economic suicide note. IPOB itself has disowned it. Yet every week, lives are lost, wallets emptied, and the future mortgaged. The South-East bleeds over ₦10 billion ($7.10 million) every Monday, according to economic estimates. Multiply that by 52 weeks and you’ve got a region bleeding half a trillion naira annually. That’s not activism—that’s assisted collapse.

Walk through the cities of Onitsha or Awka in Anambra State on a Monday morning, and you’ll see the real tragedy—empty roads, closed markets, and frightened faces. The smell of fear mixes with dust and hopelessness. Schools sit like abandoned shells, and children stare out of windows learning nothing but silence. That’s what Aguocha calls “peace.” That’s not peace—that’s paralysis with a press release.

And then he opens his mouth to scold Governor Soludo for trying to end it. He says Soludo’s actions are “unconstructive” and “counterproductive.” Oh really? So doing nothing while the region burns is “constructive”? Maybe Aguocha would prefer Soludo to organize a committee to study the philosophy of fear instead of fixing it. He even said Soludo “unleashed terror on silent agitators.” Silent agitators? My foot. The only thing silent in Anambra on Mondays are the gunshots—right before they hit their targets.

Aguocha talks about “rights.” He says Soludo can’t compel traders to open their shops. Fine. But can criminals compel them to close them? Can fear now dictate market hours in a supposed democracy? The irony is suffocating. When a man defends oppression because it wears his tribe’s uniform, he’s not defending justice—he’s enabling tyranny. Aguocha’s words drip with hypocrisy disguised as concern. Let’s call this what it is: cowardice polished with grammar. The man talks about “fragile peace” like we’re talking about fine china. The South-East doesn’t have peace—it has quiet terror. It’s the kind of quiet you hear before a storm, the kind that fools think is stability. Markets have died. Transport workers starve. Teachers cry. Businesses flee. And Aguocha calls this “progress.” Someone should check his pulse; he might be mistaking rigor mortis for calm.

Governor Soludo may not be perfect, but at least he’s doing something. The man is standing in the fire while others are roasting plantain from a distance. He’s trying to drag Anambra out of a ditch dug by fearmongers and opportunists. And Aguocha? He’s too busy lecturing him about “rights” from the comfort of Abuja, probably sipping coffee while Anambra counts coffins.

When Aguocha says Soludo’s policies could “reignite violence,” it’s almost laughable. Brother, the violence never stopped. It’s been ongoing—just quiet enough for people like you to pretend it’s peace. You don’t end terror by tiptoeing around it; you end it by crushing it. Ask Colombia. Ask Northern Ireland. Ask anyone who’s ever had to choose between fear and freedom. The only people who benefit from this nonsense are criminals and cowards—and Aguocha sounds far too sympathetic to both.

The sit-at-home order has turned the South-East into a weekly ghost town. Investors have fled. Students are falling behind. People can’t feed their families. You can’t build a nation where half the week is wasted on fear. And yet this lawmaker—who should be fighting for development—chooses to defend decay. If stupidity were a currency, he’d be a billionaire by now.

And let’s talk about his obsession with “silent agitators.” These so-called agitators have burned buses and businesses, killed teachers, and forced children to stay home. They’ve made Mondays a curse word. But Aguocha sees them as misunderstood heroes. Maybe he should spend one Monday walking through Onitsha without security. Let’s see how long that sympathy lasts when the first gunshot rings.

There’s a Yoruba proverb that says, “If a man lets his eyes close because he doesn’t want to see evil, evil will find him in his sleep.” That’s what Aguocha is doing—sleeping through disaster and calling it peace. The South-East doesn’t need silence; it needs sanity. It doesn’t need lectures from Abuja; it needs leadership on the ground.

Soludo is right to challenge this madness. You can’t rebuild a society while obeying the orders of ghosts. You can’t educate children by keeping them home out of fear. You can’t revive commerce while kneeling to criminals. Ending this forced sit-at-home Mondays isn’t oppression—it’s liberation. It’s not tyranny—it’s therapy.

So yes, what Obi Aguocha is saying is complete nonsense. Either he’s too dumb to see the damage, or he’s too comfortable to care. But here’s the truth: no region has ever prospered by normalizing fear. Mondays in Anambra should be for business, not for burial. If Aguocha can’t grasp that, then maybe he should take his own advice and stay at home—permanently. Because the South-East Nigeria needs thinkers, not talkers. It needs builders, not bureaucrats. And if defending insanity is his idea of wisdom, then, truly, the man’s head needs a ‘brain’ reboot.

 

 On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my “Brief Book Series”  worth exploring. Read it here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

The White-Collar Bloodbath That Never Came

 

AI won’t fire everyone—but it will expose who was replaceable all along. If your job is routine, the countdown has already started.

I have heard the warnings. They come at you like sirens at midnight. The head of the IMF says AI is a tsunami. A Wall Street titan says he’ll need fewer humans. A Silicon Valley boss says half of entry-level white-collar jobs could vanish. The chorus is loud, clean, and terrifying. It sounds like the end of the office as we know it. But I don’t buy the funeral march. I’ve seen this movie before, and the ending isn’t extinction. It’s mutation.

When I walk through the modern office in my head, I don’t see a robot sitting in my chair. I see a cyborg. Flesh and code welded together. Think less killer machine, more upgraded human. The kind that runs faster, sees sharper, and still makes the call when the stakes get ugly. AI isn’t here to wipe out white-collar work. It’s here to rip it apart, task by task, and stitch it back together into something meaner and more valuable.

Start with the numbers, because fear hates numbers when they don’t cooperate. Since late 2022, America has added roughly 3 million white-collar jobs. Management, professional roles, sales, office work—all up. Blue-collar employment, flat. That alone should slow the panic. Jobs everyone said would be first against the wall are growing. Software developers are up about 7 percent. Radiologists, up 10 percent. Paralegals, up a wild 21 percent. If AI were the executioner, these roles would be bleeding out on the floor by now. They’re not. They’re lifting weights.

Pay tells the same story. Real wages in professional and business services are up around 5 percent since late 2022. Office and administrative workers are earning about 9 percent more. Control for education, age, race, gender, the whole social autopsy, and white-collar workers still earn roughly a third more than blue-collar ones. That premium is almost triple what it was in the early 1980s. AI hasn’t stolen the crown. If anything, it’s polished it.

History backs me up, and history has a long memory. In the early 1980s, when computers started chewing through mental tasks, a Nobel Prize–winning economist warned that the bond between man and machine was being radically transformed. He wasn’t wrong. He was just early. The transformation didn’t kill white-collar work. It fed it. Since that era, employment in management, professional, sales, and office roles has more than doubled. Inflation-adjusted pay climbed by about a third. The computer didn’t erase the office. It made it bigger.

Here’s the trick everyone forgets. Technology almost never kills a job in one clean shot. It kills tasks. The boring ones. The repeatable ones. The ones that can be written as rules and fed to a machine. Typists vanished because their entire job was repetition. Most white-collar roles aren’t like that. They’re messy bundles. Analysis mixed with judgment. Coordination tangled with accountability. When computers arrived, they took the drudge work and left humans with the decisions that mattered. Productivity went up. So did wages. Air-traffic controllers didn’t disappear when software got better. They got more powerful, because someone still had to own the decision when lives were on the line.

AI follows the same pattern, just faster and sharper. Its intelligence is jagged. It’s brilliant at 95 percent of a task and shaky at the 5 percent that can blow everything up. Edge cases. Context. Discretion. That last mile where things go wrong and excuses don’t matter. Data from AI companies themselves show that only a sliver of occupations use AI across most of their tasks, and almost none can be fully automated. AI is cheapening specific cognitive moves—drafting text, scanning data, writing standard code—not entire professions.

Look at the labor market since late 2022 and you see the split clearly. White-collar employment overall is up about 4 percent. Real wages, up around three. Jobs that blend technical skill with oversight and coordination are on fire. Project managers. Information-security experts. Roles where you have to understand the system and also steer people through it. Employment in some of these has jumped roughly 30 percent. Care-oriented roles and jobs that demand judgment and human coordination are growing too. The only ones shrinking are the quiet back rooms. Insurance claims clerks are down about 13 percent. Secretaries and admin assistants, down around 20. Routine work gets eaten first. Always has.

And while everyone argues about which jobs will die, new ones are crawling out of the lab. Data annotators. Forward-deployed engineers. Chief AI officers. Titles that sound made up because they’re still settling into shape. Categories with names like “other mathematical-science occupations” have ballooned by about forty percent since late 2022, with real wages jumping roughly twenty percent. “Other computer occupations” are expanding fast. Business operations specialists, the people who redesign processes and keep the machine humming, have seen employment jump by nearly 60 percent. When productivity explodes, the economy doesn’t shrink. It sprawls.

I’m not pretending this is painless. There’s blood on the floor, and more coming. Entry-level roles are exposed because they often live on routine. New AI models can already work autonomously for hours, chaining together analysis, coding, and tool use with minimal supervision. Benchmarks show that this endurance doubles roughly every seven months. That’s not a rumor. That’s a clock ticking. Clerical and administrative work has been shrinking for decades anyway, falling from about 18 percent of the workforce in the 1980s to around 10 percent today. AI will keep pushing that number down. Workers in these roles often have fewer transferable skills and less room to climb. When the floor drops out, the fall hurts.

Still, pain isn’t apocalypse. This isn’t mass white-collar extinction. It’s selective pressure. Jobs that rely on judgment, coordination, and accountability will keep a premium because someone has to answer when things go sideways. AI doesn’t go to court. It doesn’t take the blame. It doesn’t sign off. I do. And as long as that’s true, I’m not obsolete.

I hear the panic in the break room. “So what happens to us?” someone asks. I shrug. “Same thing that always happens,” I say. “We adapt or we disappear.” It sounds harsh, but it’s honest. AI is a force multiplier, not a grim reaper. It will redraw the office again, the way computers and the internet did before. The weak tasks will die. The strong roles will evolve. New ones will be born without names. The office won’t be wiped out. It’ll be rebuilt, faster and stranger, with humans still in the loop, still on the hook, still valuable.

The future isn’t a robot takeover. It’s a negotiation. And history says the humans who show up ready to change usually walk away with the better deal.

 

 

Separate from today’s article, I recently published  “Forget Day Trading: Build Wealth the Benjamin Graham Way and Retire Rich”  for readers interested in a deeper, standalone idea. You may also read it from here on Google Play: Forget Day Trading.

 

Nigeria’s Overpaid Lawmakers: Feasting While the Lights Go Out

 

Nigeria is not being misgoverned; it is being slowly looted, as overpaid elites feast while darkness, hunger, and fear spread—until one spark triggers a collapse no one will be ready for.

In Nigeria today, while ordinary citizens struggle to survive blackouts, hunger, and daily fear, a tiny political elite is quietly bleeding the nation dry, turning public offices into private vaults and pushing the country toward a sudden, unstoppable collapse no one will see coming until it explodes. This is not a slogan. It is a pattern, repeated so often that it has begun to feel normal. And normal, in a failing state, is the most dangerous lie of all.

This is not mismanagement anymore. Mismanagement sounds clumsy, like a dropped plate. What is happening now is deliberate extraction. The kind that wears a suit, smiles for cameras, and signs budgets with steady hands. Nigeria’s lawmakers sit at the center of this storm. On paper, their salaries look harmless. A senator’s basic annual salary has long been officially placed at roughly 13.5 million naira. That figure is waved around whenever critics raise their voices. But everyone knows the paper salary is a decoy. The real money lives elsewhere.

Allowances are where the vault opens. Housing, furniture, vehicle loans, constituency projects, travel, hardship claims, and running costs stack on top of one another like bricks in a private fortress. Over the years, civil society groups, budget analysts, and investigative journalists have repeatedly estimated that when all allowances are added, the annual cost of a single senator to the Nigerian state runs well above 200 million naira. Multiply that by 109  senators, then add 360 members of the House of Representatives, each with their own river of perks, and the picture stops being abstract. It becomes grotesque. When the bucket is gold, the well dries faster.

All this happens in a country where the minimum wage struggles to keep pace with inflation and where a large share of the population survives on the edge. Recent poverty assessments have placed more than 60 percent of Nigerians below the poverty line. That is not a typo. More than half the country wakes up every day calculating how to eat, how to move, how to stay alive. Food inflation has surged. Rice, bread, cooking oil, and fuel prices jump so often that salaries feel like rumors. Yet the political class remains insulated, sealed off by convoys, security details, and allowances that rise even when the economy falls.

Electricity tells the story better than speeches ever could. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and one of its largest economies, still struggles to generate more than 4000 to 5000 megawatts of power for over 200 million people. Blackouts are not emergencies; they are routines. Businesses burn diesel to survive. Hospitals ration power. Students read by phone light. The cost of private generators drains households and companies alike, acting as an invisible tax on survival. Meanwhile, legislative budgets remain bloated, defended as the price of democracy. When the lights go out, excuses glow brighter.

Security is no better. Kidnapping for ransom has spread from remote highways into villages and city streets. Armed groups roam rural areas, forcing farmers off their land. Food insecurity deepens not only because of climate pressure or global shocks but because people are afraid to plant and transport what they grow. Official figures and independent tallies over the past few years have shown thousands of kidnapping cases annually, with ransoms running into billions of naira. Communities pay because the state cannot protect them. Yet lawmakers’ security votes and personal protection never seem to shrink. Fear is privatized. Safety is reserved.

History does not whisper here; it shouts. Nigeria has seen this movie before. In the years leading up to past political ruptures and military takeovers, the same signals flashed red. A ruling elite grew richer. Institutions weakened. Public trust collapsed. Ordinary people adapted by lowering expectations, then by lowering hope. When the break came, it felt sudden only because denial had been loud. A crack ignored becomes a collapse remembered.

The psychology of this moment is as dangerous as the economics. Overpaid lawmakers do not just drain resources; they drain empathy. When leaders no longer experience darkness, hunger, or fear, they begin to treat suffering as background noise. Policy becomes theater. Accountability becomes a joke told in private. Citizens, watching from the outside, begin to see the state as something that happens to them, not something that belongs to them. That is when loyalty dies quietly.

Fuel policy offers a sharp example. The removal of fuel subsidies in 2023 sent petrol prices skyrocketing, doubling or worse in many areas almost overnight. Transport costs exploded. Food prices followed. Ordinary Nigerians were told to endure the pain for long-term reform. Some reforms are necessary. But pain without shared sacrifice is poison. Lawmakers did not slash their allowances. Convoys did not shrink. The message was clear even without words. Endure means you. Adjust means you. When belts tighten, only the poor feel the pinch.

Corruption scandals deepen the rot. Constituency projects are approved, funded, and then abandoned. Schools exist only on paper. Clinics have signboards but no staff. Each uncompleted project is a small betrayal, but together they form a pattern of contempt. Investigations come and go. Prosecutions stall. The cycle repeats. People stop asking when things will improve and start asking how to escape. Emigration becomes a dream. Survival becomes a plan.

What makes this moment explosive is the youth factor. Nigeria is young, restless, and online. Millions of young people face unemployment or jobs that barely pay. They see the numbers. They see the luxury. Social media does the accounting in public. Every allowance, every convoy, every careless statement is screenshotted and shared. Anger travels faster than reform. When patience dies young, rage grows fast.

States rarely collapse with fireworks and warnings. They collapse like a chair with termites, holding steady until the moment it doesn’t. Nigeria risks that kind of fall. A disputed election. A sudden spike in prices. A major security failure. Any spark could ignite a system already soaked in resentment. When that happens, no legislative privilege will buy immunity.

This is why the image of lawmakers feasting while the lights go out is not exaggeration. It is diagnosis. A country where representation becomes extraction cannot stand forever. Numbers do not lie, even when politicians do. You can drain a nation quietly for only so long before the silence breaks. And when it does, the collapse will feel sudden only to those who refused to count.

 

 

On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my  “Brief Book Series” worth exploring. You can also read the books  here on Google Play: BriefBook Series.

Snowed In, Cut Off, and Unprepared: When Nature Turns Cruel

 

When snow keeps falling, nature proves it needs no permission to trap cities, break systems, and turn ordinary homes into freezing cages with no timeline for rescue.

Nature does not negotiate during a snowstorm. I am watching it prove that again, hour by hour, street by street. Roads vanish under white weight. Power lines go silent like cut throats. Ordinary neighborhoods turn into cold, isolated cages overnight, and nobody gets a pass. Not the elderly. Not the sick. Not the careful. Not the confident. Snow does not ask who you voted for, how much you saved, or whether you followed the rules. It shows up, uninvited and unbothered, and it takes what it wants.

Right now, across Baltimore, New York, New Jersey, and much of the Northeast, the evidence is piling up as fast as the snow itself. Entire blocks are locked in place. Cars sit abandoned like bad decisions frozen mid-thought. Side streets disappear first, then main roads follow. Emergency sirens sound farther away than they should, slower than people need. Power outages spread in the dark like rumors, and suddenly the modern world feels very old and very thin. I hear a neighbor shout through the snow, asking if anyone has heat. Someone else yells back, “We’re burning candles and praying.” That’s not a metaphor. That’s logistics.

More than 700,000 people across the country have already lost electricity during this storm, and tens of thousands of flights have been canceled or delayed. Airports that usually move like machines are reduced to waiting rooms full of coats, fear, and phone chargers. Roughly 245 million people across 40 states are in the storm’s path, from Texas to New England. Governors didn’t issue emergency declarations because they felt dramatic. They did it because history taught them what happens when snow gets mean and nobody listens.

I have seen this movie before, and it never ends well. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri crushed Texas. Power failed for days. At least 200 people died, many from hypothermia inside homes that were never designed to go cold. Water systems collapsed. People melted snow in bathtubs like it was a frontier problem, not a modern one. The lesson was clear and brutal: when infrastructure meets ice, ice often wins. Nature didn’t care that Texas prides itself on independence. Pipes still burst. Heaters still failed. People still froze.

Go further back. The Blizzard of 1996 and 2010  buried the East Coast under feet of snow and ice, shutting down cities and killing more than 200 people. In 1978, the Great Blizzard paralyzed New England with hurricane-force winds and record snowfall, stranding drivers on highways overnight. Some never made it home. In 1888, the Great Blizzard killed hundreds across the Northeast, snapping telegraph lines and trapping people inside buildings for days. Technology has changed since then. Human vulnerability has not.

Snowstorms are cruel not because they are loud, but because they are patient. They don’t rush. They grind. They let panic bloom slowly as supplies thin out. Grocery trucks stop coming. Pharmacies close early. Dialysis patients start worrying. Parents stare at thermostats like they’re life support machines. I overheard a man on the sidewalk mutter into his phone, “If the power doesn’t come back tonight, we’re in trouble.” He didn’t sound dramatic. He sounded factual.

There is a special kind of fear that comes with winter storms. It’s quiet. It seeps in. It doesn’t scream like a hurricane or roar like a wildfire. It just removes options one by one. Roads close. Then bridges. Then help. You realize the heat in your house depends on a grid you don’t control, maintained by workers who may not be able to reach you. When the roof leaks, the wise man looks to the sky and the fool blames the floor. Snowstorms turn everyone into students of that lesson.

Officials urge people to stay indoors and stock emergency supplies, but that advice assumes time and money exist in equal measure for everyone. It assumes people can prepare. Many cannot. The storm does not adjust for that. It does not slow down because a neighborhood is poor or elderly or overlooked. It just keeps falling. I hear someone joke, “At least it looks pretty.” That joke always comes before the fear. Pretty snow becomes dangerous snow once the lights go out.

The National Weather Service has warned that bitter cold following the storm will slow cleanup and prolong outages. That matters because cold doesn’t forgive delays. Hypothermia doesn’t care about explanations. Carbon monoxide poisoning spikes when people turn to unsafe heating methods. Emergency rooms see more heart attacks from shoveling snow than from most other winter activities. This is documented, measured, repeated. Winter kills quietly and often after the headlines move on.

What makes snowstorms especially unsettling is how fast control evaporates. One day you’re complaining about traffic. The next day, traffic no longer exists. I heard a woman yell across a buried sidewalk, “We didn’t think it would be this bad.” That sentence is winter’s greatest hit. Every major storm leaves behind a chorus of it. We underestimate nature because it looks familiar. Snow falls every year. Cold comes every winter. But when they align just right, they stop being seasonal and start being savage.

There is no moral arc to a blizzard. No lesson it intends to teach. Any meaning we find is our own invention. Snowstorms are cruel because they are indifferent. They expose the thinness of our systems and the fragility of our confidence. They remind us that comfort is rented, not owned, and the landlord doesn’t answer calls during a storm.

As I watch plows struggle, power trucks crawl, and neighborhoods seal themselves into silence, one truth keeps pressing in. Nature does not negotiate. It does not compromise. It does not care who you are. When snow decides to take a city hostage, it does so without malice and without mercy. And the scariest part is not that this is rare. The scariest part is that it keeps happening, and we keep acting surprised, as if winter hasn’t been warning us all along.

 

If you’re looking for something different to read, Brief Book Series titles is available on Google Play Books. You can also read the books in the series here on Google Play: Brief BookSeries.

 

The Age of Paranoid Power: Why Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Jerusalem No Longer Trust Reality

 

Today’s greatest threat isn’t one aggressive nation, but a world of terrified leaders who distrust reality, overreact to shadows, and govern as if disaster is always seconds away.

I watch the world like a man standing in a room full of twitchy strangers, fingers hovering over triggers, eyes darting at shadows. This is modern geopolitics. Not the chessboard of calm grandmasters we were promised in textbooks, but a cracked mirror where every state sees an enemy staring back. Strategy used to be about patience and planning. Now it’s about fear management, about who panics first and who panics louder. Governments don’t act like sober adults weighing costs and benefits anymore. They act like traumatized survivors, convinced betrayal is always one step away and catastrophe is already late.

In the United States, fear wears a suit and calls itself vigilance. Every election is treated like a crime scene before the votes are even counted. Foreign interference is no longer a risk to be assessed; it’s an assumption baked into the system. Since the 2016 election, investigations, intelligence briefings, and congressional hearings have kept the country locked in a permanent posture of suspicion. Cyber intrusions, disinformation campaigns, and influence operations are real, but the response has turned existential. Washington behaves like a house that’s been robbed once and now hears footsteps in every creak of the floor. The result is a foreign policy that often treats ambiguity as aggression and uncertainty as intent. When you expect sabotage everywhere, restraint starts to look like weakness. A scared guard shoots first and asks questions at the morgue.

China operates from a deeper wound. Its leaders don’t just remember humiliation; they institutionalize it. The century of foreign domination is not ancient history in Beijing. It is curriculum, propaganda, and political oxygen. Every naval patrol in the South China Sea, every semiconductor restriction, every alliance meeting in Asia is read through the same lens: containment is coming, betrayal is inevitable, and survival requires control. The ruling party governs as if losing grip for even a second means national collapse. Internal dissent is treated as foreign manipulation. Economic pressure is framed as siege warfare. When a government believes history is out to get it, paranoia becomes policy. Pre-emption feels rational. Waiting feels suicidal.

Russia is fear forged into muscle memory. Decades of NATO expansion, real or perceived, fused with the collapse of the Soviet Union to create a state that sees encirclement in every neighbor’s handshake. Protests are not grievances; they are Western plots. Sanctions are not punishment; they are acts of war. Even peaceful alliances are treated like loaded guns pointed at Moscow’s door. This mindset did not begin with the invasion of Ukraine, but it found its most violent expression there. The Kremlin acted not because invasion made strategic sense in the long run, but because delay felt dangerous. When leaders convince themselves that tomorrow will be worse than today, they choose escalation and call it defense. A cornered bear doesn’t negotiate; it lashes out.

In Iran and Israel, fear is not abstract. It is lived, rehearsed, and passed down. Iran’s leadership governs with the memory of coups, invasions, and sanctions that crippled its economy and legitimacy. Israel governs with the memory of annihilation narrowly avoided and violence constantly returning. In both cases, survival psychology dominates. Pre-emption feels safer than patience. A missile not launched today is imagined landing tomorrow. This logic turns intelligence estimates into self-fulfilling prophecies. When both sides assume the other is minutes away from catastrophe, diplomacy shrinks and trigger fingers grow restless. The past does not merely inform policy; it haunts it.

The numbers tell the same ugly story. Global military spending surpassed $2 trillion in the early 2020s, the highest level ever recorded. That is not the behavior of a confident world. That is the behavior of a nervous one. Arms races thrive on distrust. Missile defense systems, hypersonic weapons, cyber commands, and space forces are sold as stabilizers, but they often do the opposite. They shorten decision windows and magnify worst-case thinking. When leaders believe an enemy can strike faster than ever, they feel pressured to strike first. When the clock runs faster, mistakes multiply.

Information warfare pours gasoline on this fire. Social media floods leaders and citizens alike with rumors, leaks, and half-truths moving at the speed of outrage. Reality becomes slippery. Every video might be fake, every silence suspicious, every denial proof of guilt. Governing in that environment is like steering through fog while being screamed at from all sides. Trust collapses not just between nations, but between leaders and facts themselves. When reality is doubted, paranoia fills the gap. Decisions get made on vibes, instincts, and worst nightmares.

I hear diplomats talk about de-escalation, but their voices sound small in rooms dominated by security hawks. Fear has better talking points. Fear is easier to sell to voters than patience. Fear wins elections. Leaders learn quickly that calming people down is risky, but scaring them straight is profitable. So they inflate threats, dramatize intelligence, and frame every compromise as surrender. Over time, this performance becomes belief. The mask sticks. Leaders start trusting their own propaganda. If you lie to yourself long enough, the lie starts giving orders.

This is how misjudgment becomes inevitable. When everyone assumes hostile intent, every move confirms it. A military exercise becomes a rehearsal for invasion. A sanction becomes proof of aggression. A defensive alliance becomes a noose. Diplomacy weakens not because it fails, but because no one believes in it anymore. Talking looks naive in a world addicted to suspicion. And so conflict stops being an accident. It becomes the expected outcome of a system designed around fear.

The greatest danger we face is not one rogue state or one mad leader. It is a global mindset that treats catastrophe as normal and paranoia as wisdom. A world where leaders no longer trust reality itself is a world that governs in permanent emergency mode. Emergency mode shortcuts judgment. It rewards speed over accuracy and force over understanding. History shows where this leads. In 1914, nations sleepwalked into war believing mobilization was defense and delay was death. Millions paid for that paranoia with their lives.

I don’t pretend fear will disappear. It is human, and states are run by humans with scars. But when fear becomes the primary driver of policy, it stops protecting and starts destroying. We are living in an age where nations flinch first and think later, where overreaction is praised as strength and restraint is mocked as weakness. When everyone lives like the sky is falling, someone eventually pulls it down.

If this system doesn’t relearn how to breathe, to pause, to trust something other than its own nightmares, then conflict will keep writing itself. Not because war is inevitable, but because paranoia makes it so. And that, more than any missile or tank, is the real weapon pointed at the future.

 

An update for those who follow my work: “China’s Military Mirage: The Overestimated Power of the People's Liberation Army” is now available on Google Play Books. Read it here on Google Play: China’s Military Mirage.