Tanzania: When Stability Turns Deadly.

 

When elections deliver 98% and dissent delivers funerals, democracy is already dying—Tanzania now faces its most perilous hour since independence.

I have watched power in Africa long enough to know the smell of it when it turns sour. It starts with applause. It ends with gunfire. Tanzania, once the quiet diplomat of East Africa, now walks with a limp and a loaded rifle. Don’t welcome Africa’s newest despot. Samia Suluhu Hassan has caused Tanzania’s most dangerous crisis since independence.

Chama Cha Mapinduzi has ruled Tanzania since 1961. That is 65 years of unbroken control. Longer than any ruling party in Africa. Under Julius Nyerere, the founding father, millions were forced into collective farms under the policy of ujamaa. It was sold as African socialism. It delivered shortages, inefficiency and economic collapse. By the early 1980s, inflation had soared above 30%, growth had stalled, and Tanzania had to turn to the IMF. When Nyerere stepped down in 1985, CCM reinvented itself. It embraced a flawed but competitive democracy. It allowed opposition parties. It opened markets. For decades, Tanzania became the poster child for slow, steady stability.

Average GDP growth over the past 20 years has hovered around 6%. Investors came. Tourists came. Aid flowed. Afrobarometer polling in 2024 still showed CCM as the most popular party. Tanzania looked like the calm cousin in a rough neighborhood.

Then came October.

An election that should have been routine exploded into the first mass protests in mainland Tanzania’s history. The country has a population of more than 70m. It is not a small island state. When anger erupts at that scale, it shakes the ground. State security forces responded with bullets. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed. The exact number is unclear. That alone tells you everything. In stable democracies, body counts are counted. In broken regimes, they are buried.

And as people died in the streets, Samia Suluhu Hassan claimed 98% of the vote.

Ninety-eight percent. In a competitive system. In 2026. That number does not whisper legitimacy. It screams fraud. Even dictators in the 1970s blushed at figures like that.

Dan Paget, a scholar of Tanzanian politics, has said that the last time mainland Tanzania experienced brutality on this scale was under German colonial rule more than 100 years ago. Let that sink in. A country that survived colonialism, Cold War politics, and regional wars without mass bloodshed has now drawn blood from its own citizens.

Samia came to power in 2021 after John Magufuli died. Magufuli was autocratic, yes, but he wrapped himself in populist nationalism. He cut waste, fought some forms of corruption, and cultivated an image as a bulldozer for the common man. Samia styled herself as the opposite. She spoke softly. She welcomed back exiles. She reopened space for media. She mended ties with Western investors. Many Tanzanians believed she was a liberal reformer.

I did not.

When a leader promises constitutional reform and then quietly shelves it, I take note. Tanzania’s constitution gives the president enormous power. The promised review stalled. Opposition parties threatened to boycott the election. The state responded not with dialogue but with arrests. Tundu Lissu, the most prominent opposition figure, was arrested and charged with treason. Treason is not a parking ticket. It carries the possibility of death. He remains behind bars.

In 2025, critics disappeared. A CCM bigwig vanished. A Catholic priest vanished. Scores of others were taken. Many are feared dead. When disappearances become routine, fear becomes policy.

Some once argued that Samia, a Muslim from Zanzibar, which accounts for about 3% of Tanzania’s population, was forced to rely on hardliners in the party and security services. They said she was weak. That she had no base. That she was cornered.

But after repeated cabinet reshuffles, she now commands every arm of the regime. Diplomats in Dar es Salaam say she has surrounded herself with Zanzibaris, family and loyal newcomers. Her daughter is now deputy minister of education. Her son-in-law is minister of health. When blood ties replace merit, the state becomes a family business.

And the world is watching.

The EU has frozen aid. The United States is reviewing bilateral relations, citing concerns over churches and the treatment of investors. Tanzania relies heavily on foreign capital and development finance. In 2023, foreign direct investment inflows were about $1bn, modest but vital. If investors fear instability, that money dries up fast.

Yet the government’s first instinct after the crackdown was not remorse but reassurance. Reassure investors. Protect existing capital. Speed up talks on a long-delayed liquefied natural gas project. A final investment decision is expected this year. The message is clear: business first, bodies later.

But growth alone cannot silence anger. Tanzania’s population grows at nearly 3% per year. That means the economy must grow above that rate just to keep incomes steady. At 6% GDP growth, per capita gains are thin. Youth unemployment and underemployment remain high. Too few young people have formal jobs. When they are jobless, they are restless. As one minister admitted, they are easily “triggered” into protest.

China is often cited as a model. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, China doubled down on growth. It delivered decades of rapid expansion, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. But Tanzania is not China. It lacks the industrial base, the scale, and the global leverage Beijing wielded. You cannot copy and paste history.

Meanwhile, corruption is said to be rising. Business experts in Dar es Salaam speak of rent-seeking everywhere. Foreign firms complain of shake-downs. A Western diplomat put it bluntly: things are better for corrupt oligarchs. Not for investors.

I have heard this script before. First comes centralization. Then comes repression. Then comes economic favoritism for insiders. Finally comes the claim that stability requires strong hands. When the drumbeat of fear grows louder, liberty slips out the back door.

Some criticism of Samia is fueled by misogyny and Islamophobia. That is real and ugly. But stripping away prejudice does not erase policy. The crisis is not about gender. It is about governance. It is about the gap between promise and practice.

CCM has survived because it adapts. After economic collapse in the 1980s, it reformed. After political pressure in the 1990s, it opened space. It has been a strange beast, yes, but a flexible one. Now it faces an inflection point. Another uprising could be catastrophic. A former minister has warned that unless security forces show humanity, CCM will be removed from power.

A coup within the party is possible. Internal rebellion has toppled leaders before in African ruling parties. Outsiders cannot know how deep dissatisfaction runs within CCM. But when elites begin whispering, the clock starts ticking.

Tanzania was long known for stability in a volatile region. It mediated conflicts in Burundi. It hosted refugees. It avoided the coups and civil wars that scarred neighbors. Now that reputation is cracking.

I do not celebrate instability. I fear it. A nation of 70m cannot afford chaos. But stability built on fear is a house of cards. A 98% victory is not strength. It is insecurity dressed up as triumph. Do not welcome Africa’s newest despot. Do not clap for a leader who trades reform for repression and calls it order. Tanzania stands at its most dangerous crossroads since 1961. The bullets of October did more than kill protesters. They shattered a myth. The myth that CCM’s long rule guaranteed peace.

History teaches a brutal lesson. When power refuses to bend, it eventually breaks. And when it breaks, it rarely does so quietly.

 

For readers interested in a separate line of thought, the titles in my “Brief Book Series” are available on Google Play. Read them here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

No Safe Haven: Why the Next Crash Could Hurt More

 

AI hype is soaring, but history screams warning: when bubbles burst, fortunes vanish fast, and the old safe havens might fail you this time.

On February 8th 2026, as America inhaled wings and beer and waited for the halftime show, an AI chatbot named Claude flashed across the Super Bowl screen. I didn’t see innovation. I saw déjà vu. I saw ghosts from 2000, when 17 dotcom firms bought 30-second ads during the same game, each torching millions for a shot at immortality. Weeks later, the Nasdaq began its long fall. The party lights went out. Portfolios bled.

History does not repeat, but it rhymes—and sometimes it screams.

Now the hype machine is back, only this time it runs on neural networks and trillion-parameter dreams. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have pledged a combined $660bn on AI in the coming year. That is not pocket change. That is empire money. A year ago, Wall Street would have cheered. Today, investors flinch. Microsoft’s stock is down 16% since its spending plans landed. Meta popped, then wobbled. Confidence feels thinner than it did.

Everyone knows stocks are expensive. The S&P 500’s cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio has hovered well above its long-run average of about 17. When valuations stretch, expected returns shrink. That is not ideology. That is math. When you pay too much for earnings, you bake in disappointment. The higher you climb, the thinner the air.

So I ask myself the question that keeps money managers up at 3 a.m.: how do I hedge a bubble when everything looks bubbly? The obvious answer is to sell. Cash out. Walk away. But I have watched this movie before. During the late 1990s, the Nasdaq rose nearly 12-fold in the 5 years to March 2000. Along the way, it suffered at least a dozen corrections of 10% or more. Any one of those dips could have scared a cautious investor into selling. Anyone who bought at the start of 1995 and simply held on would have doubled their money even after the crash. Timing a mania is like trying to catch a falling knife while riding a bull.

Professional managers often cannot just sit in cash. Their mandates chain them to equities. Clients pay them to be invested, not to hide under the desk. Even for individuals, selling because stocks “look pricey” can mean missing the last explosive leg up. Bubbles do not pop politely. They stretch further than reason allows. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

So I look for refuge. In the 1990s, bonds did the job. From early 1995 to the Nasdaq’s peak in March 2000, a Bloomberg index of American Treasuries rose nearly 50%. When stocks crashed, the same Treasury index rose another 30% as central banks slashed rates. Bonds were a shock absorber. Stocks fell, bonds rose. The classic 60/40 portfolio looked like genius. But 2022 rewrote the script. Inflation surged to 9.1% in June 2022, the highest in 40 years. The Federal Reserve hiked rates aggressively. Stocks fell. Bonds fell. The S&P 500 dropped 19% that year. Long-term Treasuries suffered one of their worst drawdowns in decades. The supposed hedge failed. Both sides of the portfolio burned at once.

If inflation resurges again, bonds may not save us. If governments’ debts—now exceeding 100% of GDP in many rich countries—spark fears of fiscal strain, both stocks and bonds could land in the same blast radius. We saw a glimpse of that when policy shocks rattled markets and Treasuries briefly lost their safe-haven glow. When trust cracks, correlation spikes.

Gold? It has swung wildly. Bitcoin? It calls itself digital gold, but in 2022 it fell more than 60%. When liquidity dries up, even the rebels beg for mercy.

That leaves derivatives. Options. The financial world’s insurance contracts. Buy a put option on the S&P 500 and you gain the right to sell at a pre-set strike price. Own the stock and the put, and you cap your losses. Today, a 1-year put limiting losses to 10% costs about 3.6% of the amount insured. Pay 3.6% and you sleep better.

But insurance is never free. Analysts at Goldman Sachs studied how such strategies would have fared from 1996 to 2002. A series of 1-year puts limiting losses to 10% produced roughly the same annualised return as unhedged stocks, but with less volatility. Not bad. A series of 1-month puts limiting losses to 4% did worse, because the repeated premiums piled up like credit-card interest. Protection can quietly eat performance.

I think of it like paying for flood insurance every month when the river never rises—until it does. You resent the premiums, then you bless them.

The problem is timing and cost. If volatility is already high, options get expensive. If everyone smells danger, insurance sellers raise prices. Buying puts after the crash starts is like shopping for fire extinguishers while your kitchen burns.

So I circle back to an idea that feels almost insulting in its simplicity: hedge equities with equities. During the dotcom bust, filtered baskets of steadier stocks outperformed. The S&P 500 low-volatility index, which holds the 100 least volatile stocks in the main index, proved a surprisingly effective diversifier. A 50/50 split between it and the broader S&P 500 from 1996 to 2002 generated nearly twice the annualised excess return over cash compared with the S&P 500 alone. Dividend aristocrats—companies that have increased dividends for at least 25 consecutive years—also delivered similar resilience. Quality stocks with high returns on equity and low debt did the same.

In other words, the best hedge was not fleeing the market but tilting within it.

That feels unsatisfying when AI stocks dominate headlines and valuations. Nvidia’s market capitalisation has at times surpassed $2trn. A handful of mega-cap tech firms account for a large share of the S&P 500’s gains. Concentration risk is real. When leadership narrows, fragility grows.

But if I step back, I see that not all stocks are the same. A cash-generating consumer-staples firm with stable earnings is not a venture-backed AI dream burning capital. A healthcare company with steady demand is not a speculative chip designer priced for perfection. If AI spending disappoints, if $660bn fails to produce commensurate profits, the high-fliers will suffer first.

The dotcom crash offers a brutal lesson. Cisco and Intel survived but traded sideways for years. Pets.com vanished. The Nasdaq fell nearly 78% from peak to trough. Yet diversified, profitable companies endured. Investors who owned quality and held on were scarred but not destroyed.

So how do I hedge a bubble, AI edition? I accept that there is no perfect shield. Bonds may not rescue me. Gold may whipsaw. Bitcoin may implode. Options cost money and discipline. Selling everything may mean missing the last manic surge.

Instead, I think in layers. I trim exposure to the most euphoric names. I tilt toward quality, dividends, lower volatility. I consider selective option protection, knowing it will drag on returns. I keep some cash—not because I am scared, but because liquidity is power when markets panic.

Above all, I remind myself that bubbles are stories we tell each other until the bill arrives. In 2000, it was eyeballs and clicks. In 2007, it was house prices that “never fall nationwide.” In 2026, it is AI that will change everything. Maybe it will. But prices can outrun reality.

Protecting a portfolio from a crash looks harder than ever because the old playbook is fraying. Stocks and bonds can fall together. Safe havens wobble. Insurance is costly. The hedge is imperfect. But I would rather carry an imperfect shield than march naked into a storm. In markets, survival is victory. Returns are optional. Staying in the game is not.

 

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 them here on Google Play: Brief BookSeries.

 

 

Crypto Winter Just Turned Into a Financial Ice Age.

 

Crypto’s vibes have died, $2 trillion has vanished, leverage is detonating, and the “digital gold” dream is freezing into dust—this isn’t a dip, it’s financial rat poison finally claiming its victims.

I warned you. I said crypto was not a revolution. I said it was not digital gold. I said it was vibes wrapped in code, hype wrapped in hashtags, a casino dressed up as a technology conference. Now here we are. This is the coldest crypto winter yet. And I am not shivering. I am nodding. Bitcoin has fallen from $124,000 in early October 2025 to around $70,000 today. That is a 45% plunge in a matter of months. The total market value of cryptocurrencies has vaporized by more than $2 trillion. Gone. Evaporated. When the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked. What I see is a market built on mood swings and leverage.

Yes, crypto has crashed before. In late 2021, Bitcoin peaked near $69,000 and then cratered by 77% in 2022. That wipeout erased more than $2trn in value at the time, according to CoinMarketCap data. But back then, tech stocks were bleeding too. The NASDAQ 100 fell by over 33% in 2022 from peak to trough. Everyone was hurting. Misery had company.

Now? The NASDAQ 100 is less than 4% below its recent record high. Nvidia, Microsoft, and the rest of the AI darlings are flexing. Meanwhile, crypto bros are staring at red screens alone. That loneliness matters. Crypto is an asset class powered by vibes. When the vibes turn ugly, there is nothing underneath to cushion the fall. No earnings. No dividends. No cash flow. Just belief.

And belief is a fragile thing.

At the end of September, measurable borrowing against crypto assets reached about $74bn. That figure had more than doubled over the previous 12 months. Leverage is rocket fuel on the way up and napalm on the way down. Starting October 10, about $19bn in leveraged crypto bets were liquidated in days. Forced selling. Margin calls. The kind of cascade that does not ask for your feelings.

I have seen this movie before. In 1929, investors bought stocks on margin with as little as 10% down. When prices slipped, brokers demanded cash. People could not pay. The selling fed on itself. The Dow Jones fell nearly 89% from peak to trough. In 2008, mortgage-backed securities were sliced, diced, and leveraged to the sky. When housing cracked, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the S&P 500 dropped 57%. Excess leverage always ends the same way. The higher the monkey climbs, the more it shows its tail.

Crypto is not immune to gravity. It just pretends to be.

Look at Strategy Inc, the company that borrows and issues shares to buy Bitcoin. Its stock has plunged almost 70% since July. That is what happens when you strap your balance sheet to a volatile token and call it genius. It works in a bull run. It burns in a bear market.

Even the so-called institutional embrace is unraveling. In 2024, crypto exchange-traded funds were launched with fanfare. The iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, IBIT, became the fastest-growing ETF in history, amassing nearly $100bn in assets by October. The narrative was simple: Wall Street is here, this time is different.

Now IBIT has seen outflows of $3.5bn over the past 80 trading days. Most of the capital invested in the fund is underwater. The same institutions that were supposed to legitimize crypto are quietly heading for the exits. No speeches. No apologies. Just redemptions.

Meanwhile, Bank of America’s September survey showed digital assets accounted for just 0.4% of the total portfolio value among fund managers surveyed. The vast majority had no allocation at all. Let that sink in. After all the hype, all the conferences, all the laser eyes on social media, professional investors are basically saying, “No thanks.”

Central banks are not buying Bitcoin either. They are buying gold. According to the World Gold Council, central banks purchased over 1,000 tonnes of gold in 2022, the highest level on record. They continued strong buying into 2023 and 2024 as geopolitical risks and inflation fears lingered. Gold has a 5,000-year track record. Bitcoin has vibes and volatility.

The Czech central bank dipped a cautious toe in crypto last year, buying about $1m worth of Bitcoin. Experimental. Tiny. Symbolic. And it has announced no plans to buy more. That is not adoption. That is curiosity.

Crypto once sold itself as rebellion. A middle finger to fiat money. A hedge against inflation. A shield against central banks. But when politicians and their families are knee-deep in tokens and meme coins, how rebellious can it be? Charles Hoskinson, co-founder of Ethereum, admitted it bluntly: once you become part of the system, the system makes you uncool.

Exactly. Crypto lost its outlaw mystique and gained nothing in return. It is not widely used for payments. It is not a reliable store of value. During the inflation spike of 2022, when U.S. CPI hit 9.1% in June, Bitcoin did not soar as digital gold. It crashed. From around $47,000 in March 2022, it slid below $20,000 by mid-year. That is not a hedge. That is a hazard.

And let us not forget the body count. In 2022, FTX collapsed in one of the biggest financial scandals in modern history. Sam Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud. Billions of dollars vanished. Celsius Network filed for bankruptcy. Terra Luna imploded, wiping out an estimated $40bn in value in days. People lost life savings. Pensioners were ruined. Retail investors were left holding digital dust.

Every cycle, the same script plays out. Prices surge. Influencers scream “to the moon.” Leverage builds. Then something cracks. A stablecoin depegs. An exchange halts withdrawals. A founder gets indicted. Prices crash. And the faithful say, “This is just another winter.”

But this winter feels different. Not because the percentage drop is the worst ever. It is not. A 45% fall is brutal, but we have seen 77% before. It feels different because the aura is gone. The vibe is off. And when your entire asset class is built on vibe, that is lethal.

I have always argued that crypto is the most dangerous kind of rat poison in finance. Not because it kills instantly, but because it seduces first. It whispers about freedom and decentralization. It promises 10x returns. It dresses up speculation as innovation. And then, slowly, it drains portfolios while investors tell themselves they are early.

An asset that produces no income must rely on someone else paying more later. That is the greater fool theory dressed in blockchain jargon. When fools are plentiful, prices rise. When fools get cautious, prices collapse. That is not investing. That is musical chairs with code. Crypto has survived many obituaries. It may survive this one too. I am not predicting it goes to zero tomorrow. But survival is not the same as legitimacy. Tulips survived after 1637. So did Beanie Babies after the 1990s bubble burst. That does not make them sound long-term investments.

Right now, the numbers are screaming. $2trn wiped out. $19bn liquidated in days. $3.5bn flowing out of the biggest Bitcoin ETF. 0.4% portfolio allocation among professional fund managers. Those are not vibes. Those are facts.

This is the coldest crypto winter yet because the fantasy is fading. The rebellion is stale. The institutions are cautious. The leverage is toxic. And the mood is sour. Crypto is an asset class built on belief, and belief has a breaking point. I do not hate technology. I respect innovation. But I refuse to worship volatility. When I look at this market, I do not see digital gold. I see a high-stakes casino where the house is leverage and the currency is hype.

And when the music stops, hype cannot pay your bills.

 

For readers interested in a separate line of thought, the titles in my “Brief Book Series” are available on Google Play. Read them here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.

 

 

 

Super Bet Sunday: Welcome to the United States of “Odds”

 

America didn’t just watch the Super Bowl—we turned it into a national casino night, and now half the country is betting its future on odds designed to quietly bleed us dry.

Just a week ago, on Sunday February 8, 2026, America did what it always does. We gathered around giant screens, stacked wings like sandbags, cracked open beer, and swore this year our team would not break our heart. But let’s stop lying to ourselves. That wasn’t just the Super Bowl. That was Super Bet Sunday. Major League Sports has become Wager League Sports, and the real MVP wasn’t a quarterback. It was the sportsbook app glowing in half the living rooms in this country.

About 57% of American adults now report participating in some form of gambling. That is not a fringe hobby anymore. That is a national pastime. Half of men under 50 have an active online sports betting account. Half. That means if you put 10 guys in a sports bar, 5 of them are not just watching the game. They are sweating spreads, hedging parlays, checking live odds every 3 minutes like it’s a medical condition. And if half of women are bingeing true-crime podcasts about wives poisoning their husbands, maybe it’s because somebody bet the rent on the over.

Now listen. I’m not your pastor. I’m not your parole officer. When it comes to personal pleasure, I’m a libertarian. You want to strap on a helmet and risk brain damage for a touchdown, that’s your body. You want to bet on the color of the Gatorade dumped on a coach, that’s your wallet. Risk is part of freedom. But freedom without memory turns into amnesia. And America has amnesia about gambling.

This country was founded by Puritans who hated gambling so much they banned it in 1631. Dice games? Illegal. Lotteries? Illegal. Fun? Suspicious. For roughly 300 years, gambling lived in shadows. It was something you did in smoky back rooms with men named Lefty. It was vice. It was dirty. It was whispered about, not advertised during halftime.

Then 1931 hit. The Great Depression crushed the economy, and Nevada legalized gambling because when you’re broke, morals suddenly become flexible. Las Vegas rose out of the desert like a neon confession booth. But even then, gambling was contained. You had to go there. You had to make the pilgrimage. Sin required travel. It was still socially radioactive. The Flamingo opened in 1946, tied to mob money. Gambling and organized crime were practically roommates. In the 1950s, Guys and Dolls made gamblers look like charming degenerates. Sky Masterson would bet on which sugar cube a fly would land on. That was supposed to be absurd. Today, that’s just called micro-betting.

The slow creep began in 1964 when New Hampshire launched the first modern state lottery. Politicians realized something powerful: why raise taxes when you can sell hope? Today, 45 states run lotteries. They promise the money goes to education. That’s adorable. Lotteries are disproportionately funded by lower-income Americans. The pitch is always the same. Somebody’s got to win. The math is always the same. Most of you won’t.

In 1971, off-track betting expanded gambling beyond racetracks. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act legalized casino gaming on tribal lands. In 1989, riverboat casinos floated into the scene, except they didn’t float anywhere. They docked permanently and pretended nostalgia made vice classy. Gambling kept getting rebranded like a pop star with a PR team. But the nuclear event happened in 2018. The Supreme Court, in Murphy v. NCAA, struck down the federal ban on sports betting. And just like that, the dam burst. As of 2026, more than 35 states have legalized sports betting in some form. Most allow it on your phone. You don’t even have to stand up. You can lose money horizontally.

In 2023, Americans legally wagered over $119 billion on sports. Before 2018, the number was under $5 billion. That’s not growth. That’s ignition. ESPN partnered with DraftKings. Teams that once banned gamblers now sign sponsorship deals with sportsbooks. Las Vegas has NFL and NHL teams. Caesar’s Sportsbook is an official partner of franchises that used to act like gambling was contagious.

We didn’t just legalize it. We glamorized it.

And here’s the uncomfortable part. Gambling thrives in economic anxiety. When housing feels out of reach and wages feel stagnant, a $20 bet feels like rebellion against reality. Owning a home feels harder than hitting a 5-leg parlay. Never mind that roughly 50% of millennials own homes. The narrative is louder than the data. The shortcut whispers sweeter than the staircase.

Problem gambling is not imaginary. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates about 2.5 million U.S. adults meet the criteria for severe gambling disorder, with millions more at risk. After states legalized sports betting, some reported hotline calls jumping by over 30%. When friction disappears, behavior accelerates. A casino used to require travel. Now it requires Wi-Fi.

And let’s talk psychology. Gambling doesn’t just take your money. It messes with your belief system. It shifts you from builder to bettor. From architect to spectator. It replaces sweat equity with “maybe.” It trains you to chase variance instead of discipline. That’s not just an economic shift. That’s cultural.

We used to brag about grit. Now we brag about odds boosts.

I’m not calling for bans. Prohibition makes martyrs out of bad habits. Adults deserve choice. But choice should come with self-respect. Betting on your team is fun. Betting on whether a pop star’s boyfriend shows up in the luxury suite is not investing. It’s cosplay capitalism. Super Bet Sunday is a symbol. It’s America eating nachos while turning entertainment into derivatives trading. The game is secondary. The spread is primary. The touchdown is emotional. The parlay is financial. We’ve merged Wall Street with the end zone.

And here’s the question that nobody wants to ask. When did we decide that every thrill needed to be monetized? When did fandom become a side hustle? When did we trade effort for probability?

This is still America. You still control your destiny. You still build your life one decision at a time. But every time you outsource your future to a betting slip, you chip away at that myth. Not because gambling exists. But because gambling normalizes the idea that luck outruns labor.

We used to say the house always wins. Now the house is in your pocket, smiling, sending you notifications. Super Bet Sunday came and went. The confetti fell. The trophies were lifted. And millions of Americans woke up Monday morning not just with hangovers, but with transaction histories.

Welcome to the United States of Odds. Where we don’t just watch the game. We are the action.

 

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 them here on Google Play: Brief BookSeries.

 

 

Under the Rock: Lies, Lists, and the Rot Beneath Epstein’s Empire

 

The Epstein files rip open a vault of elite deception, exposing a power network that lied, minimized, and protected itself while over 1,000 victims were reduced to redactions. The emails show a culture of access and arrogance where powerful names circled a predator, then swore they barely knew him.

I keep hearing that we should move on. That it was just one monster, one island, one bad apple with a private jet. But every time I lift that rock called Epstein, it’s not a few bugs crawling around. It’s a colony. It’s a system. It’s rot with a Rolodex.

Jeffrey Epstein died on August 10, 2019, in a Manhattan jail cell. The official ruling was suicide. Cameras malfunctioned. Guards falsified logs. A man who had tried to kill himself weeks earlier was left unmonitored. If this were a movie script, an editor would send it back as too obvious. Yet here we are. A high-profile defendant facing federal sex trafficking charges, dead before trial, and the world’s most powerful people suddenly breathing easier. When the lights go out at the exact wrong moment, you don’t just blame the bulb.

Now the Department of Justice has released more than 3 million pages of documents, dumped on January 30 in a tidal wave of paper so massive it felt like accountability by avalanche. Volunteer software engineers had to convert the files into searchable formats just so the public could read them. That alone tells me something. Transparency delayed is truth diluted.

When analysts combed through 1.4 million emails, around 1,500 threads fell into the most severe category, including messages that made light of abusing Epstein’s “littlest girl.” That phrase alone should freeze the blood. Over 1,000 victims were abused, according to court filings and investigative reporting. Over 1,000 lives. And yet for years the headlines were about the guest list, not the girls. The powerful always want the story to be about them.

Nearly 60% of Epstein’s emails were to people he paid to make his life easier. Fixers. Lawyers. Reputation scrubbers. People who handled the bureaucratic headaches that come with being a registered sex offender. People who tried to erase the digital trail of his 2008 plea deal in Florida, when he secured a non-prosecution agreement that allowed him to serve 13 months in a county jail with work release privileges. Thirteen months. For crimes involving minors. If that isn’t velvet-glove justice, I don’t know what is.

And then there’s the network. Of his 500 main correspondents, about 20% were financiers. Ten percent were scientists or doctors. Eight percent were media and public relations figures. Six percent each were lawyers, politicians, academics, and businesspeople. That isn’t a fringe crowd. That’s the boardroom of the republic. That’s the people who lecture us about ethics on television and write books about progress. When almost every pillar of elite society appears in a trafficker’s inbox, I start asking harder questions.

Who had been there for years? Who kept showing up? Who claimed later they barely knew him? Some may truly not have understood the scale of his crimes. The concealment was real. Money buys silence. Money buys introductions. Money buys doubt. But others lied. We know that because emails, calendars, flight logs, and photos contradict public denials. When someone says, “I never met him,” and then their name appears in correspondence arranging meetings, that isn’t a misunderstanding. That’s damage control.

I’m not saying everyone in those files committed crimes. That would be reckless. Some were one-sided contacts. Some were brief acquaintances. Some, like J.K. Rowling, were pilloried despite evidence suggesting the contact came only from him. But others deserve moral scrutiny. The physicist Lawrence Krauss, for example, has faced criticism for his association. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick was criticized for initially minimizing dealings. Even if no criminal charge sticks, dishonesty matters. In a democracy, trust is currency. When leaders shade the truth about even minor ties, it feeds the suspicion that bigger truths are buried.

And then there are the whispers about big names like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Some emails include claims written by Epstein himself, including bizarre allegations about personal matters. But here’s the hard part: Epstein was a manipulator. He exaggerated. He bragged. He wrote things that may have been lies. So every sensational claim must be weighed carefully. Being mentioned in a document is not the same as being guilty of a crime. Yet when multiple elites first deny contact and later admit to meetings, the pattern starts to look less like coincidence and more like choreography.

What truly fuels the fire is the lack of progress. Seven years have passed since Epstein’s 2019 arrest. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking. That was one step. But with over 1,000 victims identified in civil and criminal proceedings, why have so few additional charges been filed? Why does it feel like the machinery of justice moves slower when the accused have private jets?

Redactions complicate everything. Names blacked out. Faces blurred. Victims protected, as they must be. But the haphazard nature of some redactions has shielded possible abusers while exposing peripheral figures. It has turned a story about exploited girls into a circus about celebrity names. Female bodies became footnotes in their own tragedy. When the smoke clears, the powerful are still standing and the victims are still blurred. I look at this and I don’t just see a criminal case. I see a stress test for the idea of meritocracy. We’re told the best rise to the top through talent and grit. But too often, the best and brightest are seduced by flattery, vanity, and access. Epstein offered proximity to wealth and power. He hosted dinners with Nobel laureates. He courted politicians. He donated to universities. In return, he got legitimacy. He got photos. He got doors opened. He wrapped himself in the aura of brilliance to mask brutality.

The nihilism creeping into public life didn’t start here, but Epstein poured gasoline on it. When people see a man accused of trafficking minors dine with royalty, socialize with billionaires, and negotiate a sweetheart plea deal, they stop believing the rules apply equally. When surveillance footage goes missing and answers arrive years late, they don’t shrug. They spiral.

And here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: this isn’t just about who’s on the list. It’s about who helped him operate. Who handled the money. Who cleaned the reputation. Who introduced him to fresh rooms. Trafficking at this scale requires logistics. It requires enablers. It requires a web. And webs don’t spin themselves. I don’t need wild conspiracies to be angry. The confirmed facts are damning enough. A convicted sex offender built a global network of influence. Over 1,000 victims were abused. Over 3 million pages of documents were released in a chaotic flood. Years later, accountability still feels partial. That alone should shake anyone who believes in justice.

So when I hear people joke about orange shapes on surveillance video, I get the dark humor. It’s easier to laugh than to accept how deep this might go. But beneath the jokes is a simple, brutal truth. Too many powerful people got close to a predator. Too many denied it. Too many minimized it. And too many still haven’t answered fully for what they knew and when they knew it.

The more I lift that rock, the more I see that this was never just about one man. It was about a culture that confuses access with virtue and wealth with wisdom. It was about institutions that bent instead of breaking him. And until every credible lead is pursued and every proven abuser is charged, that rock stays lifted. Because when the foundation smells this bad, you don’t cover it with perfume. You tear it down to the studs.

 

 

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 them here on Google Play: Brief BookSeries.

 

Bunker Britain: Starmer’s Fall and the Leftward Drift Before the Storm

 

Starmer is wounded, Labour is drifting left, and Britain is sleepwalking into fiscal danger as debt, stagnation and political fear tighten their grip on a country running out of time.

I have seen this movie before. The triumphant leader walks into Downing Street like a conqueror. The polls sing. The cameras flash. Then the lights flicker. Ratings crash. Allies scatter. And Number 10 turns into a bunker with better wallpaper. Britain does not just have instability anymore. It has made it a habit.

Sir Keir Starmer was supposed to end the chaos. After Labour’s landslide in 2024, he spoke like a man planning to govern for a decade. Now he is Britain’s fourth prime minister in 4 years. That is not a transition. That is turbulence. Local elections loom in 12 weeks, and the air smells like panic.

The scandal that detonated his authority was not a thunderclap. It was a slow fuse. The revelation that Peter Mandelson was appointed ambassador to America despite Sir Keir knowing about the length of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein shattered the carefully polished image of a dull but competent reformer. Epstein’s name is political napalm. Once it sticks, it stains. Mandelson has long been a survivor of political storms, but this time the splash damage hit the prime minister himself. The aides who built Sir Keir’s swaggering machine resigned. The cabinet secretary is leaving. The strongman image evaporated. What remains is a leader clinging to office but not power.

I can almost hear the muttering in Westminster corridors. “Just survive,” one voice says. “Don’t rock the boat,” another whispers. Survival is not strategy. It is drift with better lighting. Britain does not have the luxury of drift. Growth is sluggish. The Office for National Statistics shows UK GDP growth in 2023 at 0.1%. In 2024 it improved modestly, but living standards remain under pressure. Real wages only recently recovered to pre-2008 levels after more than a decade of stagnation. That is not just an economic statistic. That is a lost era.

Public debt hovers around 100% of GDP. The Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that debt interest payments have surged as rates climbed, reaching levels not seen since the late 1980s as a share of GDP. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has repeatedly said that demographic pressure, especially an ageing population, will strain health and pension spending in coming decades. Rearmament is back on the table as NATO members respond to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Defence spending targets of 2% of GDP look modest in a world on edge.

So what does a weakened prime minister do in this storm? He retreats. And when Labour retreats, it does not drift right. It drifts left.

Sir Keir once sold himself as the brake on his party’s left wing. He purged Jeremy Corbyn. He promised discipline. He talked about fiscal responsibility. But power is physics. When gravity shifts, leaders fall. The parliamentary Labour Party today is not the New Labour of Tony Blair. The centre of gravity moved during the austerity years of the 2010s. Many MPs came of age politically during spending cuts and public sector restraint. They do not want restraint. They want reversal.

Labour members will choose the next leader if Sir Keir falls. Surveys of party members have shown strong support for higher taxes and higher public spending. The gap between members and voters is wide. Only about 20% of voters consistently support large tax increases to fund more spending, according to long-running British Social Attitudes surveys. Inside the party, the appetite is stronger. That tension will not disappear. It will pull policy leftward.

Already Sir Keir has shifted tone. He now talks about “putting money in people’s pockets” as the priority, rather than focusing first on productivity and growth. That sounds compassionate. It is also expensive. Without growth, redistribution becomes a shrinking pie fight. I have seen that movie too. It ends in bond market lectures.

Remember 2022. Liz Truss unveiled unfunded tax cuts. Gilt yields spiked. Pension funds wobbled. The Bank of England intervened. Markets can humble governments faster than voters. If Labour responds to political weakness by handing out fiscal sweets without structural reform, investors may test its nerve. Debt markets are not sentimental. They price risk.

The instinct inside a shaken party is unity at all costs. Unity sounds noble. In practice it means lowest-common-denominator politics. Welfare reform becomes radioactive. Education reform stalls if it irritates unions. Civil service overhaul gets postponed because confrontation feels risky. Planning reform, one of the few bright spots, may soften as environmental concerns and local opposition regain ground. Nature versus developers is not just a slogan. It is a vote bank.

I imagine the closed-door meeting. An MP pounds the table. “We didn’t get into politics to cut benefits.” Another adds, “Our voters expect help, not lectures.” The prime minister nods. He backs down. The “Ming vase” strategy that protected him in opposition now sits empty. It was designed to avoid breaking anything. Governing requires breaking inertia.

History offers a warning. In the 1970s Britain faced stagnation, high inflation, industrial unrest. Governments lurched. Markets lost confidence. In 1976 the UK sought an IMF bailout. That humiliation reshaped politics for a generation. Today inflation has fallen from its 2022 peak above 11% back toward target, but the scars remain. Productivity growth has been weak since the global financial crisis. The Resolution Foundation has described the UK’s productivity slowdown as one of the worst among advanced economies.

Political fragmentation adds another layer. Voter loyalty to major parties has eroded. Smaller parties like Reform UK and the Greens siphon off chunks of the electorate. Governing on a low vote share is the new normal. Call an election now and Labour could lose hundreds of seats. Fear of that scenario will paralyse bold reform.

And so the drift begins. More scepticism of big tech. Palantir becomes a symbol in internal debates. Louder pro-European tones, which may be sensible economically, but only if matched with tough negotiation. More spending promises. Fewer structural fights. Meanwhile the numbers tick. Debt interest accumulates. Health and social care demands rise. Defence commitments expand. The Office for Budget Responsibility has warned that long-term pressures from ageing and climate transition could push debt higher without policy change. Ignoring that warning is not compassion. It is postponement.

I walk through this argument with a grim smile. Britain wanted stability after years of Conservative drama. It got a landslide. But landslides can bury their architects. Sir Keir’s humiliation is greater precisely because expectations were higher. He promised a decade. He may be lucky to survive the season.

What happens next? Perhaps a moderniser emerges from Labour’s ranks, someone willing to confront the fiscal math and the party’s comfort zones. Perhaps the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch craft a sharper economic narrative from the right. Reform UK currently leads some polls, but beyond anti-immigration rhetoric it offers thin policy detail. Disruption is not a plan.

For now, I see a government that governs cautiously because it is afraid. Afraid of its members. Afraid of markets. Afraid of voters who sour quickly. Fear makes leaders shrink. And when leaders shrink, policy slides toward the path of least resistance. Britain’s predicament will get worse before it gets better. The economic headwinds are real. The fiscal arithmetic is stubborn. The political centre is fragile. With Sir Keir Starmer weakened, the gravitational pull inside Labour will drag the government leftward, toward spending promises and away from painful reform. That may soothe party nerves. It will not solve structural decline.

I do not say this with pleasure. I say it because I have watched Westminster long enough to know that drift feels comfortable until it meets the wall. And Britain, boxed in by debt, demographics and distrust, is inching toward that wall. The only question is who is holding the wheel when the impact comes.

 

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.

 

 

Nigeria’s Expanding Kill Zone: Nigeria’s Cities Are Next

 

 Jihadists and bandits are no longer hiding in Northern Nigeria’s forests—they are marching toward its cities, and if the state keeps blinking, the next massacre could explode in the heart of urban Nigeria. Indeed, Northern Nigeria is a place where poverty bites so hard that a rifle starts to look like a résumé.

I keep replaying February 3rd in my head. The call to prayer rose over Kaiama, soft and holy, and then the gunshots answered back. Men walking to the mosque never made it. Armed attackers stormed two villages near the Benin border in Kwara state. They shot people at close range. They slit throats. They burned homes with families inside. Around 170 people were killed before the gunmen melted into the bush. That is not rumor. That is a body count.

President Bola Tinubu blamed “Boko Haram.” That name used to mean one specific jihadist group founded by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002. Now it has become shorthand for chaos itself. Boko Haram splintered after its leader Abubakar Shekau died in 2021 during clashes with a rival faction aligned with Islamic State West Africa Province. Since then, the alphabet soup of violence has grown thicker. JAS, one Boko Haram faction, fights rivals, targets Muslims and Christians alike, and has been pushing westward. Another suspect is Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, an al-Qaeda-linked group active across the Sahel that formally announced its presence in Nigeria in 2025 with an attack in Kwara. When groups start issuing press releases about entering your state, that is not expansion. That is conquest by installment.

I have watched Nigeria’s security crisis mutate for years. In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from Chibok. The world shouted “Bring Back Our Girls.” Some were rescued. Many were not. That single act put Nigeria on the global terrorism map. According to the Global Terrorism Index, Nigeria ranked among the countries most impacted by terrorism for much of the past decade. At its peak around 2014 to 2015, Boko Haram was responsible for thousands of deaths annually. The United Nations estimated that more than 35,000 people have been killed in the north-east insurgency since 2009, and over 2 million displaced. That war never really ended. It just changed shape.

What makes the Kaiama massacre different is geography. Kwara sits in the mid-west, not the traditional north-eastern heartland of Borno and Yobe. Violence is creeping south, closer to urban centers that once felt insulated. Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, lies only a few hours away by road. Ilorin, the state capital, is not some remote outpost. When blood spills near better-governed regions, the old comfort story collapses. Fire does not ask permission before it spreads.

Then there are the bandits. They are not ideologues. They are entrepreneurs of violence. Hundreds of loosely organized armed groups operate across Zamfara, Kaduna, Katsina and Niger states. They started with cattle rustling. Then kidnapping for ransom became an industry. In 2022, SBM Intelligence estimated that between July 2021 and June 2022 alone, kidnappers collected more than $1 million in ransom payments nationwide, and that figure likely undercounts cash delivered in sacks at night. Villages pay protection money. Parents pay for children. If you cannot pay, you disappear.

Illegal gold mining in Zamfara has poured fuel on this fire. Gold is easy to move and hard to trace. Armed groups tax miners or control sites outright. More money means better weapons. Better weapons mean bolder attacks. I have seen this movie before. When crime syndicates discover natural resources, they do not retire. They expand.

The line between jihadist and bandit is thin and shifting. Sometimes jihadists offer “protection” to villages terrorized by bandits, collecting taxes in exchange for safety. Sometimes bandits pledge allegiance to jihadists for branding and training. Sometimes they fight each other. Civilians are trapped in between. You can switch sides. You cannot switch geography.

The Nigerian government has responded with force. Troops are deployed. Air strikes are launched. Joint Task Forces sweep forests. In 2024 and 2025, major operations were launched in parts of the north-west. Villagers celebrated. Then the reprisals came. Gunmen returned with vengeance. The army withdrew from some areas after brutal counterattacks. Another group moved into the vacuum. It is a grim cycle. Clear, hold, fail, repeat.

America has sent a small counter-terrorism team to assist. The United States has supported Nigeria’s fight against Boko Haram for years, providing intelligence and training. But foreign advisers cannot fix what is deeply local. Nigeria has more than 200 million people, complex ethnic ties, porous borders and vast ungoverned forests. Policing that terrain requires more than drones and speeches.

Governance is the real battlefield. In many rural areas, the state is barely present. Police are underfunded. Courts are slow. Young men face unemployment rates that hover painfully high, especially in the north. When poverty bites hard enough, a rifle starts to look like a résumé. The World Bank has repeatedly warned that northern Nigeria suffers from higher poverty rates than the south. In some states, more than 60% of the population lives below the poverty line. That is not just an economic statistic. That is a recruitment pool.

President Tinubu has promised reforms. More police. State-level security structures. Better coordination. Those are good words. But words do not patrol highways at night. Words do not stand guard at village entrances. Residents of Kaiama reportedly warned authorities about rising threats before the massacre. They say nothing changed. When citizens cry wolf and the wolf actually comes, trust dies with the victims.

I worry most about the big cities. Abuja has already seen kidnappings on its outskirts. Kaduna’s airport road has been attacked before. If armed groups begin targeting major urban centers consistently, the economic fallout will be brutal. Investors flee instability. Businesses close early. Insurance premiums spike. A nation of 200 million people cannot afford to let fear become routine.

There is a small hope that these groups overextend as they move south. Jihadists rely on ethnic and kinship networks rooted in specific regions. Bandits thrive in lawless spaces. Southern states tend to have stronger institutions and denser urban surveillance. But hope is not a strategy. And for the people already caught in this widening storm, theoretical limits offer no comfort. When I look at the map, I see pressure building. The Sahel is unstable. Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have faced coups and surging jihadist violence in recent years. Borders are lines on paper, not walls in the sand. Weapons flow. Fighters migrate. Ideology travels by phone.

Kaiama was not an isolated tragedy. It was a warning shot. Around 170 lives erased in a morning. That is not random. That is momentum.

I do not say Nigeria is doomed. I say Nigeria is at a crossroads. If governance improves, if security becomes local and accountable, if economic despair is addressed, the tide can turn. Nigeria has beaten back insurgents before. But if the current drift continues, if armed groups keep advancing west and south, if bandits keep getting richer and bolder, then the next headline may not be about a remote border village.

It may be about a city skyline under smoke.

And when that day comes, nobody will be able to say they were not warned.

  

If you’re looking for something different to read, some of the titles in my “Brief Book Series” is available on Google Play Books. You can also read them here on Google Play: Brief Book Series.