In July 1977, the Organisation of African Unity adopted a Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa. It offered a definition of a mercenary to include someone who “is motivated to take part in hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and in fact is promised by or on behalf of a party to the conflict material compensation.” The drafters of the Convention for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa probably did not foresee that it would encompass the conduct of judges.

Yet, at the beginning of this month, the immediate past president of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Olumide Akpata, took to the floor of the International Bar Association (IBA) conference in Paris, the capital of France, to invite the association to take an active interest in a new species of judicial subornation in Nigeria, which can best be described as judicial mercenarism.

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian General, is credited with the insight that war is the continuation of policy by other means. The converse can also be true: that policy and politics could also be war by other means. Private military contractors, also known as mercenaries, are paid to fight in other people’s wars.

Judicial officers are ordinarily not politicians. So, when they choose to immerse themselves in the theatre of power politics, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that elements of mercenarism are involved.

This mercenarism can manifest itself in the form of judicial fornication, soliciting, or contumeliousness. Let’s begin with judicial fornication. In his memoir, The Accidental Public Servant, former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and recent governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, recounts that the Chief Judge of the FCT when he became minister, Lawal Hassan Gummi, had preceded him to Barewa College in Zaria. As Minister, he desired “to ensure the judiciary was fully on board with our reform directions.” Although advised by his staff to invite the Chief Judge to a “briefing” with the Minister, El-Rufai exultantly recalls that he overruled them because “our old boys’ protocol trumped all others they may have in the FCT.” So, in obedience to the supreme law of the Barewa Old Boys Association (BOBA), El-Rufai “visited Gummi, met with his team of senior judges and…. prayed for their support.”

The result, El-Rufai further exults, was that “the FCT judiciary supported us strongly throughout my tenure,” and the official pay-off was a ministerial decision “to budget an annual grant to support our judiciary to procure court recording and automation equipment.”

The reader may note two things. One is that in the narration of the Minister, the FCT judiciary became transformed from an institution established to hold a fair balance between different interests in society to one dedicated to servicing the Minister and his FCT administration. The second is that the judiciary thus became – in his telling – part and parcel of the government of the day, to be instrumentalised as the government dared, not an independent institution to hold the government to account. This was judicial fornication at ministerial beck-and-call.

After the publication of this book, some non-governmental organisations under the aegis of the Civil Society Network against Corruption (CSNAC), petitioned against Lawal Gummi to the then Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Aloma Mukhtar, who also chaired the National Judicial Council (NJC). In response, the CJN issued a disciplinary query to the Chief Judge of the FCT, “seeking explanation over an annual grant made to the FCT judiciary by the FCT administration during Nasir El Rufai’s administration.” Reluctant to be dragged through the process, Lawal Gummi took early retirement and promptly got translated to the stool of the Gummi Emirate in Zamfara State. 

One decade later, the current successor to the seat of the Chief Judge of the FCT, Husseini Baba-Yusuf, preferred to take matters a notch higher by showcasing his skills in judicial soliciting. Rather than have the Minister pay him a visit, the Chief Judge went to promenade for the Minister of the FCT instead, and took the opportunity to show off his plumes. Assuming the role of a judicial vuvuzela, he began by hailing the Minister as having “exceeded the level that people had thought you would perform”, before reminding him that “as the judiciary, we are part of the government and we expect that we should be able to do things that will make government work.”

In claiming that the judiciary is “part of the government,” the Chief Judge was fully aware that he was inviting the Minister into an intimate transaction.

So, the Chief Judge let it be known that he had issued directions to the judges under him that “all cases involving the FCT will only be assigned by the Chief Judge….” A suitably tingled Minister of the FCT happily nodded “thank you”, while the judges and sundry hangers-on accompanying the Chief Judge clapped uproariously in full expectation of full-on consummation.

While the conduct and verbiage of the current Chief Judge were even more egregious than those of his durable predecessor from one decade ago, few expect him to suffer anything like the consequences that followed the revelations in The Accidental Public Servant. The reason is because these days judicial mercenarism occurs in the full glare of the records.

Judicial decision making is ordinarily deliberative and its language, even in the pen or keyboard of the colourful, is usually clothed with dignity. These days, however, some judges in Nigeria are not shy about announcing which political side has penetrated their judicial orifices. They are not merely contumelious but choose to advertise it.

When it decided to nullify the election of Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun State earlier in the year, for instance, T.A. Kume, who sat as part of the Governorship Election Petition Tribunal, relied on the high authority of Kizz Daniel’s popular single, Buga, to hold that Adeleke “cannot ‘go lo lo lo lo’ and ‘buga won’ as the duly elected governor of Osun State.

In the Kano State governorship election petition decided last September, Benson Anya, a judge on the tribunal, went one further. Relying on matters that were never in evidence or in dispute before the Tribunal, he describedone side to the case as “bandits in politics” and decided “to condemn the gang of Red Cap wearers (a reference to the supporters of the second respondent in the case) who, like a violent and terrorist cult, chased us out of Kano and put us in the fear of our lives. We believe that only Allah is the giver of power. Those who believe in Allah must bow to his (sic) will and submit to the authority of Governmental (sic) power.”

For the avoidance of doubt, the author of this insightful theological distraction is a Christian from Abia State in South-East Nigeria and no question about Allah or His supremacy was even remotely in contention in the case. It did not require any imagination to understand that the god under reference by Benson Anya existed entirely in his head, probably from vanities he harboured about the finality of the judicial vote in determining election outcomes.

It is no surprise that this kind of thing only happens in political and election disputes, where politicians chase judges with money and induce open trades in the outcome of judicial proceedings. This is why judicial mercenarism is often accompanied by unconcealed hubris. Just this past week, Yargata Nimpar, a Justice of Appeal, informed the appellants in the judicial contest over the governorship of Lagos State that they “came empty-handed and left empty-handed. They merely enjoyed their day in court.”

The courts no longer even pretend to tether their pronouncements to any sense of principle, precedent or proportion. To use an expression originated by our neighbours in Cameroon, judicial mercenarism now manifests itself in an open jurisprudence of “buy am; sell am.”

Over the years of educating parents, teachers and caregivers about early childhood development, we've received many questions about how to raiseemotionally intelligent kids.

Kids with high emotional intelligence have the tools they need to navigate their feelings and relationships in a healthy and secure way. Key components include self-awareness, self-regulation and motivation. But surprisingly, the most overlooked one is empathy.

Parents of the most emotionally intelligent children lead by example — and teach their kids four empathy skills at a young age:

1. How to take on different perspectives

Perspective taking does not mean having the same experience as someone else or deciding whether their experience is real.

When a child is pulling at their shirt and saying, "It's scratchy, I don't like it. I want a different shirt," we can model perspective taking by believing that their experience is true: "That shirt feels uncomfortable for you, and you want to change it."

It's not the parent's job to convince them that the shirt is perfectly comfortable and remind them that they've worn it before. It's their job to step outside of themselves and be a witness to their child's experience.

2. How to avoid judgement

This means practicing mindfulness of our biases and self-regulating so that we can see the child's experience without a biased lens.

So instead of responding with, "You don't need to be so upset. It's just a shirt. We can fix this," avoiding judgment is simply noticing what is: "You are really upset that it's so uncomfortable."

3. How to recognize emotions

Recognizing emotions is connecting with what your child is feeling, not whythey're feeling it.

So when your child comes to you upset, take a moment to articulate out loud what they are feeling. "Wow, you are disappointed, that's really tough."

Then recall and share a time when you dealt with the emotion they're expressing, so you can connect with them about how it feels.

This teaches them that if they know what disappointment feels like, they can choose to empathize with that feeling, regardless of the reason why someone else is feeling it.

4. How to communicate understanding

Communicating our understanding about the emotions is when connecting happens, when we have the opportunity to say: "I see you. I get it. That's so hard. Ugh, yeah, I understand that."

For example, you tell best friend: "I've been so tired the last couple of nights that the thought of us meeting for dinner tomorrow night feels exhausting. But I know we haven't seen each other in such a long time."

Good communicating of understanding from your friend might look like: "I get how exhausting that feels. Especially today looking at tomorrow." This is nice because she's not trying to convince you or minimize your experience. She's being present to your pain because she is really listening.

When your child sees you do this for people you care about, they absorb the valuable lesson of how to be a better friend and community member.

The secret to teaching empathy is to show it

Just as we build self-regulation skills by co-regulating with a child, we teach emotional intelligence by responding to children with empathy.

Connect with your child and imagine what the message underneath their behavior might be. Trust that they are kind humans and allow them to make mistakes. When you do this, you teach them that your love for them is conditional.

And lastly, remember to pause to say "I love you." It's impossible to spoil kids with love. We promise that you can never say those words too much.

** Alyssa Blask Campbell is a parenting and emotional development expert.

CNBC

Criticisms have trailed the sacking of Governor Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State by the Court of Appeal, triggering reactions that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) was at work to run one-party system in Nigeria.

The sacking of Mutfwang was the third experience of the opposition in four days.

Last week, Iliya Damagum, Acting National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), raised the alarm that there was a plot to overturn the will of the people as expressed during the general elections.

Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters, Damagum alleged that there was a design by the APC to “cripple democracy, overthrow the democratic rights of Nigerians, suppress the Rule of Law and downgrade our nation to a fiefdom run by the whims of a cabal.”

Mutfwang of the PDP had 525,299 votes while his APC challenger, Nentawe Goshwe, polled 481,370 votes in the governorship election in March.

Goshwe challenged the victory at the tribunal saying that Mutfwang did not comply with the Electoral Act as he was not validly nominated and sponsored by his party.

The panel dismissed the petition for lacking merit, but Goshwe headed to the appellate court. In its judgment on Sunday, the appeal court headed by Elfrieda Williams-Dawodu sacked Mutfwang for not being validly sponsored by the PDP for election.

On Thursday, the appeal court sacked Governor Dauda Lawal of Zamfara State of PDP, declaring that the governorship election in March was inconclusive.

The following day, the same court nullified the election of the Kano State Governor, Abba Kabir Yusuf of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP).

These recent court rulings leading to the sacking of opposition governors have gotten Nigerians talking as they pointed to the APC as the mastermind.

Here are some of the reactions on Twitter:

Shehu Sani, a former senator, wrote: “The Court of Appeal Judgement against the electoral victory of the Plateau State Governor is unfortunate, unacceptable and condemnable. A broad daylight heist of the will of the people.The bench is becoming the coffin of democracy.”

@Rabsy_b: “APC can take over all the 36 states if they want ”

@authentic_malam: “It’s natural to question court rulings. I wonder why all our court verdicts seem to favor the APC, the ruling party, against the opposition. This trend could potentially harm the country’s political process. ”

@MikelegofGod wrote, “APC at work oo, they wanna turn Nigeria into a one-party system.”

ÄPC has turned Nigeria into something different o,” @Okey_Ego_Crypto wrote.

“APC-owned court sacks Plateau governor,” @Mary_dozie reacted.

“They are gradually sinking this country,” @ErcharuP lamented.

In his own reaction, @JayPeeGeneral said, “No justice in the courtrooms system anymore! Our judges have replaced susbstantail justice with technicalities.

“Court sits on Sundays,” @CheezyCharles queried.

“Miscarriage of justice, there is no law left in Nigeria anymore,” @EnergizeBen said.

@timibreaker_35 said, “APC came to finish Nigeria.”

@TheoAbuAgada: “APC should actually take it easy. It’s becoming annoying at this point.”

@Its_ereko: “Dem go still remove Governors for different states put APC. Mad money dey fly for Nigerian judges account this period. But Nigerians no go wake up ???? ”

@YundNedu∅1: “APC is just clearing everywhere with the help of our judiciary. Any small thing “go to court ” because they already have the judiciary on their payroll….”

@leroikris: “It is now glaring that Nigeria is an APC captured state.”

@Pauly257∅: “They have decided to snatch Plateau and allocate it to themselves. APC Department in charge of political allocation and distribution.”

@iam_samedohi: “America wonder. Nigeria is fast becoming a one-party country ????‍♂️????‍♂️????‍♂️”

Daily Trust

African governments are scrambling for dollars, and that’s creating a new dividing line for investors.

Amid a deepening shortage of hard currency on the continent, governments are turning to bartering, currency devaluations, central bank exchange controls, and help from the International Monetary Fund andMiddle East to shore up their balance sheets.

Investors are rewarding nations whose efforts to boost dollar liquidity are paying off. But they’re punishing those that can’t guarantee access to the currency they need to invest and repatriate returns, and are steering clear of countries without adequate reserves to cover import costs or debt repayments. African currencies are the worst performers in the world this year, with about a dozen sliding at least 15% against the dollar.

“Dollar holdings are part of the value proposition,” said Benedict Craven, country risk manager at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Will investors be able to trade using foreign exchange from official sources? Will they be able to expatriate their dividends abroad? These questions are separating where investment is going.”

The dollar squeeze has played out most obviously in local currencies. Eurobond issuers who were forced to devalue this year include Egypt, Nigeria and Angola. Dwindling capital inflows have also seen the likes of Kenya’s shilling and Zambia’s kwacha weaken to record lows versus the greenback. The former has sizable dollar-debt repayments due next year, while the latter is in default on its eurobonds.

Kenya’s dollar bonds have handed investors losses of 2.1% since the beginning of July, when US Treasury rates started rising as the “higher-for-longer” interest-rate narrative took hold. That compares with the 1.7% average loss for emerging and frontier peers in a Bloomberg sovereign dollar bond index. Nairobi’s benchmark stock index has slumped 32% in 2023, the most among 92 global markets tracked by Bloomberg, while the shilling has declined 19%.

In Zambia, Mozambique and Nigeria, the inability to access foreign financing has forced governments to ramp up domestic issuance in shallow markets, pushing up the cost of borrowing. African sovereigns have been locked out of international debt capital markets since April 2022.

Nigeria’s longest-dated naira bond is trading at a record 18% yield. But higher domestic yields aren’t attracting foreign buyers, who worry about depreciating local currencies and difficulties in repatriating returns. In Zambia, for example, foreign holdings of domestic debt fell from 29% at the end of 2021 to around 22% currently, partly due to the restructuring process as well as liquidity issues.

IMF Rescue

In some cases, the IMF is coming to the rescue. It said last week it will expand financing to Kenya by $938 million to bolster its reserves, ahead of a $2 billion eurobond maturity in June. That sent yields on the 2024 notes tumbling almost 200 basis points in four days through Friday — though they remain well above 14%.

“The general perception is when a country trades above 10% in USD yields they are not able to issue in the USD market,” said Lars Krabbe, a portfolio manager at Coeli Frontier Markets AB. “This is of course not good for the general investment environment and debt sustainability in these countries and makes them highly dependent on concessional funding” such as IMF loans, he said.

On the other hand, countries with less pressing foreign-exchange needs are becoming more appealing.

“Countries with less punishing dollar-denominated loan amounts and bond repayments, and large stocks of foreign reserves, are most attractive,” said David Omojomolo, Africa economist at Capital Economics. “And more so those that have made large FX adjustments already.”

Egypt is one. Citigroup Inc. strategists were the latest to turn bullish on the North African nation’s dollar debt, as sales of state assets pick up and the government appears on track to meet targets set by the IMF. The central bank is close to securing as much as $5 billion in new deposits from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, al-Borsa reported last month.

Egypt’s eurobonds have handed investors returns of 8.7% in the second half of this year in dollar terms, compared to a loss for the average developing-nation peers in a Bloomberg sovereign credit index.

For Kaan Nazli, portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman Asset Management, investors are likely to prioritize sovereign issuers that had better access to alternative sources of financing, such as Ivory Coast and Senegal.

“Ivory Coast, for example, was able to rely on blended finance deals at reasonable cost over the last year,” he said.

The West African nation also secured an IMF loan, while its currency, the CFA franc, is pegged to the euro, leaving it less exposed to fluctuations. Regional peer Senegal is attracting investments to public-private partnerships in climate finance.

Losses in both Senegal and Ivory Coast’s eurobonds have been less severe than Kenya’s and narrower than the average since July. Month-to-date, their performance has exceeded peers.

Meanwhile, the dollar shortage is also hurting consumers and local businesses as import costs soar, fueling inflation.

In Nigeria, prices of prescription drugs for conditions such as hypertension and diabetes have tripled in the past year. One of Zimbabwe’s biggest retailers, OK Zimbabwe, said sales volumes are now below break-even point due to rising costs and an exchange rate which has driven customers to the informal sector. And in Malawi, the price of corn, a food staple, has more than doubled over the past year.

“The problem is there’s only so much you can do if you don’t have a vast trove of dollar reserves,” said Sonu Varghese, global macro strategist at Carson Group. “For investors, the risk that these countries remain on the verge of crisis hasn’t gone away.”

Rice consumption in the country has been on a steady rise, beyond the reach of local supply, leading to a supply gap of about two million metric tonnes annually, a new report has disclosed.

This has led to an over 37 per cent increase in the price of the commodity so far in 2023. This was revealed in ‘AFEX Wet Season Crop Production Report for 2023.

The firm said, “Rice consumption in Nigeria has been steadily increasing, aligning with the consistent growth of the rice market, nearly matching the annual population growth projection of 2.6 per cent at two per cent. This has led to a supply gap of about 2 million metric tonnes annually.”

So far, Nigeria has spent over $15bn in the past decade to meet its expanding rice consumption, despite its potential to be a net rice exporter, the firm stated.

Globally, rice prices reached their highest point in nearly 12 years in 2023, primarily due to India’s ban on rice exports and the potential impact of El Nino on production in key regions. These factors, along with rain-induced disruptions and variations in quality during Vietnam’s summer-autumn harvest have further contributed to the price surge.

It noted, “A similar trend is observed in Nigeria, where the price of rice has increased by over 37 per cent year-to-date, driven by reduced production in 2022 due to the effects of flooding during the wet season of that year.” The firm also blamed the increase in prices on flooding and the ripple effect of the international market dynamics.

It, however, expects an increase in production of rice by approximately 4 per cent, and a further increase in the price of paddy rice by up to around 32 per cent.

The firm declared that the production of milled paddy rice has seen a remarkable increase of over 35 per cent in the country, reaching an estimated output of 5.4 million metric tonnes in 2022, up from 3.9 million metric tonnes in 2015. While rice is cultivated across all of Nigeria’s agro-ecological zones, the Northwest region accounts for 72 per cent of the total rice production in the country.

Punch

Israel says soldier executed, foreign hostages held at Gaza's Shifa hospital

Israel stepped up accusations of Hamas abuses at the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital on Sunday, saying a captive soldier had been executed and two foreign hostages held at a site that has been a focus of its devastating six-week-old offensive.

At one point a shelter for tens of thousands of Palestinian war refugees, Al Shifa Hospital has been evacuating patients and staff since Israeli troops swept in last week on what they called a mission to root out hidden Hamas facilities.

Israel is also searching for some 240 people Hamas kidnapped to Gaza after an Oct. 7 cross-border assault that sparked the war.

One of these was a 19-year-old Israeli army conscript, Noa Marciano, whose body was recovered near Shifa last week. Hamas said she died in an Israeli air strike and issued a video that appeared to show her corpse, unmarked except for a head wound.

The Israeli military said a forensic examination found she had sustained non-life-threatening injuries from such a strike.

"According to intelligence information - solid intelligence information - Noa was taken by Hamas terrorists inside the walls of Shifa hospital. There, she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist," chief spokesperson Daniel Hagari said.

He did not elaborate.

In his televised briefing, Hagari said Hamas gunmen had also brought a Nepalese and a Thai, among foreign workers seized in the Oct. 7 raid, to Shifa. He did not name the two hostages.

CCTV video aired by Hagari appeared to show a group of men frog-marching an individual into a hospital, to the surprise of medical staff. A second clip showed an injured man on a gurney. Another man nearby, in civilian clothes, had an assault rifle.

Hamas did not immediately comment on Hagari's statements. The Palestinian Islamist group, which runs Gaza, has previously said it took some hostages to hospitals for treatment.

Separately on Sunday, the Israeli military published video of what it described as a tunnel, running 55 metres in length and dug by Palestinians 10 metres under the Shifa compound.

While acknowledging that it has a network of hundreds of kilometres of secret tunnels, bunkers and access shafts throughout the Palestinian enclave, Hamas has denied that these are located in civilian infrastructure like hospitals.

The video showed a narrow passage with arched concrete roofing, ending at what the military, in a statement, described as a blast-proof door.

The statement did not say what might be beyond the door. The tunnel had been accessed through a shaft discovered in a shed within the Shifa compound that contained munitions, it said. A second video showed an outdoor shaft-opening in the compound.

Mounir El Barsh, the Gaza health ministry director, dismissed the Israeli statement on the tunnel as a "pure lie".

"They have been at the hospital for eight days ... and yet they haven't found anything," he told Al Jazeera television.

Reuters

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Zelenskiy calls for rapid operations changes for soldiers, sacks commander

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Sunday demanded rapid changes in the operations of Ukraine's military and announced the dismissal of the commander of the military's medical forces.

Zelenskiy's move was announced as he met Defence Minister Rustem Umerov, and coincided with debate over the conduct of the 20-month-old war against Russia, with questions over how quickly a counteroffensive in the east and south is proceeding.

"In today's meeting with Defence Minister Umerov, priorities were set," Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. "There is little time left to wait for results. Quick action is needed for forthcoming changes."

Zelenskiy said he had replaced Major-General Tetiana Ostashchenko as commander of the Armed Forces Medical Forces.

"The task is clear, as has been repeatedly stressed in society, particularly among combat medics, we need a fundamentally new level of medical support for our soldiers," he said.

This, he said, included a range of issues -- better tourniquets, digitalisation and better communication.

Umerov acknowledged the change on the Telegram messaging app and set as top priorities digitalisation, "tactical medicine" and rotation of servicemen.

Ukraine's military reports on what it describes as advances in recapturing occupied areas in the east and south and last week acknowledged that troops had taken control of areas on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in southern Kherson region.

Ukrainian commander in chief General Valery Zaluzhniy, in an essay published this month, said the war was entering a new stage of attrition and Ukraine needed more sophisticated technology to counter the Russian military.

While repeatedly saying advances will take time, Zelenskiy has denied the war is headed into a stalemate and has called on Kyiv's Western partners, mainly the United States, to maintain levels of military support.

Ostashchenko was replaced by Major-General Anatoliy Kazmirchuk, head of a military clinic in Kyiv.

Her dismissal came a week after a Ukrainian news outlet suggested her removal, as well as that of others, was imminent following consultations with paramedics and other officials responsible for providing support to the military.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Top Zelensky aide questions Ukraine’s ‘survival’

A senior aide to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed in an interview with Ukraine’s Channel 24 television station on Friday that Kiev must seize all territories lost to Russia, including the Crimean Peninsula, or risk disappearing from the world’s map.

The aide, Mikhail Podoliak, opined that failure to push back Russian troops from the territory Kiev claims as its own could become a breaking point for the country. “Do we have an endgame in which we do not enter Crimea and which would clearly indicate that Ukraine has a historical perspective?” he asked.

According to Podoliak, the same concerns apply to the four other regions – the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – that overwhelmingly voted to join Russia last autumn. “Do we have even a single chance to survive in historical terms for another ten to 15 years?” the official added. 

Podoliak also believes that Russia’s victory would be a significant setback for the West as it would “not be able to claim global leadership” while its “autocratic” rivals would have free reign to attack other territories. He also admitted that “the war is unpopular” in Ukraine but rejected any peace engagement with Russia, insisting that Moscow wants to “subjugate” Kiev.

Russian officials have repeatedly said they have never closed the door to talks with their Ukrainian counterparts.

Podoliak also attempted to justify unfulfilled predictions that Ukraine would seize Crimea during the past summer, noting that this assessment was based on an analysis of how many arms Kiev would receive from its Western backers and the impact of sanctions on Russia. According to the official, however, many Western companies remained in the Russian market, allowing the country’s government to receive “high taxes” and use this money to fund its military campaign.

Ukraine’s eventual takeover of Crimea was predicted twice this year by Ukrainian intelligence chief Kirill Budanov – first in the spring and later in the summer amid Kiev’s counteroffensive. Moscow has warned it would use“any weapon” in response to a potential Ukrainian attack on the peninsula.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said last month that Kiev “is losing” while being unable to make any substantial progress on the battlefield. He also estimated Kiev’s losses at more than 90,000 service members since the start of the counteroffensive in early June.

Reuters/RT

A man is in critical condition after being shot in the head while preaching Wednesday on a street corner in a Phoenix suburb, United States.

Hans Schmidt, 26, was shot near Victory Chapel — the church where he serves as outreach director — at around 6:15 p.m. Wednesday before a service began, the church said. No arrests have been made, according to the Glendale, Arizona, police department.

“Family’s is just devastated. We all are fine,” said Victory Chapel Pastor Gary Marsh.

Victory Chapel is a Pentecostal church and its services draw about a hundred attendees, according to Marsh. At the time of the shooting, Schmidt had been preaching, asking people attend a service.

"We do believe in evangelism. That's why there's young men standing in the corner preaching the gospel," Marsh said.

Schmidt was in critical condition as of Friday, when the church posted an update saying his family "is encouraged by what they are seeing."

Police said Friday they believe there may be additional witnesses with information about the case.

Glendale is located about nine miles northwest of Phoenix.

Schmidt, who is also a former military combat medic, has a wife and two children, according to a post on the church's homepage calling for donations for medical expenses.

A man who works at a nearby automotive repair shop told The Republic that he often saw Schmidt preaching using a megaphone along with a couple other people from Victory Chapel.

"He wasn't being hateful," Paul Sanchez said.

USA Today

We in the West like to imagine that liberal democracy spread because others were attracted by its intrinsic merits. It didn’t. It spread through military victories – a fact that the rest of the world has not forgotten.

Only now, perhaps, are we learning how limited its appeal is. Several countries which we thought were in our camp turned out to be pro-Western only contingently and transactionally. The moment they saw our power waning, they began to look elsewhere.

We see the shift in the reluctance of states beyond Europe, the Anglosphere and a handful of East Asian democracies to join sanctions against Russia. We see it in the UN votes positing an implicit equivalence between democratic Israel and terrorist Hamas. When the world’s dominant power declines, violence and disorder rush to fill the vacuum.

It is against this background that Joe Biden and Xi Jinping held their meeting in San Francisco last week. Biden came across, as usual, as a dotard, fluffing his lines and horrifying his officials by referring to his guest as a dictator.

Xi, by contrast, looked comfortable and confident, convinced that time is on his side. Like Winnie-the-Pooh, to whom he has been compared so often that Chinese censors ban references to the portly bear, Xi radiated the Taoist virtues of patience and imperturbability.

The two sides had very different takes on the summit. For the Americans, it was all about encouraging China to take up its responsibilities as a member of the international community. They know that Xi wants to escape from the economic restrictions imposed by Donald Trump in 2018. The Chinese economy is faltering, partly because of exceptionally long lockdowns, and partly due to the rise in expropriations leaving people reluctant to invest.

Sensing that they have leverage, the Americans want to draw China into collaborative structures on climate change, artificial intelligence and drugs. To have secured understandings with Xi on these issues, as well as establishing military backchannels, is no small achievement.

From the Chinese perspective, though, all that was fluff. The real business of the summit, as they saw it, was to make plain that they intended to annex Taiwan. Sure, they would rather do so without a war. To win without fighting is, as Sun Tzu says, the ultimate achievement. But Xi left Biden in no doubt that reunification is not some vague aspiration, but the policy on which he has staked his leadership.

The Chinese autocrat is aware of American concerns about the economic impact. Taiwan produces most of the world’s semiconductors, especially the advanced models on which the global economy depends. How long, Xi asks, would it take the United States to build up a domestic manufacturing capacity? Five years? Fine, then use it. But understand that, after that, Taiwan will be reabsorbed.

Talk of semiconductors brings us to why the world has suddenly become so chaotic. The relative peace and prosperity that followed the Second World War rested, to a greater degree than most people realised, on globalisation.

International commerce reduces both the incentive to wage war (without trade barriers, it doesn’t matter where resources are) and the capacity to sustain it (a bellicose country can be deprived of critical materials).

This consideration, more than any other, motivated the original campaigners for liberalisation. “Do you suppose that I advocated Free Trade merely because it would give us a little more occupation in this or that pursuit?” asked Richard Cobden in 1850. “No; I believed Free Trade would have the tendency to unite mankind in the bonds of peace, and it was that, more than any pecuniary consideration, which sustained and actuated me.”

Cobden was right. While no one has found a way to eliminate war altogether, globalisation has a pacifying effect, because countries like to remain on good terms with their customers. In 1860, Cobden signed the modern world’s first trade agreement with his counterpart, Michel Chevalier, a rare French classical liberal. Since then our two nations, which had spent the previous six centuries in a state of semi-permanent war, have not fought.

Cobdenism began to run out of steam in the early twentieth century, as challenges to British power led to calls for retaliatory tariffs. The horrors that followed were to a degree products of the end of the Victorian economic order.

By 1945, there was a recognition that protectionism, autocracy and war were interconnected. The victorious powers grasped that the dictators had been products, as well as supporters, of autarky, and set up the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to ensure that the world did not slide back into beggar-my-neighbour mercantilism.

“The whole world is concentrating much of its thought and energy on attaining the objectives of peace and freedom,” declared President Truman in 1947, the year that the GATT was established. “These objectives are bound up completely with a third objective: reestablishment of world trade. In fact, the three – peace, freedom, and world trade – are inseparable.”

Truman, like Cobden, was right. As the barriers came down over the next 75 years, we saw not only a global enrichment beyond the dreams of previous generations, but an unprecedented decline in the number of wars. The relative stability of the Victorian age had rested on the Pax Britannica; that of the post-war boom rested on the Pax Americana. When American power surged after 1989, so did peace and prosperity.

Then came the banking crisis, a fall in world trade and, before long, a return to protectionism – a process accelerated by the pandemic.

“Trade wars are good and easy to win,” declared Donald Trump as he ordered tariffs on Chinese imports. Joe Biden accelerated America’s retreat into autarky, notably through the disastrous (and comically misnamed) Inflation Reduction Act, a classic piece of protectionism disguised as greenery. The EU is now pursuing a similar scheme.

China’s leaders are determinedly building their own versions of the global companies that withdrew from Russia in 2020. Xi has made clear that he does not want to depend on imports. “You should not rely on international markets,” he told his rubber-stamp parliament when Russia blockaded Ukrainian exports. “China must depend on itself.” His solution? To reserve 296 million acres of agricultural land for food production – precisely the kind of policy that caused the breakdown of the 1930s.

Protectionism always does the most damage to the country pursuing it. The US Tax Foundation calculates that tariffs on China are “equivalent to one of the largest tax increases in decades,” destroying 173,000 American jobs.

Similarly, had Xi not reversed his predecessors’ policy of liberalisation, China would not only be growing faster, but would be a trusted partner investing in our nuclear power stations and communications infrastructure.

Xi’s swerve to economic nationalism has also wrecked the prospect of peaceful reunification with Taiwan. Many Taiwanese had been prepared to countenance some form of political union as long as China was becoming more pluralist, but the authoritarianism of the current regime, and its crackdown in Hong Kong, killed such talk.

As during the early twentieth century, a unipolar world order is being succeeded, not just by great power rivalries, but by a return to the disastrous illusion of self-sufficiency, what the North Koreans call “juche”. We can already see the consequences in the cascade of conflicts around us. If the West, with all its collective strength, is unable to dislodge Russia from Ukraine, that cascade will become a torrent. The time of troubles is just beginning.

The Telegraph

We often hear corporate leaders talk about transforming their company culture. But this transformation needs to be more than a buzzword – it has to start with an honest analysis of an organisation’s current culture. This authenticity is vital because organisations have unspoken codes, and therein lies the hidden truth that unmasks their culture.

Corporate leaders need to be genuine seekers of what they need to hear and not what they want to hear from employees who are just there to butter them up. Those kinds of employees are sycophants – people who will tell you what you want to hear. If leaders cannot hear the truth, it will be difficult for them to separate fact from fiction.

How do you spot if your organisation suffers from a culture of sycophancy? Here are two pitfalls that corporate leaders need to be aware of:

1. Broken Psychological Contracts

Most employees get into organisations with ‘psychological’ contracts. They start with expectations, which may be met at variable scales. Or they may not be met at all. 

The danger of sycophancy in organisations is that corporate leaders will have employees around them who tend not to inform them of the realities on the ground. As much as these leaders try to show the world their corporate values, they should find value in assessing their employees’ emotional climate from time to time. 

Organisational sycophants prevent leaders from listening to their employees. They tell the leader all is well, even if most employees are going through hell. The downside is that these propagators of the old ‘yes-man’ bro philosophy often make corporate leaders appear unempathetic and narcissistic. Unguarded strength is actually a weakness.

Corporate leaders need to ask, are my employees’ psychological contracts broken? How is it that an A*-level employee two years ago is now performing at the C-level? Although this is no justification for poor performance, leaders might need to know what happened.

2. Org-wide Trust Deficit

Corporate leaders like to attract, retain and nourish good talent. They want to engage with employees aligned with their sustainable business objectives. However, they do not aim to have significant updates on employees’ perceptions of the organisation. This raises the question of what feedback gets to corporate leaders. 

Trust is one currency that every pragmatic and future-thinking organisation should have. Trust is not forced – it is earned. And the distortion of employees’ psychological contracts could lead to a lack of it. In Art Baxter’s recent book, Farmer Able, the author asserts, “Trust breakdown causes a rust build-up; everything moves slower and costs more.” 

A major predicament of organisational sycophancy is that ‘yes people’ do not pass the right information through the right funnel to the corporate leader. As a result, employees no longer trust the company they are working for. So when corporate leaders speak, they might think they are painting a beautiful vision, but what the employees are seeing is a smokescreen. 

Corporate leaders need to understand that an organisation is a people business inside before it becomes a business for the people outside. It’s one thing for corporate leaders to tell employees they see their value; it’s another for the employees to believe it. 

If corporate policies are only for the few, the corporate leader has created an organisation for the few. This is dangerous. You cannot sing the song of Ubuntu when the collective will not see themselves taking part in the collective, to begin with. 

Sycophants will make corporate leaders gloss over pertinent issues, and the organisation will be like a restaurant that redesigns a new menu cover (and increases its prices). What is forgotten is that customers are more interested in the quality of the food than a new cover. 

The way forward

Corporate leaders should be intentional about finding out the current realities of their organisation. They should avoid sycophants. They do not need gossip. They need solutions and people around them who brainstorm, not blamestorm. They should kick against a culture where employees are under pressure to momentarily perform rather than authentically aim for incremental progress toward excellence. 

Corporate leaders should aim to solve the real problems that define their organisation’s culture and not rub the surface. They should listen to Pied Piper’s tunes but to the people.

** Chim Okecha is an academic faculty, leadership expert and strategic HR professional with expert knowledge of people dynamics, organisational culture and leadership strategy.

Inc