In this analytical critique, Bright Simons argues that Ghana’s proposed draft NITA Bill represents a dangerous overreach that would transform the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) from a coordinating ICT agency into a sweeping digital-sector regulator with unprecedented powers. Simons warns that the bill goes far beyond licensing IT professionals—it would grant NITA authority over ICT infrastructure, cloud services, SaaS platforms, public-sector technology procurement, professional certification, business premises, mergers, ownership structures (including a controversial citizen-only ownership clause), audits, sanctions, and enforcement powers including closure and seizure of assets. Simons contends that while Ghana certainly needs reforms to address public-sector procurement indiscipline and support local tech innovation, the current draft fails catastrophically by attempting to regulate a dynamic, AI-driven sector through rigid licensing frameworks that do not account for the diversity of ICT occupations—from laptop repairers to AI-assisted developers.

Read the full analysis below.

The Draft NITA Bill Should be Shredded

By Bright Simons

One of Ghana’s veteran business journalists, now based in New York, reached out and asked if I have been following the NITA bill debate. Sadly, I hadn’t. Too much going on.

He pressed, subtly but firmly, so I did.

I appreciate the ambition of the current management at the Ministry. I am sure they want their names in neon above Black Star Square. But there is a serious katanomic odour blowing from the bill they are promoting.

They would do well to assemble a group of truly independent tech folks from the ICT chamber, not just a bunch of their friends, listen hard, talk less, and take the advice. If they did, they would gut that manuscript and return to the drawing board.

Here is why, based on my quick take on the bill.

Bottom line

The Ministry of Communications, Digital Technology, & Innovations (MOC) does not merely appear to be proposing to “license IT professionals.”

The draft NITA Bill is much bigger. The plan is to convert NITA from a coordinating ICT agency into a broad digital-sector regulator with powers over ICT infrastructure, cloud, SaaS, digital platforms, public-sector technology procurement, professional certification, business premises, mergers, ownership, standards, audits, sanctions, and even the structure of government digital infrastructure. It is a wholesale revamp.

No one would have quarrelled with the bill if it had focused on the big problems in the sector: public sector procurement indiscipline and a lack of incentives for R&D and support for local tech innovations.

Ghana certainly needs improved standards and practices in digital assurance, interoperability, and accountability for critical systems (already captured in the “critical infrastructure” policy).

The katanomics arise when instead of learning from national mistakes and proposing workable solutions, one jumps the process to venture into a whole range of areas where the country absolutely lack policy experience.

1. MOC’s Proposals

The draft/consultation bill proposes as follows:

A stronger NITA “Authority”

The Bill would establish NITA as a regulatory authority for ICT and digital services, with objects including regulation, coordination, promotion, standards, licensing, certification, interoperability, digital innovation, and public-sector ICT personnel management.

Mandatory licensing of ICT business activity

Section 35 (the bombshell that has sparked so much controversy). It says no person may engage in business or a related activity in the ICT sector unless granted a licence. It expressly includes installation of ICT infrastructure, development or provision of ICT products and services, and activities requiring licensing or certification. Doing any of these without a license could get one jailed, or at best fined.

Who is to be licensed?

Section 36 lists categories such as public/commercial ICT infrastructure, cloud hosting, SaaS providers, government digital services partnerships, national digital platform operators, data centre operators, and any other category the Authority later determines.

Citizen-only ownership qualification

Section 37 says a licence applicant must be an adult Ghanaian citizen, or a company/partnership/association/body “wholly owned by a citizen.” Essentially, it would now be illegal to engage remote experts to work on a system deployed in Ghana. Essentially, half the whiz kids in Silicon Valley would have been ineligible to build their genius gizmos had America had a law like this.

Certification of ICT professionals

Section 46 says a person shall not be appointed as an ICT professional in a public or private institution unless certified by the Authority, and that NITA shall determine the criteria and procedure. (Funnily, this contradicts the definitions section where “certified professional” is confined to the public sector.)

Closure, seizure, suspension and enforcement powers

NITA could close premises or facilities, seize ICT products/equipment, suspend business, revoke licences, and impose administrative penalties in specified circumstances.

M&A and business-structure control

Section 49 appears to require NITA approval before sale, transfer, merger, amalgamation, or alteration of the nature of an ICT service provider’s business.

There are also some less controversial proposals about setting up a special purpose national e-government vehicle, promoting transparency and interoperability, and preventing vendor lock-in.

Let’s focus, however, on the areas of the Bill that have rankled so many ICT professionals and would clearly not have seen the light of the day if the Ministry bosses had done any serious sounding beyond their clique.

2. What do they mean by “ICT professional” anyway?

“IT/ICT professional” is not like “nurse,” “electrician,” “lawyer,” “chartered accountant,” or “professional engineer.” Those occupations usually have a more defined body of practice, recognised training path, public-risk rationale, and a reserved act or protected title.

“ICT” and “IT” are very loose umbrella terms. International occupational systems do not treat ICT as one unified profession. The International Standard Classification of Occupations classifies jobs by skill level and specialisation, not by one vague “IT professional” identity.

Eurostat and O*NET both list many distinct computer and mathematical occupations within that bracket: software developers, network architects, cybersecurity analysts, database administrators, web developers, data scientists, support specialists, QA testers, IT project managers, and many more.

Is the government of Ghana going to insist on licensing every single person in Ghana who builds a website, uses Microsoft Power BI to create some charts for a company, or deploys mermaid to craft some flyers for an event organiser?

The whole idea is totally ridiculous.

A more sensible approach would be to pry open the ICT chest open and only target the most critical functions. Example:

Critical Public Digital Infrastructure management (with a clear and rigorous process properly defined as to how any system gets to be elevated to that status to begin with);
Financial services cybersecurity auditing;
Tier II & III datacenter operations;
Public hospital digital health network administration;
Public ERP procurement readiness certtification.
The bill could then have said that for those functions, licensed professionals are required. The licensing regime would then have been constructed in an industry-led fashion much like we have in leading accounting jurisdictions. Frankly, the civil service is the last place to situate licensing for a dynamic sector like ICT.

More importantly, under no circumstances should any government aspire to poke its long nose into stuff like “writing code,” “installing a router,” “maintaining a school website,” “handling some graphic design,” “being a product manager at a food delivery company,” “using AI to generate a UI for a service,” or “working in an IT department of a small law firm.” The risks are not national-scale and employers should be left to manage their own personnel validation.

3. Ghanaian laws already provide some protection

A standard feature of Katanomics is to pile laws upon laws without much effort being spent on reviewing how the current laws are performing, why gaps, if any, have formed, and what the lessons really teach.

The Cybersecurity Act creates a targeted licensing/accreditation regime for cybersecurity service providers, establishments, professionals and practitioners. That makes sense because cybersecurity services can create high systemic risk, and the Act contains a specific institutional mandate around cyber protection. If that has not stopped fraud in banks and telcos, there is a need to enhance our understanding and respond accordingly.

The Data Protection Act regulates controllers and processors of personal data, requires registration, imposes security obligations, requires written processor arrangements, and provides breach-notification duties. If the Data Protection Commission is only taken fees and isn’t really measuring up, the right approach is to fix it.

The Engineering Council could decide to create top-tier categories for “software engineering,” as well as hardware and electronic engineering if it aims to elevate the field. It already has the pedigree and legal infrastructure to proceed if it deems the time right.

4. But don’t other countries already do this?

Well, some have tried but the lessons are worth taking.

Nigeria, for instance. The Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria was created under a 1993 law and has a broad mandate over persons and organisations providing computing professional services.

The arrangement in Nigeria has gone nowhere. The country still has a huge informal and startup-driven tech sector. In practice, broad computing-profession regulation tends to become procurement gatekeeping, dues, professional conferences, anti-“quackery” rhetoric, and credential signalling. It has generated nothing of clear value to the sector.

Canada shows a narrower and more legally coherent model. Engineering regulators restrict titles such as “software engineer,” “computer engineer,” and “firmware engineer” where those titles imply professional engineering. But even there, regulators recognise that not all software development is software engineering. The Canadian fights over “software engineer” titles show how hard it is to map old professional-engineering concepts onto modern tech labour markets.

The United States tried a software-engineering professional-engineer exam pathway. The software engineering PE exam was first offered in 2013 and discontinued after 2019 because candidate numbers were too low.

Almost everywhere else, the approach has been to rely more on voluntary professional bodies, chartered status, competence frameworks, sector standards, procurement rules, data protection, cyber regulation, product regulation, and critical-infrastructure obligations. In many of these contexts and jurisdictions, industry associations take the lead.

5. It can get absurd pretty quickly

Meanwhile, AI has thrown a wrench into the whole wheel of what “IT work” even means today. m

In the pre-AI world, one might imagine a recognisable “software developer” writing code manually. In the AI world, a founder describes an app to a model, a non-technical employee uses AI to build an internal workflow, a designer generates front-end code, a business analyst deploys automations, and a cloud platform assembles infrastructure through templates. Who is the “ICT professional” here? The geography graduate with a few hours on reddit and stackoverflow under her belt typing out prompts? The AI tool vendor? The person who clicks deploy? The person who reviews the code? The company using the system?

A licensing regime based on “professional identity” will clash with AI-generated work because AI diffuses technical production across the entire economy. The more powerful AI gets, the less realistic it becomes to require every producer of digital functionality to hold a state-issued ICT license. Once again, if the Ministry had engaged beyond their small clique, everyone would have told them.

6. Hardware, networking and informality

On the physical device and network level, the absurdity start to get out of hand.

Ghana’s ICT economy is not made up of just software startups. It includes laptop repairers, phone technicians, CCTV installers, router vendors, fibre/cabling contractors, school computer-lab maintainers, POS support agents, small network installers, market traders selling peripherals, informal refurbished-device dealers, cybercafé operators, church/media livestream technicians, and thousands of small businesses that keep digital life functioning. All these people are using ICT and making a living in the ICT-enabled economy.

If enforced aggressively, the scheme could:

raise the cost of basic repairs and installations;
push informal technicians further underground;
create opportunities for inspectors and middlemen to extract bribes;
make small businesses operate through “certified” fronts;
reduce access to affordable hardware support in rural and low-income areas;
increase e-waste if repair markets are chilled;
make public-sector maintenance more expensive by reducing the pool of eligible providers.
It is a whole mess, and must be reined in before it transmutes from panic to catastrophe.

7. And the MESS doesn’t end there

The citizen-only ownership clause is potentially devastating. A Ghanaian startup with foreign VC, non-citizen co-founders, regional holding structures, offshore investors, or employee stock held by non-citizens may struggle if licensed ICT activity requires wholly citizen ownership. This may be more economically explosive than the “IT professionals” headline.

NITA, the Cyber Security Authority, Data Protection Commission, National Communications Authority, Bank of Ghana, Ghana Standards Authority, Public Procurement Authority, GIPC, Engineering Council, and sector regulators may all touch the same digital product. A fintech, for example, could face payment regulation, data protection registration, cybersecurity obligations, NITA licensing, cloud/data-centre requirements, and public procurement rules. The cost of doing business is already too high. Don’t make it worse!

The Bill includes criminal offences, administrative penalties, licence suspension, business prohibition, closure, seizure, and penalties for negligent cybersecurity breaches or false certification claims. Some of that is justified for critical misconduct, but excessive criminalisation can chill innovation and incident reporting.

Now imagine:

A small NGO building a data-collection app could be treated as developing/providing an ICT product.

A small periurban school near Techiman appointing a self-taught but competent ICT teacher or network administrator could run into the Section 46 certification requirement if “ICT professional” is read broadly.

A startup adding cloud hosting, AI features, or platform functionality might need to ask whether it has changed the “nature” of its ICT business and needs approval.

A Ghanaian founder could be treated less favourably after raising foreign investment than before raising it.

An AI-assisted non-programmer could produce useful code, while a formally certified but incompetent person is legally privileged.

Even worse:

The merger/alteration approval clause is dangerous because it turns ordinary corporate switches into a whole regulatory fanfare. Startup pivots, acquisitions, restructurings and investment rounds depend on speed and certainty.

More licensing layers are likely to lead to slower product launches, especially in already tough fields like fintech. Think also about the higher legal costs, and more uncertainty for firms already dealing with Bank of Ghana, data protection, cybersecurity and AML obligations.

Paradoxically, overregulation can weaken cybersecurity. Small operators may avoid registration, breach reporting, or formal contracts because contact with the regulator feels dangerous.

Conversely, employers may over-apply the law and require NITA certification for analysts, IT support, product managers, data officers, website administrators, and junior developers, even where the legal risk is unclear.

Moreover, Ghana participates in regional and continental liberalisation frameworks, including ECOWAS free movement/establishment principles and AfCFTA services liberalisation. A broad citizen-only ICT licensing scheme may create avoidable trade and investment friction, even if Ghana retains policy space to regulate for legitimate objectives.

It is true that the Bill creates an appeals tribunal, but the tribunal is appointed through ministerial processes and funded through the NITA’s funds. Appeals to the Court of Appeal, on the other hand, are limited to points of law. That may be insufficient for a regime with such heavy commercial consequences.

9. A better law might look something like this

The Bill should be rewritten around regulated activities, not “IT professionals.”

The following quick fixes would be a good start:

• Replace the broad Section 35 ban with a schedule of licensable high-risk ICT activities: public & sensitive commercial digital infrastructure, critical data centres, public cloud for government/critical sectors, critical SaaS for public services, cybersecurity-sensitive operations, and national platform operators.
• Rewrite Section 46 so certification applies only to defined risk roles: public-sector chief information/security officers, critical infrastructure administrators, certified ICT auditors, digital identity administrators, public procurement sign-off professionals, and cybersecurity-sensitive roles. For everyone else, use voluntary certification or title protection.
• Add exemptions for employees doing internal work, students, hobbyists, open-source contributors, micro repairers, ordinary retail sales, internal IT departments, low-risk website/app development, and small businesses below clear thresholds.
• Remove or radically narrow the citizen-only ownership rule. Use public-procurement preferences, local-capacity requirements, security vetting for sensitive contracts, and Ghanaian participation incentives instead of a blanket nationality-based ownership restriction.
• Limit transaction approvals to changes of control of high-risk licensees. Do not require approval for ordinary pivots, product changes, share issuances, acquisitions outside sensitive categories, or internal restructuring.
• Create a lead-regulator rule. If the CSA, DPC, NCA, Bank of Ghana or another regulator already licenses the core risk, NITA should coordinate through memoranda and joint standards, rather than duplicating permissions.
• Hardwire the due process in. The Bill should require that there should be published criteria, fee caps, timelines, deemed approvals where appropriate, written reasons, appeal stays except in emergencies, warrant requirements for seizure except imminent-risk cases, and compensation for wrongful closure.
• Build an AI-specific assurance layer. Require secure development practices, AI-use documentation, human review for high-risk systems, logging, testing, model/data governance, incident reporting and audit trails. Avoid creating an “outmoded at birth” bill because of a failure to take AI into account.
• Be sensitive to the informal economy. Ensure long transition periods, recognition of prior learning, apprenticeship routes, low-cost micro-certification, mobile registration, district-level support, and no criminal enforcement for low-risk actors during transition.
• Require a regulatory impact assessment before commencement. The government should publish expected costs, affected occupations, SME effects, competition analysis, trade implications, institutional overlaps, enforcement budget, and anti-corruption safeguards.
• Conclusion: the Ministry is off the bar but they can have another go
• A careful NITA law could be one of Ghana’s most anti-katanomic and groundbreaking digital economy reforms. Especially if it focuses on fixing wasteful, opaque, and pooly thought through public ICT procurement.

But a careless version could become a massive burden on the heads of a struggling, still nascent, technology sector. The draft bill tilts more to the latter than the former.

The MOC should get off its high horse while there is still time, abandon the bill in its current form, return to the drawing board, and come back with something more aligned with modern realities.

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Bright Simons is a Ghanaian technologist, social innovator, entrepreneur, writer, social and political commentator. He is the vice-president, in charge of research at IMANI Centre for Policy and Education. He is also the founder and president of mPedigree.

When military juntas seized power in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger between 2020 and 2023, they promised sovereignty, security, and national dignity. Several years on, the evidence tells a brutal story. Large portions of the Sahel remain outside state control, with jihadist groups like JNIM and Islamic State affiliates growing more sophisticated and operationally bolder. In this urgent analysis, security researcher Joseph McCarthy argues that West Africa’s future stability depends on rebuilding states that citizens trust, economies that create opportunity, and regionally coordinated security architecture, because the Sahel’s collapse cannot be treated as someone else’s problem.

Read the full analysis below:

Sahel on fire: Why Ghana and ECOWAS cannot ignore the collapse of the AES

When soldiers seized power in Bamako in 2020, Ouagadougou in 2022, and Niamey in 2023, they offered a familiar promise: civilian governments had failed, foreign partnerships had grown corrupt, and only military rule could restore sovereignty, security, and national dignity.

Across the Sahel, millions exhausted by years of insecurity and perceived foreign condescension believed them.

Several years on, the evidence tells a brutal and irrefutable story.

The security situation across Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the three countries that form the self-styled Alliance of Sahel States (AES), now reveals something the juntas can no longer paper over with slogans.

Large portions of northern and eastern Burkina Faso are either under jihadist influence or violently contested.

Magical Realpolitik: Two kinds of facts wrestle for the soul of Realism

In Mali, the regions of Taoudéni, Timbuktu, Ménaka, Gao, and much of Mopti remain outside effective state authority.

Niger retains a stronger foothold around Niamey and Maradi, but insecurity is steadily creeping into Diffa, Tahoua, and Agadez.

The trajectory across all three countries is identical: state presence is shrinking; militant mobility corridors are expanding southward.

The April 2026 coordinated attacks across Mali, striking Mopti, Gao, Kidal, Sévaré, and approach routes to Bamako simultaneously, confirmed what conflict monitors at ACLED and the Critical Threats Project had been documenting for months. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) and Islamic State affiliates are not retreating.

They are growing more sophisticated, more coordinated, and operationally bolder.

When insurgents can strike urban and semi-urban centres, spaces that house military headquarters, administrative institutions, and strategic infrastructure, with precision and impunity, military presence alone has clearly ceased to guarantee territorial control.
The core problem is structural.

Terrorism in the Sahel has never been purely a military challenge.

Extremist organisations thrive where governance collapses, public trust erodes, and economic opportunities evaporate.

Governments may announce the destruction of militant camps or the recapture of towns.

But if corruption, unemployment, food insecurity, and local grievances go unresolved, recruitment resumes elsewhere.

The cycle continues.

Military-led governments are structurally ill-equipped to break that cycle.

Officers trained for battlefield command are now expected to manage fragile economies, attract investment, regulate inflation, and deliver social services.

Predictably, all three juntas have addressed profoundly complex national crises almost entirely through a security lens.

The consequences are visible: authority in Burkina Faso barely extends beyond Ouagadougou and a few southern towns; Bamako’s security perimeter has reportedly contracted; central Mali remains an unresolved warzone.

Meanwhile, judicial independence weakens, civil society operates under pressure, media freedoms narrow, and decision-making grows opaque and personalised. Investor confidence has collapsed. Trade routes have frayed.

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: insecurity discourages investment, weak development fuels grievance, grievance powers recruitment, and governments respond with yet more militarisation.

The junta compounded this failure with a catastrophic strategic miscalculation: they dismantled every cooperative framework that had previously helped contain extremist expansion. MINUSMA was expelled.

French military operations ended. American intelligence and surveillance assets withdrew.

EU training missions deteriorated or closed. ECOWAS security cooperation collapsed.

In their place came Russian-linked security actors, first the Wagner Group, then the Africa Corps. This shift has not produced decisive results.

Western and multilateral partners had provided drone surveillance, aerial logistics, rapid evacuation support, command training, and multinational operational coordination.

Russia’s deployment has remained narrower, more militarised, and heavily oriented around regime protection rather than population security.
The fall of Kidal said everything.

Once showcased as proof that expelling Western forces and embracing Moscow represented strategic genius, Kidal instead exposed the new model’s core vulnerability.

When Russian-linked personnel reportedly withdrew as Malian forces came under attack, it shattered years of carefully cultivated political messaging.

Facts eventually overpower slogans, and those facts are now arriving at a pace.

The consequences no longer stop at the AES border.

The Sahel has become a sanctuary where extremist organisations regroup, recruit, train, and launch operations southward into coastal West Africa. Benin has already suffered deadly attacks near Pendjari National Park.

Côte d’Ivoire endured the Grand-Bassam massacre and continues fortifying its northern frontier.

Togo has seen infiltration pressure mount. Ghana, which has not yet experienced large-scale jihadist violence, is not insulated from what is coming.

The expansion of JNIM and IS-affiliated operations into southern Burkina Faso has intensified arms trafficking, infiltration networks, and radicalisation risks along Ghana’s northern border.

The Bawku conflict, rooted in ethnic and chieftaincy tensions, presents precisely the kind of local instability that extremist organisations have exploited elsewhere to gain a foothold.

Ghanaian security agencies have responded with Operation Conquered Fist, expanded border surveillance, joint intelligence operations, and counter-extremism programmes, all reflecting a growing, sober recognition that this crisis is no longer distant. It is at the door.

The lesson the Sahel has taught, at enormous human cost, is clear: no country defeats a transnational insurgency through isolationist nationalism or militarised governance alone. Security and development are inseparable.

Roads, schools, healthcare, agriculture, jobs, and functioning local governance are as essential to counterterrorism as soldiers and weapons. Where states are absent, extremists fill the space.

West Africa’s future security architecture must be African-led, regionally coordinated, and built on genuine interoperability: shared intelligence, joint border operations, and integrated economic resilience.

External partnerships have a role, but one that strengthens African institutional capacity rather than substituting for it.

Sustainable security cannot be outsourced to mercenaries or purchased through battlefield operations alone.

Ghana and the wider ECOWAS community cannot afford to treat the Sahel as someone else’s problem.

The region’s long-term stability will depend on building states that citizens trust, economies that create opportunity, and institutions capable of collective action.

The AES experience has shown, at devastating cost, what happens when those foundations are abandoned.

West Africa cannot afford to learn that lesson twice.

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About the author:

Joseph McCarthy is an analyst and researcher specialising in governance, security, and political transitions in the Sahel. He writes on geopolitics, development, and African diplomacy. Email: joecarthy30@gmail.com

In this incisive essay, renowned policy analyst Bright Simons introduces the concept of “magical realpolitik” to describe a growing dysfunction in contemporary foreign policy: the inability of strategic thinkers to integrate two competing species of fact. The first, “expert-mediated facts,” emerge from structured inquiry, peer review, and institutional memory (e.g., Robert Pape’s finding that strategic bombing has never toppled a regime on its own).

The second, “facts on the ground,” are perceptual, observable realities accessible to anyone with eyes and a map (e.g., the Strait of Hormuz is closed to shipping; Russia occupies parts of eastern Ukraine). Drawing on historical and contemporary cases—from the 1988 U.S. Navy’s Operation Praying Mantis that reopened the strait, to Iran’s IRGC proxy strategy, Netanyahu’s Gaza operations, Trumpian populist realism, and even John Mearsheimer’s Ukraine analysis—Simons argues that populist realists, authoritarian ideologues, territorial maximalists, and liberal internationalists alike selectively embrace one factual register while willfully ignoring the other.

The result is “enchantment”: a trance-like confidence that the world will behave as one’s preferred category of evidence predicts, even when the other category is screaming otherwise. Simons concludes that genuine strategic competence requires holding both factual categories in tension, resisting the urge to resolve contradictions prematurely, recovering granular historical knowledge that resists tidy narratives, and accepting that realism itself is no longer a stable paradigm but a question: which world, and whose facts?

Read the full article below.

Magical Realpolitik: Two kinds of facts wrestle for the soul of Realism

In the spring of 1988, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) began laying mines across the shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf. The Ayatollah’s navy had spent months dissuading tanker traffic from the Strait of Hormuz, and Washington responded with the largest convoy operation since the Second World War. Within a year, the American navy had sunk or crippled half the Iranian surface fleet in a single afternoon’s engagement – Operation Praying Mantis – and Tehran was forced to accept a ceasefire it had rejected for eight years. The strait reopened. Oil flowed. The episode was filed away as a footnote to the Iran-Iraq War and largely forgotten except among history buffs.

Thirty-eight years later, the strait is closed again. And the overwhelming majority of Western strategists, including those who lived through the 1980s tanker war, write and speak as though Iran’s capacity to choke the world’s most important oil chokepoint were some unprecedented riddle rather than a recurring test of naval power with a well-documented resolution. This forgetting is deeper than it looks. It reveals something about how facts travel – and fail to travel – through the cogs of foreign policy.

This essay proposes a framework for that phenomenon: magical realpolitik. I summarise it as the rubric in which practitioners of hard-nosed, interest-based statecraft increasingly evade a coherent factual foundation to entangle with two frequently hostile species of fact, each obeying its own logic and each capable of overriding the other at unpredictable intervals. Rather than enlightenment through friction, the result is often enchantment: a trance-like confidence that the world will behave as one’s preferred category of evidence predicts, even when the other category is screaming otherwise.

About Two Facts

Realism, as Fukuyama noted in his celebrated critique, begins from a simple and powerful premise: the world should be engaged as it is, not as we wish it to be. For this insight Kissinger was canonised by his admirers. Hans Morgenthau, channelling his inner Machiavelli, would build whole curricula. Every foreign-policy professional educated since 1945 has absorbed some version of it. The trouble is that “the world as it is” contains two quite different kinds of raw material, and realism has never adequately reckoned with the tension between them.

The first kind of fact is what we might call expert-mediated fact, facts as they congeal in the minds of sages. Think of them as the product of structured inquiry, peer review, institutional memory, and the slow accumulation of case studies. Robert Pape’s finding that strategic bombing has never toppled an entrenched regime on its own is an sagely fact. So is the democratic peace thesis. So is the well-attested pattern, documented by Barbara Geddes and her collaborators, that personalist dictatorships are more brittle than party-based ones but also more reckless in their final phase. Such facts draw breath from journals, and flourish in seminar rooms, and in the briefing memoranda that policy planners circulate before principals’ meetings. They carry the weight of evidence which is not the exact same thing as the weight of experience.

The second kind of fact is what I call a fact on the ground, workaday or commonplace things visible at the perceptual level, accessible to anyone with eyes and a map. The Strait of Hormuz is closed to most shipping traffic: that is a fact on the ground. Russia occupies parts of eastern Ukraine: fact on the ground. China has built artificial islands in the South China Sea and garrisoned them with anti-ship missiles: fact on the ground. These facts do not require the tutelage of sages. They require attention.

Both species of fact claim residence in the house of realism. Both are, in principle, about the world as it is. But they can pull in opposite directions, and with surprising regularity, because they answer different questions. Sagely facts usually tell you what tends to happen – the regularities, the probabilistic patterns, and the structural constraints. Facts on the ground tell you what has already happened. The specific configuration of power, geography, and committed action at this moment, say.

Of Populist Realists and Establishment Realists

The analytical payoff of this distinction emerges when you watch it operate inside actual strategic behaviour. Consider the current American administration. The MAGA foreign-policy apparatus, as Rebecca Lissner of the Council on Foreign Relations has observed, presents itself as a new kind of illiberal superpower. Realist in posture, and civilisational in self-conception. Its instincts run overwhelmingly toward facts on the ground. The Iranian nuclear programme was bombed: that is a fact on the ground, and it is treated as a solution. Houthis are still launching missiles at commercial shipping? Fact on the ground, treated as an insult requiring kinetic response. The border with Mexico is crossable: fact on the ground, demanding a wall.

People like to say that MAGA are totally anti-factual. That is not entirely true. They do care about facts-on-the-ground, hence the constant effort to influence perceptions of them.

What the MAGA apparatus treats with far greater suspicion is the sagely layer. The proposition that air campaigns do not produce regime change – a finding supported by every major empirical study from Pape onward – is precisely the sort of expert-cultivated fact that the populist realist finds suspect, open to challenge. It introduces constraint where the ground-level observer sees opportunity. Pape’s data set covers over a century of cases. The populist realist would rather trust the smoking rubble of a specific compound in Tehran.

The same selective factual metabolism operates among Iran’s clerical-security elite. The IRGC’s proxy architecture – Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilisation Forces, for instance – was a masterclass in facts-on-the-ground statecraft. It said: build physical presence, arm local allies, establish territorial corridors, and create the irreversible. Tehran’s strategic planners understood leverage in the most tactile sense. They placed men with weapons in places where their removal would be costly.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel exhibits a structurally identical pattern. Since October 2023, Israeli military operations have expanded across Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Syrian territory with relentless tactical vigour. Each operation creates new facts on the ground: buffer zones, military outposts, and the detritus of demolished infrastructure. Former senior Israeli security officials have described Netanyahu’s approach as tactical politics masquerading as strategy. But the ground-level facts speak for themselves: Hamas battalions degraded, Hezbollah’s leadership decapitated, and Syrian military infrastructure obliterated.

Yet sagely evidence on counterinsurgency – from Algeria through Vietnam to Iraq – consistently shows that military dominance over a hostile population without a political settlement underproduces pacification and inflame perpetual insurgency. US intelligence assessments have projected years of continued resistance from Hamas regardless of how many battalions are destroyed, because the armed movement is sustained by conditions that military force alone cannot alter.

There is no sign nonetheless that Netanyahu’s coalition partners will cave in to such purported wisdom. Many in that camp perceive it as the prejudices of a liberal international order they have already rejected. They point to the real ablation of ISIS, its smoking ruins, regardless how potent its remnants may be. The facts on the ground are dazzling. The facts in the research are devastating. But one can still pick and choose.

Choices, however, have costs. Iran’s planners proved spectacularly vulnerable to the sagely fact that ideological movements built on external threat rarely survive the domestication of that threat. The Islamic Republic’s founding legitimacy rested on anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism. When Joseph Nye described soft power as the ability to attract rather than coerce, he was articulating the mechanism by which values – more than, say, weapons – reshape the preferences of populations over time. The clerical establishment spent four decades insisting that its revolutionary values were magnetically attractive. The January 2026 protests, with five million people in the streets chanting for the return of the Pahlavi monarchy, were sagely fact made flesh: ideological legitimacy is a depreciating asset, and no quantity of IRGC ground presence in Lebanon can compensate for its evaporation at home.

Enter Enchantment

Here is where the magical enters the realpolitik. The Trumpian administration, the clerical-IRGC apparatus, and the Netanyahu coalition all demonstrate a phenomenon that purely rationalist accounts of foreign policy cannot explain: the willing, eyes-open refusal to integrate one species of fact with the other, even when the cost of refusal becomes critical.

The enchantment works differently in each case, but the underlying structure is identical. For the populist realist, sagely facts carry the odour of the establishment – the class of professionals, academics, and career diplomats whose authority the populist project exists to displace. When the RAND Corporation publishes a study showing that maximum-pressure sanctions campaigns against authoritarian regimes rarely produce regime change and often entrench the incumbents, the populist realist does not engage the evidence. He looks right past the messenger. The sage is marginalised for belonging to the old order, the one that lost Iraq and bungled Libya and let China into the WTO. The contingent accuracy of a particular research finding must be subordinated to the stolid fact – the ground-level, perceptual, emotionally vivid fact – that his class failed in such-and-such real time and place.

For the clerical-security realist in Tehran, the enchantment runs in the other direction but with structurally similar results. The IRGC’s strategic culture is built on a theory of civilisational destiny – the Shia revolutionary state as the vanguard of resistance to Western hegemony. When facts on the ground contradict this narrative – when the Syrian corridor collapses, when Hezbollah’s leadership is decapitated, or when Iranian cities erupt in monarchist slogans – the clerical establishment does not update the theory. It doubles down, because the theory is the institution. To abandon the narrative of revolutionary destiny would be to dissolve the very basis on which the Supreme Leader’s authority rests. For Netanyahu, the enchantment takes yet another form: a theology of territorial maximalism inherited from Revisionist Zionism’s most acute interpreters, in which every military gain confirms providential destiny and every call for political settlement is read as weakness. The sagely consensus – that promoting new occupations without broad-based legitimacy erodes the occupier – simply bounces off this armour.

Perhaps the most instructive case, however, belongs to an establishment realist rather than a populist one. John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago’s most prominent offensive realist, argued from 2014 onward that NATO expansion was the “taproot” of the Ukraine crisis and that the West bore principal responsibility for provoking Russia’s invasion. This was a textbook exercise in expert-cultivated factual reasoning: structural realism predicts that great powers will resist encroachment on their spheres of influence, therefore Russia’s behaviour was rational and foreseeable. The theory was internally coherent and Mearsheimer’s stature lent it considerable authority. The difficulty was that his framework systematically screened out an accumulating pile of ground-level facts. As the New Statesman’s analysts observed, there had been no groundswell of Ukrainian support for NATO membership before Russia annexed Crimea in 2014; Finland, with its 1,340-kilometre Russian border, joined NATO in 2023 without provoking invasion; and Putin’s own rhetoric – denying Ukraine’s existence as a nation and comparing himself to Peter the Great – pointed to imperial motivations that structural realism’s billiard-ball model cannot accommodate. Mearsheimer’s enchantment was the mirror image of the populist’s: where the MAGA realist rejects expert findings because they constrain ground-level ambition, the academic realist rejected ground-level evidence because it complicated an elegant theory. Both achieved the same result: a selective factual metabolism that felt rigorous and was, in practice, blind in one eye.

Fukuyama captured something adjacent to this dynamic in The End of History, where he observed that virtually everyone professionally engaged in the study of politics had believed in the permanence of communism, and that its worldwide collapse was almost totally unanticipated. The failure, he noted, cut across the political spectrum. That universality is the hallmark of magical realpolitik. Factual enchantment transcends partisanship. In my own country of Ghana, I dubbed a variant of the phenomenon State Enchantment for this very cross-partisan character. This structural spectrality. It afflicts whichever faction has allowed one species of fact to colonise the space that should be occupied by both.

A Liberal Blind Spot

To be fair to the populists, the authoritarians, and the territorial maximalists, their liberal-internationalist counterparts are hardly immune. The liberal establishment’s characteristic error is the mirror image: an overextension of expert-cultivated sagely facts at the expense of ground-level realities that ought to be blindingly obvious.

Consider the persistent failure of Western strategic commentary to remember that Iran has already tried to close the Strait of Hormuz and was physically dislodged by American naval power. The tanker war of 1987 – 88 is not classified information. It is taught in war colleges. And yet the analytical class repeatedly treats Hormuz closures as though they were entering uncharted territory, when the historical precedent points unambiguously to a specific resolution: concentrated naval force, applied with political will, historically reopens the strait. America’s slimming fleet size (from nearly 1250 in 1946 to less than 300 today) and overreliance on its technology edge is the real bottleneck here. Not to talk about the Navy’s failure to maintain its minesweepers. The expert-mediated overlay – game-theoretic models of escalation, scenario analyses of Chinese and Russian responses, elaborate calculations of oil-market elasticity, etc. – buries the ground-level precedent under layers of contingent complexity until the simple poignant ground-fact disappears.

Or consider the 1953 Iranian coup. The standard liberal-internationalist reading treats the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Mossadegh as the original sin of American policy in Iran, and the clerical revolution of 1979 as its karmic consequence. This reading is politically elegant. It is also, at the policy level, an extraordinary compression of contradictory ground-level facts. Ayatollah Kashani, the most powerful cleric in the Mossadegh coalition, was actively undermining Mossadegh’s secular-nationalist programme months before the coup. US Embassy cables from 1952 document Kashani sabotaging National Front candidates in the 17th Majlis elections. The Iran Party warned publicly that the country faced a dual threat: military dictatorship and the rule of the clergy. The clerics were neither Mossadegh’s loyal partners betrayed by the West or the mere exploiters of a nationalist-ideological vacuum created by the coup. They were rivals with a longrunning program independent of western imperialism. And the 1979 revolution – far from being the fulfilment of Mossadegh’s programme – was in important respects its antithesis: theocratic where Mossadegh was constitutional, clerical where he was secular, and authoritarian where he was parliamentary.

The sagely narrative flattened all of this into a seamless story of Western interference and indigenous resistance, producing an analytical tradition that, for over forty years, systematically underestimated the depth of the clerical-secular fault line within Iranian politics. When that fault line cracked open in January 2026, with millions chanting for a return to the pre-revolutionary order, too many analysts were caught unprepared. Because despite extensive factual granularity, the preferred theories had long since overwhelmed the ground-level detail.

Hence a Dialectical Trap

Magical realpolitik as a doctrine then is not confined to any single faction per se. It is a condition that emerges when the foreign-policy establishment fractures along factual lines – when the sagely class and the ground-level practitioners stop speaking the same evidentiary language and begin treating each other’s facts as noise.

A dialectical quality attends the fracture. The more the liberal establishment insisted on the primacy of expert-cultivated knowledge – multilateral institutions, norms-based order, and democratic peace etc – the more it alienated populations and practitioners who experienced international politics primarily through facts on the ground: lost manufacturing jobs, unchecked migration flows, and wars that experts promised would be short and proved interminable. The populist reaction, in turn, overcorrected: it elevated ground-level perception to the status of gospel and dismissed institutional knowledge as captured, corrupt, and irrelevant. What I call the “age of proteus” ensued. The result is not entirely a new realism. It is, instead, a new kaleidoscope of enchantments wearing realism’s clothes.

The Iranian variant follows a parallel trajectory. The revolution’s founding generation understood, at a functional level, the need to integrate theological vision with operational pragmatism – Khomeini made coldly rational calculations about the ceasefire with Iraq in 1988, comparing it to drinking poison but drinking it anyway. His successors, cocooned by decades of ideological consolidation and a suppressed policy feedback loop, have lost that integrative capacity. The Israeli trajectory runs in parallel: a security establishment that once prided itself on cold-eyed assessment – the tradition of conceptzia, the standing intelligence estimate, etc. – has been progressively captured by a political leadership whose ideological commitments override the intelligence product. The October 7 intelligence failure was more sinister than an aberration; it was the system reacting to known allergens, with inconvenient expert assessments sidelined in favour of a politically convenient ground-level picture. That Hamas had been contained, the Palestinian issue managed, and the Abraham Accords ascendant.

Analysts must embrace both factual categories and more

For the international political economy analyst, the strategist, and the policy adviser, the implications of magical realpolitik have practical consequences beyond philosophical exploration.

The first implication is epistemic discipline. Every significant strategic assessment should be explicitly stress-tested against both species of fact. What does the expert-mediated evidence say about the likely trajectory of this situation? And what do the observable, ground-level configurations of power, geography, and committed resources actually look like right now? But the sweet spot is in the tensional zone. Where the two conflict, the analyst’s job is to sit with the conflict rather than resolve it prematurely through theoretical fiat. The tanker war precedent and the Pape bombing data point in opposite directions regarding Iran: naval force can reopen a strait, but air power cannot topple a regime. Both are true. The competent analyst holds both simultaneously and designs for the resulting uncertainty.

The second implication is narrative scepticism. Wherever a foreign-policy programme presents itself as a seamless unity – whether “resistance” in Tehran, “America First” in Washington, “rules-based order” in Brussels, or “total victory” in Jerusalem – the analyst should look for the seams. The IRGC’s economic empire benefits structurally from the continuation of sanctions. The MAGA coalition’s tariff architecture conflicts with its energy-dominance ambitions. Netanyahu’s refusal to define an endgame in Gaza reflects something other than strategic patience. It is mostly about the the structural impossibility of satisfying his coalition’s theological maximalism and his military’s operational realism simultaneously. These fractures are the fuel of analysis.

The third implication is historical recovery. Magical realpolitik thrives on amnesia. The populist realist forgets the expert findings that would constrain his ambitions. The liberal internationalist forgets the ground-level precedents that would discipline her theories. The authoritarian ideologue forgets the internal contradictions that preceded his regime’s consolidation. And the academic realist, as Mearsheimer’s Ukraine commentary illustrates, forgets the ground-level evidence that would destabilise his model. The antidote is granular, unflattering, specific historical knowledge. The kind that resists compression into tidy narratives. The analyst who knows that Kashani betrayed Mossadegh, that the Shah completed oil nationalisation in 1973 with policy and political deftness that Mossadegh couldn’t muster, that Iran was forcibly ejected from the Strait of Hormuz in 1988, that the IRGC profits from the sanctions it publicly denounces, and that Israeli intelligence warned of Hamas’s capabilities before the political leadership chose to look away, possesses a factual toolkit that no amount of theoretical elegance can substitute. They rule the sky of clarity and the ground of consequence.

The fourth implication, and perhaps the most uncomfortable, is accepting that realpolitik itself is not a stable paradigm. The tradition that runs from Machiavelli through Metternich to Kissinger assumed a unitary factual world in which hard-headed observation could, with sufficient rigour, yield reliable strategic guidance. That assumption was always somewhat heroic. In a world where facts themselves have fractured into competing epistemic registers – where the expert and the practitioner, the data set and the satellite image, the historical pattern and the breaking headline, inhabit different cognitive ecologies and serve different institutional masters – the realist claim to privilege “the world as it is” becomes a question rather than an answer. Which world? Whose facts?

Magical realpolitik makes fantastic claims of resolving the question. The savvy strategist and analyst resists that enchantment, fact by fact.

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Bright Simons is a Ghanaian technologist, social innovator, entrepreneur, writer, social and political commentator. He is the vice-president, in charge of research at IMANI Centre for Policy and Education. He is also the founder and president of mPedigree.