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.

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.

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.

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.

Ghana is facing a paradoxical crisis in its education sector: the government continues to train tens of thousands of new teachers each year at taxpayer expense, yet it cannot employ them.

According to this opinion article by journalist Felix Anim-Appau, while 40,000 trained and licensed teachers applied for postings in 2026, the Ministry of Finance approved only 7,000 positions. This leaves 33,000 qualified teachers unemployed. The shortage in classrooms is severe, with an estimated 30,000 schools lacking teachers, yet bureaucratic hurdles, delayed financial clearances, and poor remuneration prevent recruitment.

The author criticizes the continued payment of GH¢207 million annually in teacher trainee allowances—a policy originally introduced in the 1960s to incentivize enrollment when teaching was unpopular. Now that demand for teacher training has surged, the author argues these funds could instead employ roughly 5,000 new teachers each year. The piece concludes that political parties maintain popular but costly allowances to win votes, while Ghana’s basic education system suffers from overcrowded classrooms, overworked teachers, and declining quality. Read the full article below.

The teacher trainees posting conundrum: Why are we training more teachers when we can’t employ them?

I went for a wedding in Kumasi few weekends ago. I left on Thursday night and arrived at Friday dawn. In the morning of Friday, one of my sisters, a trained nurse, came to me and said she was leaving for work.

She was in a casual dress and I asked her why she was not in her uniform. Then she said she manages a business for a certain woman who lives outside the country. Then I asked her the obvious question and she was like, “I haven’t been posted yet.” She completed school in 2023 and we are in 2026.Education

In Ghana, we have nursing and teacher trainee colleges that train people to become nurses and teachers. Over two decades ago, when I was in secondary school, a teacher trainee friend doing her teaching practice advised me to study nursing after school.

Her reason was not because I had any passion for the profession, but because jobs were readily available in that field. According to her, pursuing nursing meant I wouldn’t be job hunting like other graduates after school. And, she was right. The same applied to teacher trainees. Nurses and teachers didn’t have to look for jobs. But I had no passion for healthcare, so I didn’t take her advice.

The question, however, is; will the same advice I was given some years ago still hold today? Are jobs readily available for trained teachers and nurses? Or they now do hunt for jobs after their training? Although the issue in question applies to both personnel undertaking training in teaching and nursing, for the purposes of this piece, I’ll limit it to teacher trainees.

Overview of Pupil-Teacher-Ratio (PTR) in Ghana

According to a review of progress by the Africa Education Watch for Teacher Deployment in Ghana’s Basic Schools, conducted between 2022 and 2025, Ghana fell short on its targets for the benchmarks it set for the sector.

The PTR, a critical indicator of teacher adequacy and teaching quality, generally has lower PTRs corresponding to smaller class sizes, personalised instruction, and improved learning outcomes.

According to the Eduwatch report, the Education Sector Medium-Term Development Plan (ESMTDP) (2022-2025) sets PTR targets of 31:1 at Kindergarten (KG), 31:1 at Primary, and 11:1 at Junior High School (JHS). These targets, the report noted, are “relevant for the deployment of effective learner-centered pedagogy under Ghana’s Standards-Based Curriculum.”

However, implementation under the medium-term has fallen short of these benchmarks, with national data for the 2023/2024 academic year (three years into the four-year medium term), reporting PTRs of approximately 45:1 at KG, 39:1 at Primary, and 20:1 at JHS, which are all significantly above target levels.

Key aspects of the teacher deficit

The report listed four key factors contributing to this teacher deficit in the classrooms.

Massive shortage: Executive Director of Eduwatch, Kofi Asare, has said in an interview on Channel One TV on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, while assessing the one-year performance of President John Dramani Mahama, that the education sector requires at least 15,000 new teachers each year to maintain balance in the system. However, he stated that no teachers were recruited in 2025, worsening an already strained situation.
“As a result, we now have not less than 30,000 classrooms without teachers, and the number could be higher,” he indicated.

Recruitment challenges: The country is also faced with the challenge of recruiting teachers despite having a large pool of trained teachers, due to bureaucratic hurdles. Usually, there are delays in financial clearance, coupled with administrative bottlenecks preventing the employment of qualified teachers, leaving many schools in the country understaffed.
Teacher attrition: Many trained teachers in the country are leaving the profession to seek better-paying jobs and more prestigious careers. This turnover is largely due to poor remuneration and low prestige associated with teaching, making it challenging for the sector to retain its trained and experienced talents.
Rural-urban imbalance: Due to obvious reasons such as the lack of adequate infrastructure and social amenities in many deprived areas in Ghana, many qualified teachers reject postings to these areas, and often prefer to work in the urban centres, leading to a shortage in these rural and remote locations.

The recruitment controversy in Ghana

On Wednesday, November 12, 2025, Ghanaians were made to attach a familiar adjective –-black-– to the day, due to the tragic story that unfolded in the early hours of that fateful day. During a Ghana Armed Forces recruitment exercise at the El-Wak Sports Stadium in Accra, six applicants lost their lives, and 28 others suffered varying degrees of injuries in a stampede that occurred at the venue.

Over 500,000 Ghanaian youth applied for the 2026 security service roles in the Police, Immigration, Prisons and Fire Services, but only 5,000 spots were available for the 105,000 people that qualified.

These statistics exclude the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) because it is managed by the Ministry of Defence, while the other security agencies mentioned earlier operate a centralised exercise for agencies under the Ministry of the Interior.

These figures, experts have argued, are not inspired by the passion to serve but the lack of jobs in the country. After people losing their lives and many being rejected the opportunity to train to join the security services, we woke up to yet another recruitment brouhaha, this time around, not persons who are applying to be trained to become professionals, but rather, those the government has already spent taxpayers’ money to train.

The introduction of this piece makes it clear that completing teacher training does not guarantee one a readily market to fit in. You need to wait for some years before you get recruited. And according to these unemployed trained teachers, once it gets to the turn of a particular year-group to be employed, the system absorbs all available trained personnel in that particular year.

However, the situation is not the same this time around. When the Ghana Education Service (GES) opened the portal for people to apply for the 2026 postings, 40,000 trained and licensed teachers did, out of which the Ministry of Finance gave clearance for only 7,000 to be employed. Where should the remaining applicants go?

Impact on education

The government’s refusal to employ these trained teachers in the various schools adversely impacts education in the country, which consequently will affect the future of this nation. It brings increased workload on the existing teachers, declines the quality of education, particularly in rural areas where professional teachers refuse postings, and further breeds educational inequality, especially in the villages where pupils lack access to some basic resources.

The political dancing-chairs with Ghana’s training institutions

Ghana’s political landscape has been inundated with freebie promises from politicians who know such promises resonate with many of the electorates than giving them economic empowerment to cater for themselves. It is for this reason that the “I’ll provide free this, free that” dominate campaign promises during elections.

In 2013, John Dramani Mahama promised to cancel the teacher and nursing trainee allowances, which he did in 2014. Some of us commended him for that because, it was the boldest political decision any government could make since the introduction of the allowance for the trainees over some six decades ago.

This policy was first introduced by Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah in the 1960s to increase enrollment in the teacher training institutions. This was because the field was not attractive to many youths, and for that reason, Nkrumah introduced it to serve as a crucial incentive to encourage young people to pursue teaching. It was also to support needy students at the training to cater for some expenses while in school.

However, after promising to cancel the allowance, President Mahama in 2016, at the dying minutes of the electioneering period, turned around to pay the allowance to these trainees. This was because his opponent had promised to restore it and for the fear of losing votes, he licked back his own spittle on the ground.

Lo and behold, President Akufo-Addo restored the allowance in 2017, a campaign promise that helped him to win votes, which he fulfilled but failed to execute its implementation to the core.

What’s the essence of the colleges if we can’t absorb their products afterwards?

The question is; why should we have Colleges of Education if we can’t employ their students after training them? What would really be the sense in spending taxpayers’ money to train people and make them sit at home in the end? President Nkrumah introduced the allowance because people were not attending teacher training colleges.

As a result, it was meant to incentivise them to be trained as teachers. Now people are clamouring for admission, so what’s the sense in still keeping the allowance, which could have been saved, invested and used to employ these same teachers by the time they complete the training?

Following reports that only 7,000 out of the 40,000 trained teachers that applied for this year’s postings could be absorbed by the government, the Teacher Trainees’ Association of Ghana (TTAG) called for the shutting down of these colleges if the situation is going to remain the same.

Nanija Devine, President of TTAG, had said at a press conference at the Association’s national secretariat on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, that: “Those currently in the Colleges of Education are over 65,000. If the 45,000 already in the system do not know when they will be posted, then what about those still in training? What is the essence of their education?” he quizzed, adding that “if indeed the government cannot recruit the 45,000 trained teachers in the system, then the Colleges of Education should consider closing down.”

A time to redirect the allowance to reduce the unemployed trained teachers

In the 2026 Budget statement presented by the Finance Minister, Dr. Cassiel Ato Baah Forson, in Parliament on Thursday, November 13, 2025, the Government made an allocation of GH¢207 million for teacher trainee allowances. It also included a GH¢474 million for nursing trainee allowances. Don’t forget trained nurses are also unemployed.

The GH¢207 million allocated for the teacher trainee allowance, could employ pproximately 5,000 new teachers for an entire year.

An analytical policy critique by the African Foundation for Educational Development (AFFED) says the Ghana Education Service’s (GES) Single Spine Salary Structure has an entry-level monthly salary for newly posted diploma-holding teachers starting with a gross of around GH¢2,732, while degree holders start around GH¢3,459.

On average, together with SSNIT, it costs the State around GH¢35,000 to GH¢41,500 annually for an entry-level teacher. Dividing GH¢207,000,000 by an average annual employment cost of GH¢41,500 yields exactly 5,000 teachers.Ghana travel guide

Why can’t we invest this money at the beginning of every academic year? By the time they finish their training in four years, how much could have been realized to absorb these teachers who are staying at home?

Conclusion

If there is one thing I’m certain of, it is the fact that the Ghanaian politician’s interest is where they can get their earliest reward and not what the future holds for the younger generation. It is for this reason that the New Patriotic Party (NPP) introduced the Free SHS policy and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) coming up with the No Fee Stress policy.

Clearly, the beneficiaries of these two policies are either in their voting age or would be eligible in the nearest election to come. So, the objective is for political parties to use these policies as bait to win their votes, leaving the basic level which requires the most important attention to suffer.Political analysis reports

To summarise the whole issue; Government established teacher training colleges to train instructors for our basic schools. People were not interested. So, incentives were introduced to motivate people to enroll. It got to a time that application for enrollment went up.

Government abolished the incentive and rather opted to give student loans. But due to politics, these allowances were reintroduced. Now, after spending money to train these teachers, government cannot employ them. They are staying at home. Meanwhile, our schools need teachers and the political twist has always been to look busy, sound caring and ignore the real issues.

Free SHS is undoubtedly a brilliant policy. No fee stress isn’t a bad programme as well, just as the teacher trainee allowance. But all these policies are geared towards beneficiaries whom the politician could benefit from when it is time for elections. To them, the basic level can go to hell with empty classrooms and overworked teachers.

Why can’t the government redirect trainee allowances to employ trained teachers and offer student loans to those needing support, so they can repay after their training just like other tertiary students?

I dare say the Government lacks the balls to do that because of the fear of losing votes in the next elections. For this reason, children at the basic level of education are the ones paying the price for these skewed policies.

Is it not yet time to prioritise our education before politics? Anyway, the MP for Shama in the Western region, Emelia Arthur, last week assured her constituents that they are going to build more teacher training colleges.

The writer, Felix Anim-Appau, works with the online unit at Media General. The views expressed in this piece are his personal opinions and do not reflect, in any form or shape, those of the Media General Group, where he works. His email address is kwadwoasiedu2012@gmail.com, and he can be found on X as @platofintegrity