Sudan war traps civilians after ceasefire ends

Air strikes, artillery and gunfire rocked several areas of Sudan's capital on Monday as fighting between warring factions intensified for a second day, trapping civilians in a worsening humanitarian crisis.

The war between the country's army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has raged for almost two months, forcing almost 2 million to flee and wrecking the economy, causing frequent electricity and water outages.

Talks in Jeddah have failed to permanently end fighting and clashes intensified as soon as a ceasefire ended on Sunday.

While the RSF has spread out across most of the capital, controlling main streets and setting up camp inside some homes, the army has the advantage of air and artillery weaponry.

Residents of eastern Khartoum reported being hit by air strikes, while in southern Khartoum as well as northern Omdurman reported being hit by artillery fighting. Eyewitnesses reported clashes in central Khartoum as well.

"Since yesterday, the war has come back and there's strikes from all direction," said Awatif Sidahmed, 43, living in Sharq el-Nil across the Nile from Khartoum.

"Our neighbourhood is a war zone so leaving is difficult and staying home is difficult. We don't know what to do."

Those who stay also struggle with dwindling funds as the government has stopped paying salaries and pensions.

More than 200,000 of the 1.9 million Sudanese who have managed to flee their homes have gone to Egypt, which this week imposed a visa requirement for children, women and the elderly who had previously been exempt.

Hundreds of Sudanese were turned back at Cairo airport and sent back on return flights, according to Cairo airport sources, after a similar exemption for those with residencies in western and Gulf states was removed.

DARFUR FIGHTING

No side has made clear progress, and the fighting has spread to several cities to the west in the Kordofan and Darfur regions.

In the westernmost city of El Geneina, militias backed by the RSF have launched attacks on the city, which has now lost access to power and running water. Tens of thousands have fled to Chad.

Activist Kamal Alzein told Reuters that he had heard from three activists in the city that has been largely cut off from telecom networks that 1,100 people had been killed and 3,000 injured since attacks began in April.

Reuters could not immediately verify the numbers. The highest official death toll from the Sudanese health ministry was 510, reported in late May.

The Darfur Bar Association, which monitors the conflict in the region, said that 17 people had been killed on Monday as a result of shelling, while 100 had died over the past five days.

“Geneina remains under siege,” it said.

In a statement on Sunday's intense fighting in Bahri, the army says that while they were able to make gains against the RSF and claim to have killed hundreds, it had also lost several soldiers. It blamed the RSF for deadly air strikes on civilians in southern Khartoum.

The RSF in turn said that the army had used the 24-hour ceasefire on Saturday to reposition troops and attack immediately after.

Kenyan President William Ruto said on Monday that East African countries would conduct face-to-face meetings with the heads of the army and RSF within 10 days to discuss stopping the war and humanitarian corridors.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Monday agencies had been able to deliver supplies for 2 million people including 57 cross-line movements.

That included medical supplies to 42,000 people living on the island of Tuti on the Nile, where residents have said their single bridge to the mainland was blocked by the RSF, cutting off food and medicine supplies.

Reuters

The international economic architecture built after 1945 was based on a powerful idea: economic interdependence is crucial, if insufficient, for global peace and prosperity. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the predecessor to the World Trade Organization were founded in response to the three preceding decades of ceaseless instability, when the world had been devastated by two world wars, the Great Depression, and political extremism. It had also been a period of deglobalization, in which countries retreated into increasingly isolated trading blocs. In the rubble of World War II, governments sought to construct a new system that, by linking countries in a dense web of economic ties, would consign such chaos and division to history.

For much of the past 75 years, policymakers from across the world recognized the power of economic interdependence. Countries tore down trade barriers, opening their economies to one another. On balance, their record was impressive. Closer economic integration went hand in hand with rising global prosperity, an unprecedented reduction in poverty, and an unusually long period of great-power peace. Since 1990, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has fallen by three-quarters. At the center of this great leap in human well-being was a 20-fold increase in international trade volumes, which helped lift per capita incomes by a factor of 27 over the last six decades.

This economic vision is now under attack, and its achievements are in danger. A series of shocks in the space of 15 years—first the global financial crisis, then the Covid-19 pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine—have created an alternative narrative about globalization. Far from making countries economically stronger, this new line of thinking goes, globalization exposes them to excessive risks. Economic interdependence is no longer seen as a virtue; it is seen as a vice. The new mantra is that what countries need is not interdependence but independence, with integration limited at best to a small circle of friendly nations.

But dismantling economic globalization and the structures that support it would be a mistake. That is because, despite persistent rhetoric to the contrary, countries and people rely on trade more than ever in this age of “polycrisis.” Moreover, international cooperation, including on trade, is necessary to meet challenges to the global commons, such as climate change, inequality, and pandemics. Globalization is not over, nor should anyone wish for it to be. But it needs to be improved and reimagined for the age ahead.

THE END OF AN ERA?

The drift away from ever-closer economic integration was reshaping trade policy even before Covid-19. Rising geopolitical tensions between the world’s two biggest economies, the United States and China, saw the imposition of tit-for-tat tariffs. But the events of the past few years have supercharged the trend. The pandemic and the war in Ukraine exposed genuine vulnerabilities in global trade, causing product shortages and supply bottlenecks that harmed businesses and households alike. Talk of “decoupling” became widespread. More recently, governments have enacted a growing number of export restrictions, particularly for goods deemed strategically important, such as semiconductors and critical minerals. They have also revived industrial policies aimed at promoting domestic production.

That said, talk of deglobalization remains at odds with the trade data. In fact, global merchandise trade hit record levels in 2022. Over three-quarters of that trade was conducted on the basic “most-favored nation” tariff terms that governments extend to all World Trade Organization (WTO) members, suggesting that the multilateral rulebook still plays a defining role in international commerce. According to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, total trade between the United States and China reached an all-time high of $691 billion in 2022, which is 24 percent higher than it was in 2019. The share of intermediate inputs—goods used to produce other goods—in world exports remains roughly constant, suggesting that there has been no mass reshoring of international supply chains. Companies still make sourcing decisions based on cost and quality considerations. Policy measures could yet alter this calculus, but not overnight.

The experience of Covid-19 also showcased the power of international trade as a shock absorber. Early in the pandemic, as demand for medical products such as masks, gloves, and nasal swabs spiked, some of the disruptions were made worse by export restrictions on such goods. But trade swiftly became a vital means for ramping up access to desperately needed supplies, from personal protective equipment to pulse oximeters to, eventually, vaccines. Even as the value of global merchandise trade shrank by nearly eight percent in 2020, trade in medical products grew by 16 percent. Trade in cloth facemasks nearly quintupled. After Covid-19 vaccines were developed, billions of doses were manufactured in supply chains cutting across as many as 19 countries. Without trade, the recovery from the pandemic—from both the immediate public health crisis and the resulting economic crisis—would have been much slower.

In other words, despite the growing movement to dismantle the system underpinning globalization, people and businesses rely on it more than ever. Advocates of deglobalization are effectively calling for the disruption of the roughly 30 percent of all global output that depends on trade, a move that would only add to the downward pressure on peoples’ purchasing power across the world. In light of the strong rebound in trade that helped economies recover and kept most pandemic-induced shortages temporary, it is clear that the fundamental problem is not interdependence per se but an overconcentration of some trading relationships for certain vital products. And if the goal is more resilient supply networks that are less susceptible to weaponization by rivals, there is a better way forward.

DON’T DEGLOBALIZE, REGLOBALIZE

Deeper, deconcentrated, and more diversified global supply chains—what we at the WTO call “reglobalization”—offer a route to interdependence without overdependence. The problems exposed over the last three years can be turned into an opportunity to give countries and communities that have so far been excluded from global value chains a way in. 

In a handful of sectors, some reshoring or near-shoring looks inevitable. But beyond these limited areas, such measures could come at enormous economic cost. Researchers at the WTO have estimated that if the world splits into two separate economic blocs, the resulting reduction in international trade and loss of productivity from specialization and scale economies would reduce real incomes over the long term by at least five percent on average from the current trend. The output losses would be far greater than those caused by the 2008–9 global financial crisis. Low-income countries would see real incomes drop by as much as 12 percent, dealing a massive blow to their development prospects.

Economic interdependence is no longer seen as a virtue; it is seen as a vice.

What is more, large-scale reshoring could backfire by making supply chains less, not more, resilient. Negative supply shocks are likely to become more frequent in the years ahead as droughts, heat waves, and flooding wreak havoc with production and transport. Closing the door to trade would increase countries’ exposure to such shocks. In contrast, a reglobalized world economy would offer countries more outside supply options and thus more resilience.

In 2022, the United States saw firsthand that domestic production alone cannot ensure supply resilience when it experienced a shortage of baby formula. Nearly all formula sold in the United States was made domestically, and when one of the four major manufacturers had to stop production at one of its plants because of bacterial contamination, heart-rending shortages ensued. What ultimately mitigated the crisis was trade: the Food and Drug Administration authorized imports of formula on an emergency basis.

“Friend shoring,” the notion of moving production to geopolitical allies, is no panacea, either. Whenever someone proposes “friend shoring,” I always ask, “Who is a friend?” History has plenty of examples of friends behaving in unfriendly ways, especially when it comes to each other’s exports. Trade tensions can arise even among allies. 

TRADING GREEN

But the case for reglobalization goes further than such practicalities. It springs from the fact that the world needs international trade to overcome the most pressing challenges of the day, such as climate change, poverty, inequality, and war. It is often said that global problems demand global solutions. Too frequently, however, cooperation on trade is omitted from the list of those solutions.

The WTO is doing its part to rectify that omission. Last June, at our 12th ministerial conference, the organization’s 164 members agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in harmful fisheries subsidies, helping ease pressure on overexploited marine fish stocks while boosting the livelihoods of the millions of people who depend on healthy oceans. Members committed to preventing emergency food aid purchases from getting bogged down in export restrictions. They also pledged to keep food and medical supplies moving around the world, helping ensure availability and reductions in price volatility. When the war in Ukraine disrupted the supply of food, feed, and fertilizer, the WTO stepped up monitoring of related trade policies and urged members to stick to their pledges to keep markets open. As of early May 2023, around 63 of the 100 or so export-restricting measures that countries had introduced on food, feed, and fertilizer since the start of the warwere still in place. Although there is much room for improvement, things are headed in the right direction.

The existential imperative of climate change is another area where trade can—and must—be part of the solution. Trade is often portrayed as damaging the environment, with concerns about emissions related to shipping, air freight, and trucking spawning initiatives to “buy local.” It is true that transportation, like other carbon-intensive sectors, needs to reduce its emissions, and indeed, researchers are hard at work on alternative fuels, such as green hydrogen and green ammonia, to power cargo ships. But what critics miss is that the world cannot decarbonize without trade. It is an indispensable channel through which green technologies can be disseminated and countries can access the goods and services they need to recover from extreme weather events and adapt to a changing climate. The competition and scale efficiencies made possible by international trade and value chains are critical for driving down the costs of renewable energy technologies, accelerating progress toward the goal of net-zero emissions.

Moreover, international trade can help reduce emissions related to goods by allowing countries to specialize. Just as countries can reap economic gains by focusing on what they are relatively good at, the world can reap environmental gains if countries focus on what they are relatively green at. From the perspective of the planet, it makes sense to import energy-intensive products from places with abundant low-carbon energy or water-intensive products from places with abundant water. For example, a recent World Bank report noted that abundant wind and sun put Latin America and the Caribbean in a good position to produce green hydrogen.

But this sort of environmental comparative advantage works only when the right policy incentives are in place, so that the environmental costs of a given activity are taken into account—“internalized,” in the language of economists. Here, too, cooperation on trade has a critical role to play. As more governments take serious climate action, divergence in their policies could give rise to serious trade frictions and concerns about lost competitiveness. If these tensions go unchecked, countries could end up introducing trade restrictions and retaliating in kind to the restrictions of others. This would increase uncertainty for businesses, thus discouraging low-carbon investment. Higher trade barriers and lower investment would in turn combine to raise the cost of decarbonization—the exact opposite of what the world needs. Governments can avoid this scenario by reaching a shared understanding of how to assess and compare the equivalence of each other’s climate policies—whether taxes, regulations, or subsidies—with a view to helping preempt trade conflict associated with climate measures. The WTO is at work on potential approaches that could inform this kind of global carbon pricing framework, as are the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co­­operation and Development, and the World Bank.

Trade can help the world achieve environmental objectives in other ways, too. Many WTO members are looking at reforming and reducing the subsidies that governments give to fossil fuel producers and consumers, and some are considering lowering trade barriers to environmental goods and services such as technologies to manage air and water pollution. Parallel to these efforts, some members are taking bold steps to incentivize investment in green technology. Although the WTO rulebook supports efforts to decarbonize, it encourages members to do so in ways that do not discriminate against others or lead to subsidy races in which trading partners are harmed. There are ways to go green and to subsidize, including by supporting research and innovation, that do not undermine a level playing field.

CLOSING THE GAP

Trade has long been a powerful force for poverty reduction as well. It permits countries with small or poor home markets to take advantage of external demand to shift people and resources out of subsistence activities and into more productive work in manufacturing, services, and agriculture.

In the decades before the Covid-19 pandemic, trade played an instrumental role in lifting over one billion people out of extreme poverty. This was not just a story of China’s economic ascent. The share of the global population living on less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day declined from 36 percent in 1990 to around nine percent in 2018. Taking China out of the equation, that share over the same period still fell substantially—from 28 percent to 11 percent. The result of this boom was a dramatic rise in living standards almost everywhere. In the quarter century leading up to 2019, the gap between incomes in poor countries and those in rich economies began to narrow for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, 200 years earlier.

These trends have now been thrown into reverse. The World Bank has estimated that the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have pushed as many as 90 million more people into extreme poverty. Rich economies, which enjoyed early access to vaccines and the resources to rescue their economies through big fiscal stimulus packages, are once again leaving poor countries behind. Without global trade, it will be impossible to put development and poverty reduction back on track.

But the world needs a different, reimagined type of trade, because not all people and not all countries shared adequately in the progress of recent decades. Although the overall trends were impressive, the top-line numbers hid a darker story. Many poor countries—most notably in Africa—lagged behind their counterparts elsewhere, even during the pre-pandemic era of convergence. Many poor people and regions in rich countries also lagged behind, since the opportunities created by better access to international markets were not always, or not often, in the same regions or sectors hurt by attendant import competition.

The world needs a different, reimagined type of trade.

Even as economic inequality declined between countries and across the global population as a whole, inequality within many advanced economies increased. Trade was one of several factors at play, including technological changes that favored skilled workers and replaced many manufacturing jobs with machines. Tax, labor, and antitrust policy choices also shaped these changes, which is why inequality increased much more in some countries than in others. When the financial crisis and the painfully slow labor-market recovery that followed fed populist extremism, trade and immigrants became easy scapegoats. The political disruptions of recent years underscore the importance of cushioning the impacts of trade and technological changes on people’s lives and livelihoods. By introducing active labor-market and social policies, governments can ensure that the gains from trade and technology are broadly shared while their disruptive effects are softened.

There is surely scope to bring more people and places from the margins of global production and trade networks to the mainstream. This is already starting to happen. Multinational companies are diversifying their supplier bases in pursuit of cost savings and better risk management. Bangladesh, Cambodia, Morocco, and Vietnam are expanding their participation in regional and global value chains. From Barbados to Bali to Ohio, remote services work is creating opportunities and breathing new life into struggling communities.

Taking this reglobalization process further to encompass more places and draw in more small and women-owned businesses would yield considerable dividends. It would promote growth and reduce poverty in the parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have good macroeconomic and business environments but weak connections to the most dynamic sectors of the global economy. It would lead to greater socioeconomic inclusion for sections of society that typically register higher rates of poverty and underemployment. And it would increase the depth, security, and flexibility of supply chains.

A strong, open, multilateral trading system is necessary for this potential next wave of trade-driven growth. But reglobalization will look different from the export-led industrialization that transformed East Asia. With advances in automation making manufacturing a somewhat weaker engine for job creation than it used to be, services will have to play a major role alongside manufacturing and agricultural production and processing. Services are increasingly important drivers of growth and trade, expanding faster than trade in goods. This is especially true for services delivered digitally—everything from streaming games to consulting by videoconference. Cross-border trade in these services grew by an average of 8.1 percent between 2005 and 2022, compared with 5.6 percent for goods. In 2022, digitally delivered service exports reached $3.8 trillion in value, equivalent to 12 percent of all goods and services trade, up from eight percent a decade earlier.

To support this process of reglobalization, the international trade regime will need to adapt by setting forth clear rules on digital trade and promoting deeper cooperation on services trade. Gaps in existing trade rules—or the absence of shared global rules altogether—result in uncertainty and transaction costs that weigh heaviest on smaller businesses. Members of the WTO have been taking steps in the right direction. In 2021, a group of members accounting for over 90 percent of global trade in services struck an agreement on reducing regulatory barriers to services trade, and nearly 90 members, including China, the United States, and the European Union, are currently negotiating a basic set of global rules for digital trade. Regional initiatives to lower trade barriers and build connective infrastructure, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area, are also useful.

Finally, maintaining peace and security is particularly salient these days. The increasing weaponization of trade relations and policy has cast doubt on the long-standing proposition that trade brings peace. Countries are understandably worried about becoming dependent on potential adversaries for critical goods. But as has been made clear, limiting trade to a few partners comes with opportunity costs: higher prices, diminished export options, less productive resource allocation, and new kinds of supply vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, deep and diversified markets make it harder to weaponize international trade, by reducing countries’ dependence on any single source of supply. When the war in Ukraine cut off nearly all of Ethiopia’s wheat imports from that country, Ethiopia was able to fill the gap with imports from Argentina and the United States. Europe has made up for the loss of piped Russian gas with imports of liquefied natural gas from other sources. In a reglobalized world economy, a diffuse production base for all manner of goods would mean even fewer potential chokepoints. One prerequisite for reglobalization is a broadly open and predictable global economy, anchored in a strong, rules-based multilateral trading system.

A FORCE FOR PEACE

International trade is neither the silver bullet that can solve all security problems nor the Achilles’ heel of the current security architecture. To abandon the many benefits that come with international trade would be foolhardy. There are real problems with the current trading system, but the counterfactual scenario is almost certainly worse: it is difficult to believe that international security would be better served if leading powers had no economic stake in one another’s stability and prosperity and no shared institutions in which to engage. Trade between the United States and China benefits people and businesses in both countries enormously and binds the superpowers together, both bilaterally and in international forums, providing an incentive to cooperate where possible and avoid conflict.

Strategic competition is a reality of the modern world. But that world will become unlivable unless there is also strategic cooperation. The WTO’s ministerial meeting last summer offered hope that the two can go together. The agreements reached there had the support of all WTO members. They worked across geopolitical and policy fault lines, each perceiving a national interest in reinforcing the world trading system.

In the three-quarters of a century since the world first embraced multilateral cooperation on trade, the trading system has underpinned rising—if still uneven—global prosperity. It has achieved its original goal of helping governments keep markets open in turbulent times. In the face of mighty shocks, from the global financial crisis to the pandemic, the world did not repeat the 1930s spiral of protectionism and depression, instead allowing cross-border demand and supply to be an engine for recovery.

Today, the multilateral trading system is part of the solution to major global challenges, from climate change to conflict to pandemic preparedness. And a reformed WTO, fit for the twenty-first century, is needed now more than ever, with rules that underpin the stability, predictability, and openness of the global trading system. If the past 15 years have taught us anything, it is that unforeseen crises surely lie ahead and that without the stabilizing force of trade, the world will almost certainly be less able to weather them.

Foreign Affairs

I have always been in the number that believes strongly that Nigeria will reclaim its role as the giant of Africa. Year in, year out, I struggle to keep this hope alive regardless of the realities on ground. However, it became harder to profess faith in my motherland when February happened. We had trusted INEC for an efficient process in the presidential election but there seemed to be a commitment to dishonour Nigerians yet again.

With the chains of electoral malpractice witnessed and recorded across the country, it still baffles me that a ‘winner’ was declared at a time when citizens were not just asleep but a time when results were still being uploaded on the database. Isn’t it ironical that we are marking Democracy Day today? If there is anything I remember from my Social Studies class in secondary school, it would be the definition of democracy – the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Sadly, the state of the nation consistently debunks the notion that power belongs to the people.

It’s been 24 years since Nigeria ended its toxic relationship with the military regime in order to embrace democracy but it feels like that was more of a ceremony for the books and not a call to action. As we mark this day’s event, I am here to declare, “LET DEMOCRACY BREATHE; DON’T SUFFOCATE IT. WE HAVE THAT RESPONSIBILIITY.”

I am particularly excited that the presidential election results are being contested at the court of law. I do not appreciate how easily the narrative of coerced acceptance of the spectrum of electoral irregularities have continued to be pushed on citizens per election cycle. It is high time justice prevailed. The last presidential election was plagued with unfortunate circumstances. In some polling units, citizens were denied their rights to vote because of their ethnicity, while some other units had their share of violence. Despite the hitches, it was inspiring to see Nigerians resisting the urge of hopelessness until surviving votes were counted.

It Is important to reiterate that leading Nigeria is not a personal community development project. It is absolute service to those who have elected you to lead. Election is not selection, recommendation or appointment. Elections do not follow the structure of royalty; political positions are not hierarchical. The will of the people at the polling booths decides who leads. If this basic principle of democracy is compromised, then there is a problem.

The solution Is not to chant RENEWED HOPE. The way forward is to ensure the judiciary is fully independent and allowed to follow the due course of the law.

Nigeria deserves a government led by duly elected officials who can be held accountable. The structure of accountability takes into consideration the fallibility of humans hence, serving as a framework for acts of service as and when due. Those who are courageous to go to the court do not trust in the delusion that they would fix Nigeria in a minute. They are motivated by the belief that Nigeria is ours and not a parcel of inheritance. They understand that to clean up the mess that has gravely engrossed the system takes creativity, efficiency, proactiveness, transparency, firmness and discipline. Their goal is simple, to Make Nigeria Great Again. They are certain that the success of Nigeria is a collective commitment and it is greater than anyone’s personal ambition.

Without mincing words, I am forever a fan of a system that is designed to meet the needs of the people through empathy, realistic policies and no violence. I hope that by this time next year, we would look back and be grateful that democracy is not just breathing but flourishing.

I would rather wish you a happy holiday my fellow Nigerian. May justice be our reward.

The fear-mongering around Generative AI and ChatGPT taking jobs from hard-working, knowledge-economy humans has reached a fever pitch. 

Without naming names and linking links (I'd rather keep you here, more on that later), a simple web search returns hundreds of articles, listicles and correlation thought pieces, all written to harvest the click of the average bread-winner by instilling a panic image of the machines rising up and doing for free what you get paid for.

I've been working with Natural Language Generation (NLG) and the roots of Generative AI since 2010, which, on the technology timeline, is the Mesozoic Era.

And I've got some good news for you. And you might get an ironic chuckle when I tell you which jobs are immediately in danger of being erased.

How Technology Impacts the Bottom-Feeders

My journey into NLG began with a company called Automated Insights, which pioneered NLG tech to create narrative stories out of data in walled data gardens like sports, finance, marketing and so on. 

My job was to create the algorithms which analyzed the data and turned it into words. We sold to a private equity firm in 2015 and our tech, prehistoric as its origins may be, is still being utilized by Yahoo Fantasy Football, the Associated Press and dozens of other organizations. 

Anyway, as we made our meteoric rise from two engineers and a handful of young developers to a VC-backed, 75-person company, journalists took interest.

I did a lot of interviews with major media outlets and almost every single interview ended with the journalist turning off their recording device and asking, off the record:

"You're coming for my job, aren't you?"

My response was to get them back on the record and tell them firmly and flatly, no. Not you. While there were plenty of technological shifts plaguing journalism and media at the time, we weren't part of the problem. 

You know who we were coming for? Data scientists. And only the lazy ones at that.

In the mid-2010s, data science existed in two camps. In one camp were true data scientists who could take billions of rows of data and generate valuable, useful insights from it.

We could do that too and we realized we could automate a lot of it. Thus our name, Automated Insights.

The jobs that our NLG/Generative AI technology "took," were in the other data science camp. In the 2010s, with the influx of massive sets of data being released online, thanks to increases in processing power and innovations like Amazon's AWS infrastructure, there was too much data for data scientists to handle.

A new class of data scientists sprung up, basically anyone who knew SQL or Python and could game the system and generate $100,000-plus salaries for doing simple things that machines could automate. 

What I learned and what I've carried with me since those days is that technology has a way of calling out the bottom feeders in any industry and AI does it almost instantaneously. That's where the fear gets mongered.

However, ChatGPT is not coming for the bottom-feeding knowledge workers. Not yet. Because this slice of AI is niche and all Generative AI does is automate the creation of content.

So if your job is in the creator economy and if you're not very good at it, I've got some bad news for you. 

The World Doesn't Need More Content

It needs more targeted content. That's where Generative AI and ChatGPT hold the most promise. And they're coming for a camp within the creator economy.

The creator economy has two classes – not camps, I'll get to the camps later. 

In one class, you've got folks who are creating original content at the individual level (hello), in the form of words, music, film, art and even food and crafts. They're running businesses that are more creativity-based than product-based.

They target an audience as opposed to customers and they generate revenue from the attention of that audience.

This class is not in danger, yet. But they sense it. Generative AI is one of the concerns that brought about the entertainment industry's writer's strike.

In the other creator economy class, you've got people who discuss and critique content. They define and opine. It's a legit way to make a living and you probably have a favorite.

I'll point to Dan Olson and Lindsay Ellis, who do a great job of blending critique and knowledge, using creative elements to deliver their product to their audience and generate revenue. 

This is the class of the industry that's most in danger, but there are two camps within that class. 

The first camp is the legit creator, the Olsons and the Ellises. Then you've got the bottom-feeder camp, people who create low-quality and easily-replicable content, revolving around or even "stealing" copyrighted first-class original content, to game the creator-economy infrastructure and algorithms, flooding the market for a piece of that creator revenue. 

You folks are done.

Replace Entrepreneurs With Creators

Outside of my day job as head of product for a high-tech, high-growth startup, I create content that portends to make more and better entrepreneurs by writing pieces like this and more targeted Q&A content at Teaching Startup. 

So I know both the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the creator ecosystem intimately.

In the startup ecosystem, there have always been and always will be bottom-feeding "gamers" who sell a "business" based on manipulating some existing system that has a low barrier-to-entry to transact real cash money. 

A lot of creator-economy platforms are targets for these gamers. In my "word" world, it's Medium and Substack, but it's also Patreon, YouTube, podcasts, even Amazon with its affiliate links and Google with its pay-per-click ads.

These gamers plague Kickstarter and crowdfunding. They're rampant in sectors like crypto and NFTs, which is basically the unholy marriage of the creator economy and money.

Now, my point is, in the startup ecosystem, there are organizations and platforms that support and educate entrepreneurs (hello).

The organizations that promote that type of "gaming" business are, of course, not considered legitimate. However, the organizations that even tolerate that type of business are often held just as culpable and risk their reputations as legitimate entrepreneurship economy platforms. 

Replace "entrepreneurs" with "creators" and I do think, with the proliferation of a massive influx of automated, machine-generated, low-quality content, creator platforms like Medium and Substack are at a crossroads and will soon have a choice to make. 

Do they tolerate this low-quality content on a massive scale, and keep the attention-economy gravy train of algorithms and clicks and views going, or do they proactively challenge the low-quality content?

The latter will require an investment in both technology and the human element to raise the quality bar before low-quality content destroys their reputation as a legitimate platform.

And eventually, Generative AI tech will bring the same crossroads moment to digital art platforms, podcast platforms, video platforms and so on. 

Then it will hit the knowledge economy, at which point, knowledge workers can start worrying about their jobs. But going back to the 2010s, I already saw this happen.

Not just with lazy data scientists, but with almost every white-collar, butt-in-a-chair, pixel-pushing, spreadsheet-spelunking job that the influx of data wrought on the workforce. Those jobs are long gone or are only being used as stepping stones to turn "knowledge workers" into "knowledgeable workers."

Those are two distinct camps that are very easy to identify. You're probably in the latter and if you're not, well, you've likely still got five to ten years to get there before you become obsolete.

Inc

Markets are likely to respond positively to the weekend ouster of Nigeria’s central bank governor, which will allow the country’s new president to better pursue his promise of resetting monetary policy that’s been blamed for crippling Africa’s biggest economy.

Godwin Emefiele was suspended by President Bola Tinubu after financial markets closed on Friday, and detained by Nigeria’s state security service a day later for what were termed “investigative reasons.” Folashodun Shonubi, a deputy governor in charge of operations at the bank, will take over on acting capacity. 

Analysts said the outcome should be that Nigerian bonds strengthen and benchmark interest rates may rise as the nation’s assets look more attractive to investors. The scrapping of a multiple exchange rate regime will likely lead to the devaluation of the naira.

“The market will receive the removal of Godwin as a positive development, as his unorthodox policies had become an impediment for Nigeria,” Ronak Gadhia, director of Sub-Saharan banks research at EFG Hermes, said by email. “His removal should be viewed as positive and could lead to increased risk appetite for Nigerian bonds and equities.”

“A more normalized and conventional” policy “should result in higher interest rates in the short term as the CBN attempts to rein in on inflation,” Gadhia added.

Emefiele’s policies — including propping up the naira, restricting foreign exchange for dozens of imports, and focusing on development finance — had long been criticized by investors, economists and institutions like the World Bank. His central bank also lent the government 22.7 trillion naira ($49 billion), helping push the country’s public debt to a record 77 trillion naira.

Suspension and Detention

Emefiele was widely seen as acting in lockstep with the administration of Tinubu’s predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari. The previous government was perceived to be more statist and socialist in its approach, said Yemi Kale, chief economist for Nigeria at KPMG LLP and the nation’s former statistician general. “The markets will respond positively to an administration it believes to be more market oriented,” Kale said.  

Tinubu criticized the country’s central bank in his May 29 inaugural address, vowing to unify the multiple exchange rate regime in order to “direct funds away from arbitrage into meaningful investment in the plants, equipment and jobs that power the real economy.”

Under Emefiele, Nigeria’s central bank offered the US dollar through several windows at tightly controlled rates with little liquidity to businesses and individuals. This forced many to the black market where the dollar traded more freely but at about a 60% premium to the official rate. 

“The departure of Emefiele is likely to be viewed positively by markets as a signal of a new policy direction in Nigeria,” Ayo Salami, chief investment officer at Emerging Markets Investment Management Ltd in London, said via email. “To be credible, the implementation of policy changes would most likely need a new team.”

Naira Devaluation

The current naira exchange rate of 471.92 naira to the dollar, a record low, likely needs to be adjusted to about 700-750 naira, closer to the current black market rate, JP Morgan said in an investment note on May 31. “Our baseline expectation is that an adjustment to these levels is likely, barring significant upside to oil prices or production,” the bank said. 

The naira has closed lower for three consecutive days, its longest streak of losses since May 12. Analysts expect that the naira could trade anywhere between 650 to 750 naira to the dollar as Nigeria allows the currency to trade more freely. 

A naira at that level, combined with Tinubu’s decision to remove a costly gasoline subsidy, “means the government does not have [to] borrow as much, just to pay interest on debt,” Charlie Robertson, head of strategy at FIM Partners, said in a series of posts on Twitter. 

Bloomberg

Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), says he won’t relent in his fight to bring about the leadership that Nigerians deserve.

In a Democracy Day message, Obi said Nigerians should be inspired to correct the errors of the 2023 elections.

According to the LP candidate, Nigerians on June 12, 1993, stated their unreserved preference for true democracy and chose a transparent voting system despite being under military rule.

“Our votes reflected our true choice as a people. Our choice on that day defied divisions of ethnicity, religion, and region,” Obi said.

“It is these qualities that added up to make June 12 special in our search for true democracy.

“However, the current state of our politics tells a different story. Our democracy is deeply troubled while our nation’s destiny remains uncertain and precarious.

“We remain a nation in search of solutions to too many basic problems. One of these is the search for a credible electoral system that would command the trust, confidence, and belief of all Nigerians just like June 12 did.

“We should, therefore, use the commemoration of June 12 as an occasion to return to the true virtues of a truly democratic nation. We achieved that feat on June 12, 1993.”

He said Nigeria needs to have an electoral system that commands the trust of the people.

“This is in recognition of the tenets and core values of democracy, which rest on respect for the wishes of the people as expressed in their ballots,” Obi said.

“Above all, the government must respect and protect the institutions of the democratic state by respecting the social contract with the people by meeting their needs, obeying their wishes, and fulfilling the responsibilities of responsible governance as contained in the constitution.

“A cardinal responsibility of government in this regard is respect for the rule of law.”

He said Nigeria is in an era where the foundational pillars of democracy are undermined by “prevalent impunity and pervasive violence, and bloodletting”.

“The trust deficit between the leaders and Nigerians continues to expand. The deficits of trust and efficiency in our last elections demonstrate this malady quite boldly.”

Obi urged Nigerians not to lose faith in the inbuilt design of “our democratic system to self-correct”.

He expressed commitment and conviction that a new Nigeria is possible, noting that Nigerians’ aspiration for a nation of equity, justice, security, and peace is achievable.

“We are a nation blessed richly with human and natural resources,” he said.

“What we lack, are selfless leaders who are committed to the national interest, sustainable development, and innovative thinking that offers every Nigerian irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or social strata, the freedom of choice of abode, and protection of lives, property, and ordered liberties.

“These aspirations are real and achievable, and I hereby reiterate my promise to Nigerians that we will not relent in our fight to bring about leadership that will accord them the priority they deserve.”

The Cable

At least 50 farmers have been reportedly killed by bandits in various communities in Rafi Local Government Area of Niger State, while several others have fled their homes.

The attacks occured between Wednesday and Saturday.

In the latest attacks on about five villages which took place between 2pm on Friday and Saturday morning, an unspecified number of lives were lost and several others abducted including women and girls.

Our correspondent was told that while 13 people lost their lives in Kusherki community, 12 others were killed in Gidigori village and several others were yet to be accounted for.

Multiple Sources told reported that humanitarian crisis in the area had worsened since Wednesday as hundreds of Internally Displaced Persons including women and children from various villages trooped to Kagara, Headquarters of Rafi LGA, abandoning their villages for bandits whom they said now sleep in their homes.

One of the fleeing farmers, Abdullahi Usman, told our correspondent on the telephone that bandits numbering over 100, rode on about 50 motorcycles, took over many villages from around 2pm on Friday and operated unchallenged until Saturday morning.

“It’s true that bandits have resumed attacks with full force. We have not had it easy in the last two weeks but the situation had worsened since Wednesday.

“As I speak to you, bandits have taken over most parts of Rafi LGA. They had been in Kusherki Community since around 2pm on Friday; they spent the night in Garin-Zara Community and rustled hundreds of cattle, goats and rams and killed an unspecified number of people,” Usman said.

Another Resident, Mohammed Yakubu said on Sunday that “they (the bandits) first came to Kusherki Community on Wednesday during which they killed 13 people. They came back on Friday afternoon and operated in all the villages around the axis until Saturday morning. People have fled. Right now, we don’t even know where many of our people are because everybody ran into the bush.”

Also speaking, Abdulmalik Usman, another fleeing farmer said, “they raided several villages including Gidigori, Gando, Kusherki and many others. Our cattle, goats and rams have all been stolen. After they had raided our villages, they headed to Madaka, Hanna-Wanka, Kukoki through Tegina axis this morning (Saturday). The entire Rafi LGA is not safe now. More than 50 farmers were killed in Rafi LGA this week.”

Victims alleged that the soldiers camped in Kagara and Pandogari did not respond to attacks, saying that they were only patrolling Kagara town.

One of the IDPs, Sanusi Umar, appealed to the federal and state governments to take quick and decisive steps towards addressing the security challenges, saying that “we don’t know what President Tinubu is waiting for to take action against these people. These people have finished us already. We are hungry and helpless.”

He added, “The current security situation in Rafi LGA requires immediate and urgent counter insurgency action. The past few days have been very disturbing, rural communities are attacked and people are being kidnapped for ransom while some people are being killed. In Gidigori village alone, 12 persons were killed including the leader of vigilantes. Also, Garun Gabas, Pangu-Gari, Yakila and Kukoki villages have all been attacked between Wednesday and Saturday.”

Other Sources told our correspondent that bandits later split themselves into two groups, with one group operating in Sakaba community, less than 4km from Kagara, the headquarters of Rafi local Government Area, while the second group reportedly moved to Tungan-Makeri community, 15km from Kagara town where dozens of cattle were reportedly rustled and two people kidnapped.

The Senator Representing Niger East Senatorial District in the National Assembly, Mohammed Sani Musa on Friday lamented that the bandits had resumed attacks on Rafi, Paikoro, Munya and Shiroro local governments that formed part of his constituency.

He said the criminals were out to test the power and capacity of the new administrations at both federal and state levels.

He, however, said he believed Tinubu and Governor Mohammed Umar Bago led governments would deal with the situation.

When contacted, Niger State Police Command’s Public Relations Officer, Wasiu Abiodun, said security operatives had been deployed to the area to arrest the situation.

“We have reviewed tactical deployments in the area, and more deployments of PMF (Police Mobile Force) men have been made, in collaboration with the military to cover Yakila, Tegina, Kagara, Pandogari, Kusherki and its environs to forestall reoccurrence.

“Joint tactical teams are working assiduously to ensure that victims abducted are rescued unhurt,” Abiodun said.

Daily Trust

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ukraine says it retakes village in 'first results' of counterattack

Ukraine said on Sunday its troops had made territorial advances on three villages in its southeast, the first liberated settlements it has reported since launching a counter-offensive this past week.

Kyiv's forces posted unverified videos showing soldiers hoisting the Ukrainian flag at a bombed-out building in the village of Blahodatne in Donetsk region and posing with their unit's flag in the adjacent village of Neskuchne.

"We're seeing the first results of the counter-offensive actions, localized results," Valeryi Shershen, spokesperson for Ukraine's "Tavria" military sector, said on television.

Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar later said Ukrainian forces had "deoccupied" Makarivka, the next village to the south, and advanced between 300 and 1,500 metres in two directions on the southern front.

"No positions were lost on the directions where our forces are on the defensive," Maliar added on Telegram.

Reuters was unable to verify battlefield reports.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that a Ukrainian military push was underway, but that it had failed to breach Russian defensive lines and taken heavy casualties.

Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, praised his troops in his nightly video address, but made no reference to the specific areas where the fighting was reported.

"Of course, I am thankful to our soldiers for this day," Zelenskiy said, referring only to the two main sectors of the fighting in the east and the south.

"Each one of our combat brigades, each of our units."

Zelenskiy on Saturday had given his strongest signal yet that Kyiv has launched its long-awaited counterattack to seize back land in the east and south, confirming that "counteroffensive and defensive operations" were taking place.

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Kyiv officials have imposed a strict period of operational silence and urged Ukrainians not to disclose any information that could compromise the operation.

'KICKING THE ENEMY OUT'

With so little information out of Kyiv and scant independent reporting from the front lines, it has been almost impossible to assess the battlefield situation.

The video from Blahodatne showed Ukrainian troops inside a heavily damaged building as artillery rumbled in the distance.

"We're kicking the enemy out from our native lands. It's the warmest feeling there is. Ukraine is going to win, Ukraine above everything," an unidentified soldier said in the video on Facebook.

Russia said at least twice this week that it had repelled attacks close by the nearby settlement of Velyka Novosilka.

The Ukrainian advances follow the breach last week of the Kakhovka dam further west in Kherson region that unleashed floods and prompted rescues of residents from submerged areas.

Ukraine and Russia blame each other for the breach.

The Ukrainian-appointed governor of Kherson region on Sunday said Russian forces had shelled three boats evacuating mainly elderly evacuees to safety, killing three and injuring 10.

Shershen later told a radio interviewer that Russian forces had blown up a smaller hydroelectric dam near the scene of the latest combats in an attempt to disrupt the Ukrainian advance.

"This led to the flooding of both banks of the Mokri Yaly River," he told Ukrainian NV Radio. "This, however, does not affect our counter-offensive actions."

The occupied southeast is seen as a likely priority for Kyiv's forces that may aim to sever Russia's land bridge to the annexed peninsula of Crimea and split Russian forces in half.

Makarikva is around 90 km (55.92 miles) northwest of the city of Mariupol, which lies on the Sea of Azov on the southern rim of the land bridge. Russia captured the major city last year after besieging and bombarding it for several weeks.

Russia has built vast fortifications across occupied territory to prepare for a Ukrainian counterattack using thousands of troops trained and equipped by the West.

Maliar also said Ukrainian forces were continuing assault operations in the east near the devastated city of Bakhmut and had advanced 250 metres near the adjacent Berkhivka Reservoir.

Russia said it captured the city of Bakhmut last month after the bloodiest battle of Russia's February 2022 invasion, but Kyiv has said it has been regaining ground on the city's flanks.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said separately that a motorised infantry brigade had advanced on the front line around the eastern city Avdiivka in recent days and captured a Russian position, but it provided no further details.

** UN nuclear watchdog concerned over water levels at Ukraine plant

The U.N. atomic watchdog said on Sunday that it needs wider access around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant to check "a significant discrepancy" in water level data at the breached Kakhovka dam used for cooling the plant's reactors.

International Atomic Energy Agency head Rafael Grossi, who is to visit the plant this week, said that measurements the agency received from the inlet of the plant showed that the dam's water levels were stable for about a day over the weekend.

"However, the height is reportedly continuing to fall elsewhere in the huge reservoir, causing a possible difference of about two metres," Grossi said in a statement.

"The height of the water level is a key parameter for the continued operability of the water pumps."

The destruction of the Kakhovka hydropower dam in southern Ukraine last week has flooded towns downstream and forced thousands of people from their homes.

Both the Kakhovka hydropower dam and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant have been occupied by Russia since the early days of its invasion in February 2022.

The water from the reservoir is used to cool the facility's six reactors and spent fuel storage, the IAEA said.

"It is possible that this discrepancy in the measured levels is caused by an isolated body of water separated from the larger body of the reservoir," Gross said in the statement. "But we will only be able to know when we gain access to the thermal power plant."

Grossi said the thermal power plant "plays a key role for the safety and security of the nuclear power plant a few kilometres away," hence the need for access and independent assessment.

The agency has said earlier that the Zaporizhzhia plant can fall back on other water sources when the reservoir's water is no longer available, including a large cooling pond above the reservoir with several months' worth of water.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

Four more Ukrainian Leopard 2 tanks destroyed – Moscow

The Russian military has destroyed nine Ukrainian tanks, including four German-made Leopard 2s, as it successfully repelled attempts to advance by Kiev's forces, the Ministry of Defense has claimed.

Over the past 24 hours, Ukraine has “continued fruitless attempts to carry out offensive operations” in Russia’s Zaporozhye Region, in the south of Donetsk People’s Republic and near the city of Artyomovsk, also known as Bakhmut, ministry spokesman Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov said during a briefing on Saturday.

In Zaporozhye Region, Russian ground troops, artillery and aviation repelled two attacks by large Ukrainian units boosted by tanks in the area of Yablonevo and Novopokrovka villages, he said.

Two of Kiev’s armored convoys were struck near the settlements of Novodanilovka and Malaya Tokmachka, the spokesman also reported. There were also three smaller Ukrainian attacks in the region, which were also unsuccessful, he added.

Besides the nine tanks, Kiev forces are also down eleven armored personnel carriers, which include five US-supplied Bradley fighting vehicles, 14 armored cars and a French-made Caesar self-propelled howitzer, Konashenkov pointed out.

The Ukrainian military’s losses in terms of manpower during the fresh fighting in Zaporozhye Region has reached up to 300 troops, according to the ministry spokesman.

Five attacks were repelled near the city of Artymovsk, which the Russian forces captured from Ukraine in May after months of heavy fighting, he told the briefing. Kiev’s losses in this area over the past 24 hours, he pointed out, included up to 230 personnel, five armored cars and two Soviet-made D-30 howitzers.

According to Konashenkov, around 60 of Kiev’s soldiers were neutralized in the area of Krasny Liman, a Ukrainian-held town in the Donetsk Peoples Republic. An APC and several howitzers, including a Polish-made Krab self-propelled gun were also destroyed, he said.

** Kiev fails in attempt to attack Russian naval ship protecting Black Sea gas pipelines

The Kiev regime made an unsuccessful attempt with surface drones to attack the Black Sea Fleet’s ship Priazovye on a mission to protect the Turkish Stream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in the southeastern portion of the Black Sea, Russia’s Defense Ministry reported on Sunday.

"Today, at about 1:30 p.m. Moscow time, Ukrainian armed formations made an unsuccessful attempt with six fast-speed unmanned sea boats to attack the Black Sea Fleet’s ship Priazovye accomplishing the objective of monitoring the situation and providing security along the routes of the Turkish Stream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in the southeastern portion of the Black Sea. In repulsing the attack, all the boats were destroyed from the Russian naval ship’s standard weapons 300 km southeast of Sevastopol," the ministry said in a statement.

The Black Sea Fleet’s ship Priazovye continues accomplishing assigned missions after Ukraine’s attempted attack, with no casualties reported among the Russian personnel, the ministry said.

"There are no casualties. The ship has not sustained any damage. The Black Sea Fleet’s ship Priazovye continues accomplishing assigned missions," the ministry said in a statement.

A US RQ-4B Global Hawk strategic remotely-piloted surveillance aircraft conducted reconnaissance in the airspace over the central part of the Black sea during Ukraine’s attempted attack, as in other previous cases, the ministry said.

Previously, the Kiev regime carried out an attack with three surface drones on May 24 targeting the Black Sea Fleet’s ship Ivan Khurs that was providing security for the Turkish Stream and Blue Stream gas pipelines in Turkey’s exclusive economic zone. All of the Ukrainian surface drones were destroyed by the Russian naval ship’s standard weapons. The personnel of the Russian surveillance ship who repulsed the attack by Ukrainian surface drones in the waters of the Bosporus Strait were recommended for combat state awards.

** West has zero chances to bring Russia to its knees, says top senator

The months that have passed since the start of the special military operation in Ukraine have shown that the West has zero chances to crush Russia and bring it to its knees, Chairwoman of the Federation Council (the upper house of Russia’s parliament) Valentina Matviyenko said on Sunday.

"If we speak about our actions inside the country, the main conclusion is perfectly clear: Russia must be strong. Moreover, it must be strong in all respects, technologically, economically, socially and morally and, what is especially important today, militarily and in the security sphere," the top senator said on her blog on the eve of Russia Day celebrated on June 12.

"Today, 15 months after the start of the special military operation, it is perfectly clear that there are zero chances to crush our country and bring it to its knees. Russia’s victory in the conflict around Ukraine is inevitable," Matviyenko stressed.

The Russian authorities have managed within the shortest time possible to adapt the state, society and the economy to new realities, she pointed out.

"They have managed to do this without deteriorating the quality of people’s life, without any flip-flopping in the public and political sphere, without even the slightest restrictions of citizens’ rights and freedoms. Without abrupt changes in economic management, although there were plenty of calls for that," the top senator said.

"Of course, we are fully aware that we will have to face new serious challenges and we need to address them fully prepared, which will, undoubtedly, require a new quality of interaction between the authorities and society. We will ensure this because over the thirty years of Russia’s newest history we have put a reliable and strong foundation under our state and public system," Matviyenko stressed.

Reuters/RT/Tass

Race is on to protect Sudan’s pyramids and tombs as war rages

Sudan’s cultural heritage stretches back thousands of years. The North African nation boasts ancient Nubian temples, more pyramids than Egypt and is credited with being the birthplace of modern pottery and metalwork techniques. Now, Sudanese archaeologists, curators, academics and volunteers are braving fierce fighting to protect it.

Hundreds of people have been killed and thousands more injured since April 15,when the leadership of the Sudanese army and a paramilitary group with origins in the Darfur region failed to reach an agreement on how to merge their forces under a power-sharing deal that was supposed to lead to democratic elections. As the conflict has spread, fighters have looted and set fire to museums and invaluable university archives.

Under the oversight of Heritage for Peace, an organization dedicated to preserving cultural heritage during wartime, dozens of volunteers and professionals have been preparing museum evacuation plans and documenting damage to precious sites across Sudan. Despite challenges arranging safety measures and cash payments, the group has managed to station guards near archaeological areas and museums outside the capital city of Khartoum. 

“We are trying to find a way to report regularly and support work on the ground,” said Tomomi Fuahiya, an assistant professor at the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archeology at the University of Warsaw. With Ismail Hamid Elnour, a member of the Sudan Heritage Protection Initiative at the University of Birmingham, Fuahiya is assisting Heritage for Peace, which previously worked to save artifacts from the Islamic State in Syria. 

As fighting continues, the group is particularly concerned about the safety of the Egyptian temple of Buhen in the very north of the country, as well as the tomb of Muhammad Ahmad, commonly known as the Mahdi, who fought British colonial rule in the second half of the 19th century and went on to establish an Islamic state within Sudan.

Pressure to intervene on behalf of the country’s cultural heritage has mounted since a video emerged showing fighters from the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary entering the bioarchaeology lab of Khartoum’s National Museum and opening containers storing ancient human remains.

Satellite imagery obtained by the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab, made up of a coalition of experts from several US universities, also revealed that buildings belonging to the National Museum have been damaged by fire.

In Omdurman, the country’s most populous city, Elnour said that archives containing thousands of documents were looted and destroyed in a fire at Omdurman Ahlia University, which houses the Muhammad Omar Bashir Centre for Sudanese Studies and has long been celebrated as a hub of independent intellectual activity. The old Omdurman Market, known for its garments and handcrafts, has also been destroyed.

The fighting has forced millions of people to flee their homes and sparked a food crisis in parts of the country. Sudan’s army has asked the UN to remove its top diplomat in the region, Volker Perthes, who is currently abroad and has no immediate plans to return due to the risk involved.

While volunteers have struggled to enter most of the Sudanese capital’s 13 museums since the conflict erupted, Elnour said, “the archaeological sites and museums outside Khartoum are still protected by local archaeologists, guards, and local communities.”

In a stroke of good fortune, the main National Museum building was under renovation when the war began, so most items had been packed away and placed in storage, Fuahiya said. Of particular concern are a collection of 3,000-year-old Nubian monuments and temples now in the garden of the museum. An international effort to assemble and preserve these structures in the 1960s led to the creation of the modern UNESCO World Heritage system. 

Archaeological sites and pyramids at Meroe, the ancient walled city northeast of Khartoum where the conflict began, are also still intact. The status of the Sheikan Museum in El-Obeid and the Darfur Museum in Nyala, however, is unknown. Both museums are located near the sites of some of the most intense fighting.

US and Saudi-mediated talks between the Sudanese Army and the RSF broke down in Jeddah just over a week ago, and the two sides have not yet re-convened. Heritage for Peace, which provided mediators with recommendations during the talks, has appealed to both parties to protect Sudan’s heritage, prevent illicit exports of cultural property and to stop illegal digging at archaeological sites.

When reached for comment, an RSF spokesperson said their forces were “well aware of the significance” of the country’s artifacts and the importance of safeguarding them.

Addressing the incident at the National Museum, the spokesperson said video was filmed by a member of the RSF who believed he was doing the right thing by documenting the boxes to provide proof that everything was intact. 

“We have spoken with the individual concerned and strict instructions have been issued to all RSF personnel on site to ensure that their duties are fulfilled in a responsible manner,” the representative said.

A spokesperson for the army did not reply to questions.

Fighting this week centered around the Yarmouk Military Complex in Southern Khartoum, which contains a huge stockpile of weapons, videos posted by RSF fighters on social media and internal UN documents seen by Bloomberg show. Airstrikes also continued around Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri — areas home to many temples and monuments, and the cradle of the Kerma civilization, which flourished around 2500 BC.

“Sudan is a very rich country not just for its heritage with ancient Egypt, but also for Christianity in Africa. It’s the heart of Africa,” said Sada Mire, a Swedish-Somali archaeologist currently teaching at University College London. “I can’t overestimate how important Sudan and the Kerma civilization are to understanding the whole of Africa and civilizations as we know them.”

She pointed to Kerma pottery as proof of how culturally sophisticated Sudanese civilization was millennia ago. “You would think it’s modern art. If you put it in a museum or a gallery, nobody would believe it was 5,000 years old,” she said.

“It’s really a whole living culture that has thousands of years of continuity. This is what is under threat and it’s so sad to see.”

Bloomberg

Across the west, popular misery and ‘elite overproduction’ are fuelling crisis, argues data-driven historian Peter Turchin. So what can we do to turn things around?

In February 2010, Peter Turchin, a relatively obscure researcher at the University of Connecticut, wrote a letter to the distinguished journal Nature. He was responding to their “2020 visions” issue – an upbeat dawn-of-the-decade exercise that collected predictions of progress from across science and politics. Turchin assumed the role of Cassandra. “The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe,” he wrote, “which could undermine the sort of scientific progress you describe.” He pointed to waves of disruption that tend to recur every 50 years. “All these cycles look set to peak in the years around 2020.” There was still time to change course, though: with measures to improve wellbeing and reduce economic inequality, “records show that societies can avert disaster”.

Normally scientists enjoy being proved right, but for Turchin, the way the following decade panned out must have seemed a bit too on-the-nose. The response to the financial crisis wasn’t a New Deal-style rescue package as he’d recommended, but austerity and a widening of the gap between rich and poor. Frustration at the established order threw up Brexit in Britain and Trump in the US. Right on cue, 2020 delivered a pandemic, economic chaos and a president who refused to concede defeat at the polls. The following January saw the storming of the Capitol, and images of insurrection that seemed like a throwback to an earlier revolutionary era.

Now Turchin is having another go at explaining those cycles of disruption and what it might take to emerge unscathed (though he tells me that, unlike in 2010, it’s past time to avoid the consequences entirely: “We are in crisis – but it’s not too late to take a less bloody exit.”) His book’s title, End Times, doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, but it does provide a clear theory about how we got into this mess, and how to get out of it. There are some familiar concepts here – falling living standards leading to mass discontent – but others, “elite overproduction” in particular, are much less widely recognised, and genuinely eye-opening.

For a global prophet of doom, Turchin cuts a surprisingly ordinary figure. He speaks to me over Zoom from the sofa in his modest living room in Storrs, Connecticut, essentially a village with a huge university campus attached. “We have a house in the woods,” he tells me, and praises the area’s “low population density” in a way that makes me wonder if he’s prepping for the apocalypse. The reality is less alarming. “You know, my wife has a garden, it’s very comfortable.” A bit like a dacha, he observes – a reminder, alongside his strong accent, that he was born in the USSR – “a country that doesn’t exist any more”. He emigrated with his dissident parents in 1977, when he was 20.

That background makes him less sanguine than others might be about the prospect of societal upheaval – even state collapse. “I went back for the first time since leaving in 1992, and I experienced a failed state. Now, when I’d moved to the United States in 1977, the [country] was really at the brink of several trends beginning to point downwards,” he says, tracing the path of a rollercoaster with his right hand. “I saw the end of the Golden Age – from the common people’s point of view – and it has been downhill since then. So I’m really worried about ending up in another failed state.”

I point out that this will seem like hyperbole to lots of people. “I don’t say that it’s 100% certain,” he counters – and notably refuses to be drawn on whether Trump will be re-elected in 2024. “The road out of crisis opens up a whole set of possibilities, from pretty mild instability all the way to collapse. At this point, pretty much anything is possible.”

What were those downward-pointing trends in the 1970s, then? That decade, Turchin argues, was when the social contract established in the 1930s – Roosevelt’s New Deal – began to disintegrate. For 40 years, America had effectively replicated the Nordic model under which the interests of workers, owners and the state were kept in balance (he’s careful to point out that a significant portion of the population – mostly Black Americans – were always shut out of this cosy arrangement). After that, things began to shift in favour of owners. The power of unions was eroded, as were labour rights. Typical wages started to lag behind economic growth, or even decrease. Quality of life suffered, and with it life expectancy. “Diseases of despair” such as opioid or alcohol abuse grew. Turchin even links the rise of mass shootings to a generalised hopelessness he refers to as “popular immiseration”.

At the same time, the rich got richer – far richer. A system of taxation that weighed most heavily on the highest earners, including a top rate of 90%, was dismantled. The number of decamillionaires, or households worth over $10m, increased from 66,000 in 1983 to 693,000 in 2019, accounting for inflation. The economy chugged along nicely, but the share of it controlled by the wealthiest got larger at the expense of the average earner. Turchin calls this the “wealth pump”. Things are now set up, he argues, so that money gushes away from workers and towards the elite, like a blowout from an oil well.

This has an interesting effect: so-called “elite overproduction”, a phrase coined by Turchin’s colleague, the sociologist Jack Goldstone. “The social pyramid has grown top heavy,” he explains, with rich families and top universities churning out more wealthy graduates than the system can accommodate. To illustrate this, Turchin describes a game of musical chairs with a twist. There’s always been a limited number of powerful positions, be they senator, governor, supreme court justice or media mogul. In an era of elite overproduction, rather than chairs being taken away whenever the music stops, the number of competitors increases instead. Before you know it, there are far more people than can realistically attain high office. Fights break out. Norms (and chairs) are overturned as “elite aspirants” – those who have been brought up in the expectation of a say in how things are run – turn into counter-elites, prepared to smash the system to get their way. This isn’t just a US problem, by the way; Turchin says that Britain is on a similar trajectory. In fact, among OECD countries, it’s next in line. Germany is further behind, but also on the same “slippery slope”.

Turchin, who was a mathematical ecologist before turning to history in the mid-2000s, brings a numbers approach to his adopted subject. He was able to predict the turbulent 2020s by looking at economic and social indicators from 100 historical crises, gathered together in a database called CrisisDB. They range from medieval France to 19th-century Britain, and show that periods of instability are pretty consistently preceded by a decline in wages, the emergence of a wealth pump, and most combustibly, elite overproduction.

Why is the latter so important? Well, the masses may be miserable, but without someone who has the status and resources to organise them, they’ll simply languish. Their revolutionary potential is only realised once a “political entrepreneur” – usually a frustrated elite aspirant – gets involved. Robespierre, Lenin and Castro are all examples of highly privileged individuals who felt excluded from existing power structures and led popular movements to overthrow them. In 19th-century China, a young man from a well-to-do family failed the exams that would have enabled him to become a top flight imperial administrator four times. Hong Xiuquan went on to lead a rebellion in which at least 20 million died.

Things may not be quite as bad as that yet, but it’s not hard to identify modern-day figures who fit the elite aspirant mould. Donald Trump is the most obvious, a beneficiary of the wealth pump whose only route to power was as a political entrepreneur stoking grievance. Nigel Farage? “He’s a good example. He’s personally wealthy, a member of the economic elite. And he has been channelling discontent.” Sometimes counter-elites mount their takeover from the inside. With Brexit, “there was a traditional segment of the Conservative party, but then there was an insurgent part. And they were [also] using this discontent. What we see in history is that one segment of the elite channels popular discontent to advance their political careers. This happened in Republican Rome 2,000 years ago, and it happens now.”

Another distinctive feature of elite overproduction is the fierce ideological competition it generates. Turchin believes we’ve transitioned from the pre-crisis period, where political entrepreneurs largely attacked the established order, to a phase in which newly powerful factions are fighting among themselves. This, he argues, is one of the mechanisms behind “cancel culture”. “Such vicious ideological struggles are a common phase in any revolution,” he writes. There is a race to the extremes, with denunciations becoming more and more intense. “In the struggle between rival factions, the ones willing to escalate accusations win over the moderate ones.”

So how do we fix things? It strikes me that there are some pretty obvious political conclusions to be drawn from Turchin’s research, but he’s reluctant to be led too far down the road of punditry. “I don’t want to enter into the political infighting,” he says. “One thing that we know about historical exits from crisis is that at some point the elites and population have to pull together … the different factions have to be reconciled. That’s why I try to stay away from taking sides.”

He will, however, admit to “several recommendations”, saying that “some of them will please liberals, others will please conservatives”. Liberals, presumably, will be heartened by the idea that “we need to give workers more power”. In order to turn off the wealth pump you have to increase labour’s share of the pie at the expense of business. Partly by redistribution, but partly by beefing up workers’ ability to demand higher pay.

What kind of thing would please conservatives? Here he seems to hesitate slightly. “Let’s say … massive immigration does depress the wages of common workers. Actually, this is a paleo-left position. It’s just now the new left is focusing more on cultural issues, and they are all for immigration, but conservatives are now against immigration.” He elaborates, saying it’s an “iron law” of economics that if you increase the supply of something – in this case, labour – then its price will decline. “But,” he points out, “it won’t happen if workers have enough social power, if there are good labour organisations and, also, if the elites internalise the need for dividing fairly the fruits of economic growth. So if you have those institutions, then immigration is not a problem.”

And what about those surplus elites? Well, if you happen to be one, look away now. Halfway through End Times Turchin remarks, somewhat blithely: “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.” In fact, CrisisDB allows us to be even more precise: in 40% of crises, rulers were assassinated; 75% ended in revolutions or civil wars (or both), and in 20%, those civil wars dragged on for a century or longer. Sixty percent of the time the state in question disappeared, either through conquest or disintegration.

It would be nice to avoid a century-long civil war. Perhaps instead we can select “voluntary downward social mobility” from Turchin’s grisly menu. This would require elites to be persuaded to give up some of their wealth, or to decide to do so off their own backs. Patriotic Millionaires, a pressure group made up of rich people, including members of the Disney family, who “share a profound concern about the destabilising level of economic and political inequality in America” is probably unrepresentative of the class as a whole. More likely, things will have to get so bad that a new social contract becomes the only alternative to levels of discontent that would threaten private fortunes in any case. That’s what happened in the 1930s. It also happened in Britain in the 1830s, when the prospect of a revolution like the ones sweeping Europe was kept at bay by the Great Reform Act and the repeal of the corn laws (it also helped that frustrated elite aspirants could try their hand at running distant parts of the empire).

In any case, it seems we’ll know what the denouement is before too long. “The nice thing about CrisisDB is that we now have statistics on how long these periods last,” Turchin tells me. “Roughly speaking, it’s 10 to 20 years. Very few shorter, some much longer. But for those who think that we’re [already] out of it in the United States? That’s not very likely.” I nod, and make a mental note to speak to him again in 2033.

• End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin will be published by Allen Lane on 13 June.

The Guardian, USA