A year into JNIM’s fuel siege, Bamako’s supply is still counted in convoys
The blockade of Mali’s capital has run in cycles since September 2025 — squeeze, escorted convoy, partial relief, squeeze again. The most recent hard figure available is a government claim four and a half months old.
JNIM began interdicting tanker convoys on the Dakar, Abidjan and Conakry import corridors in early September 2025. By 7 October, Africanews reported the shortage had reached Bamako, with stations shut and queues running into the night, pump prices capped at 775 CFA francs a litre for petrol and 725 for diesel, a tanker burned near Sikasso the previous day and attacks on tankers close to daily. Washington urged its nationals to leave Mali on 28 October, Italy and Germany on 29 October, per RFI. On 3 November, inaugurating a lithium mine at Bougouni — his first trip outside the capital since the roads tightened — transition president General Assimi Goïta told Malians: “Nous devons rester unis et éviter la panique.” He also asked them to moderate consumption. RFI put Bamako’s requirement, conditionally and on a single source, at 250 tanker trucks a day.
Relief has always arrived the same way. Jeune Afrique reported on 28 November 2025 that convoys were reaching Bamako escorted by the Malian army and Russian Africa Corps paramilitaries under air surveillance, with the authorities publicising 82 tankers escorted by the Nigerien army. By 9 March 2026 diesel was short again: Studio Tamani counted more than 100 Bamako minibuses off the road, with what diesel arrived diverted to thermal power plants and electricity degrading through Ramadan. On 28 April 2026, three days after JNIM and the Azawad Liberation Front claimed joint attacks on Modibo Keïta International Airport and other sites, JNIM announced a full blockade of the capital. On 1 May the Direction générale du commerce said it had received more than 830 tanker trucks — a government figure, announced rather than verified, and the last hard number the desk has.
Assessment: Treat the tanker counts on both sides as instruments, not measurements. Bamako publicises convoy arrivals precisely when the pumps are empty; JNIM announces blockades to convert road interdiction into a claim on the capital. Neither is an audit. The observable proxies are pump prices, Énergie du Mali load-shedding hours and school closures, and nothing in today’s traffic establishes where September 2026 sits in the cycle. The strategic point survives the data gap: an insurgency that can make fuel arrive only under Russian and Nigerien escort has already priced the state’s sovereignty, whatever the litre costs that week. The reported $50–70m Emirati-hostage ransom is a single-sourced range; do not bank it.