Bamako’s fuel now arrives in guarded blocks, and the blocks are getting smaller

Mali’s Directorate General of Trade, Consumption and Competition said 643 tankers reached Bamako at around 07:00 on Saturday 3 October after an overnight military escort, with customs, trade authorities and police distributing them to depots and service stations across the capital. No volume and no diesel-to-gasoline split was disclosed. The same reporting records 980 tankers arriving under escort on 6 September and more than 900 on 14 September. The one figure published with volumes attached comes from the Ministry of Industry and Commerce: 57.99 million litres carried by 1,273 tankers between 14 and 20 September, with combined stocks at the OMAP, Sanké and Star Oil depots above 20 million litres on 20 September and a further 1,278 tankers said to be en route. Mali imports roughly 95 percent of its fuel by road, mainly from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire along National Road 1 through Kayes.

JNIM declared the blockade on 3 September 2025 and, per chronologies this desk could not cross-check, reimposed it on 28 April this year; a convoy attack near the Senegalese border in early February killed at least 15. Writing in African Arguments on 8 October, under the headline “900 Tankers Under Escort — What Africa Corps Actually Does in Mali”, the author argues the Russian deployment “did not break the blockade or reopen the roads: it merely learned to escort trucks through it, at a price ultimately paid by every resident of Bamako at the pump.” The piece quotes a formulation it endorses: “JNIM stays too weak to fully cut Bamako off; Africa Corps and Turkish drones stay too thin to reopen free transit.” Convoys are described as escorted by Africa Corps alongside Turkish-supplied Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci drones.

Assessment: Read the convoy series with care. The 980–900–643 sequence was assembled here from three separate reports; no publisher issued it as a series, and a 34 percent fall over four weeks could be routine variation in convoy assembly rather than falling throughput. One more figure from the Directorate General settles it. The deeper problem is that every number in this file originates with the government whose competence it measures, and reaches English-language readers through aggregators with no evident Bamako presence. That chain also launders errors: the claim circulating in English analysis that a litre of fuel rose from $25 to $130 is not plausible against pre-blockade pump prices of 700–800 CFA, and has now travelled through at least two outlets unchallenged.