Mali’s government counts 1,107 tankers into Bamako, and no one publishes a comparable count of the losses

A convoy of 1,107 fuel tankers reached Bamako under military escort on the morning of Monday 26 October, the largest single arrival the capital had received since the start of the month. The figure is attributed to Mali’s Direction générale du Commerce, de la consommation et de la concurrence and was relayed by Seneweb on 27 October and by APA News the same day. It extends a series published by the DGCC and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce since the JNIM blockade tightened: five convoys totalling 3,796 tankers in September, 643 on 3 October, 957 on 10 October, and a cumulative 5,396 from September to 10 October. One ministry figure allows conversion into volume — 1,273 tankers delivered 57.99 million litres of diesel and gasoline between 14 and 20 September, roughly 45,600 litres each. Depot stocks at OMAP, Sanké and Star Oil stood above 20 million litres on 20 September.

The destruction side of the ledger has no equivalent. Bellingcat’s investigation, dated around December 2025, documented more than 130 tankers destroyed since September; Rio Times in June 2026 put the figure above 300 since September 2025; the tracker theopscon reported more than 300 in July 2026, with 40 or more lost in a single attack near Sikasso and at least 15 people killed in an attack near the Senegalese border. These are three snapshots with three baselines and only one documented methodology, and they cannot be read as a trend. The blockade dates to 3 September 2025, when JNIM struck a convoy of 80 tankers travelling with Malian and Russian escort between Kaniara and Lakamane in Kayes. Mali imposed nationwide fuel rationing on 22 January 2026. Roughly 95 percent of the country’s fuel arrives by road, mainly from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.

A possible long-run answer surfaced on the margins of the Moscow summit week. Togo First reports that a liquefied natural gas corridor linking Lomé to the Sahel was discussed at the first Togo–Russia Joint Intergovernmental Commission, held in Lomé from 29 September to 1 October, where two memorandums of understanding were signed with further agreements still under negotiation. The report is single-sourced and the documents are MoUs, not contracts. The third Russia–Africa Summit itself convened in Moscow on 28 and 29 October, relocated from Libya, with an action plan for 2027–2029 announced in advance by Russian diplomats; this desk has not seen the outcome document and cannot confirm it was adopted.

Assessment: The asymmetry is the story. Arrivals are counted by a state directorate with an interest in large numbers and published within hours; losses are counted by foreign researchers, intermittently, with incompatible baselines. A reader can therefore track Bamako’s escort capacity in near real time and its actual supply adequacy not at all, because no one publishes consumption. Treat convoy totals as a measure of how many trucks the army can shepherd, not of how much fuel the city has. JNIM does not need to stop the convoys; making them episodic, escorted and expensive achieves the same economic effect. One caution: a widely circulating 1,200-tanker figure for late October belongs to 2025, not this week.