Fuel reaches Bamako under armed escort, and nobody has published what the escort costs

JNIM’s spokesman announced the fuel blockade on 3 September 2025; a full blockade of Bamako was declared on 28 April 2026, framed as retaliation. Mali imposed nationwide fuel rationing on 22 January 2026, and Niger revoked the licences of truckers refusing to deliver fuel into Mali on 13 January. Britain’s Foreign Office, in standing advice against all travel, describes JNIM blockades on key routes across southern and western Mali including Bamako, fuel trucks as a deliberate target, insurgent checkpoints, a national fuel shortage and a very high kidnapping threat from al-Qaeda- and Islamic State-aligned groups as well as criminal gangs. The last datable reporting on the capital’s supply is RFI’s, relayed by Senegalinfos and Bénin Web TV in September: Bamako markedly better supplied than in preceding weeks, the rest of the country erratic, and the improvement credited to the progressive introduction of military escorts for tanker convoys. That is now roughly seven weeks old on a blockade that has oscillated repeatedly since 2025.

Writing for African Arguments, Hassane Sissoko argues that the Russian-backed Africa Corps now escorts the tanker convoys into Bamako, that fuel moves only under armed escort, and that the cost is heavy. That is analysis rather than reporting — Sissoko is citing Modern Diplomacy — and the pricing assertion carries no figure. Separately, and on the civilian side of the same corridor problem, Ghana’s Minister for Trade, Agribusiness and Industry, Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, met trade ministers from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger on 1 November on the sidelines of the 18th SIAO in Ouagadougou, among them Mali’s crafts minister Mamou Daffé and Burkina Faso’s Serge Gnaidem Poda. The account comes from Ghana’s state broadcaster alone. It lists trade barriers, integration, financing and resource mobilisation, concedes that obstacles including time constraints exist, and produces no communiqué and no agreed measures.

A bloc-to-bloc channel runs in parallel: a first ECOWAS–AES ministerial dialogue was reported held in Dakar on 17 October, with Burkina Faso’s foreign minister Karamoko Jean-Marie Traoré leading the confederation delegation and Senegal’s Cheikh Niang the ECOWAS side. That account reaches The Files only through an aggregator and has not been checked against the ECOWAS Commission or the Senegalese foreign ministry.

Assessment: If Africa Corps is the toll-keeper on the only functioning fuel corridor into a capital of some three million people, the Russian presence in Mali has stopped being a security contract and become a logistics rent — a far more durable position, and one that survives any particular battlefield outcome. The missing datum is a price per truck or per litre; until someone publishes it, Sissoko’s claim remains an argument. Note also what the Ouagadougou meeting implies: Accra transacting directly with AES ministries while the formal ECOWAS channel grinds separately. States hedge faster than blocs do, and the hedge is usually visible in trade before it is visible in communiqués.