African Macro-Financial & Capital Architecture | Multi-Asset Trading & Global Macro Strategy | Founder, Canary Compass | Structure Before Sentiment
Joined July 2010
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Anyone who knows me knows this is my favourite photo.
President Frederick Titus Jacob Chiluba leaned in, I stood tall, and my mother watched as power shook hands.
It was one of those fully parent driven events. I just knew my mum was excited that the Zambian president was coming to Kenya. This was in the early 1990s, not long after Chiluba had succeeded Kenneth Kaunda. At that time he represented hope, a fresh chapter for Zambia after nearly three decades of one party rule. For Zambians living in Nairobi it was a moment of pride, a chance to meet the new leader who carried so much promise. My mum, working at the British Council, insisted I be there. She had come to Kenya for further studies, met my dad, and built a life here, but her roots and her pride in Zambia’s future carried her to the airport that day with me in tow.
I did not grasp the gravity. I was just a child being taken to meet a visiting head of state. Yet today, when I look back, I see more. I see posture, symbolism, and history in a single frame. Chiluba leans forward, extending authority. I stand upright, unintimidated, hand outstretched. My mum looks on, smiling, the bridge between heritage, identity, and a moment of recognition.
This photo reminds me that we rarely understand the weight of moments while we are in them. Their meaning unfolds years later when life teaches us how to see.
For my mother, this was pride. For me, it became perspective. Power bends, youth rises, and the witness in the background holds both stories together.
Sometimes leadership is exactly that: recognising when to lean in, when to stand tall, and when to simply bear witness so that others can remember.
Dominance is relative: the gap between one player and the rest of the field in a single defined window, a season or a calendar year.
Peak is absolute: the highest level a player reaches. It can sit in one season or across a run of seasons.
The two do not have to coincide.
Dear African, pay attention.
This template is not new. Interrupt scrutiny of the count. Detain the people coordinating the opposition’s response. Disrupt the collection and reconciliation of polling-station results. Then demand evidence from an organisation whose ability to assemble it has been crippled.
The lesson must change how elections are prepared for.
Any opposition concerned about manipulation must build an evidence operation that can survive the loss of its headquarters and senior leadership. Multiple collection and tallying centres. Independent reporting routes. Replicated records. Trained replacement coordinators. Legal teams with continuing access to the evidence.
Several offices are not enough if every office depends on the same server, the same administrator or instructions from the same leader.
Each centre must be able to continue receiving, preserving and verifying results when another is disabled. Every figure must remain traceable to its polling-station record.
This must be organised and tested before polling day. Once arrests begin and filing deadlines approach, the time for designing resilience has passed.
Dismantling the centre must not dismantle the evidence.
What has become clear to me, particularly across Africa, is that opposition candidates confronting leaders willing to do anything to stay in power must win decisively with margins that make results harder to manipulate and any attempt harder to conceal.
But a decisive victory alone is not enough. They must protect the vote at every stage, from polling stations to the final tally. Record everything. Preserve the evidence. Make every discrepancy visible.
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
🇧🇷🇺🇸 Four decoy cars, an Italian passport, a jet waiting across the Argentine border: how Flavio Bolsonaro slipped a Supreme Court travel ban and landed in Miami on a visa Trump signed off personally
The Wall Street Journal has the route.
Monday night his convoy left Brasília and split four ways while reporters chased the wrong cars; Tuesday his allies told the press he was already in Florida while he was still in Brazil, driving hundreds of miles to the triple frontier.
At 10:50 p.m. he crossed the bridge into Puerto Iguazú with his wife and daughters, Argentine airport police escorted him to a Gulfstream that Trump adviser Jason Miller had helped charter, Milei's top aide watched from the ground in contact with Eduardo Bolsonaro, and the plane lifted off at 12:21 a.m. with Flavio flying on his Italian passport, refueled in Ecuador, and landed at Opa-locka at 9:30, where officers shielded the family with umbrellas.
Trump approved the entry Tuesday, Rubio moved the visas, and the family came in on one-year humanitarian parole.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because María Corina Machado ran the same play ten months ago: a wig and a false identity through ten of Maduro’s checkpoints, a fishing boat to Curaçao with Navy F-18s circling the route, a private jet to Oslo, and a thank-you to Washington once she was safe.
Same machinery, same Trump circle, and the same kind of regime on the other end.
Maduro had a travel ban and a fugitive warning waiting for Machado; Lula has Moraes, a judge who jailed the father for 27 years, sentenced the brother in absentia, took the son’s passports the morning after he lost, and sits on a police dossier tying him to the very banker scandal he’s prosecuting... and that's not even the tip of the iceberg on this guy.
When a court like that orders you to stay home, leaving isn’t fleeing justice, it’s refusing to be the next Bolsonaro behind bars.
Trump says the family was “treated very unfairly” but he “won’t get involved.”
The plane says he already did, and that’s the right call.
Source: Wall Street Journal / Writer: Daniel
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
Test questions: Who is the better player between,
1. Maradona and Messi?
2. Haaland and R9?
3. Ronaldhino and De Bruyne?
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
It's looking more and more like Lula stole the election.
Typical.
SE PUDRIÓ TODO EL BRASIL
Los gordos Anonimus mostraron que había 8 millones de personas que viraron sin documentación y mandaron a que todos chequeen si sus familiares difuntos habían votado
Automáticamente Lula desactivó la consulta en la web oficial de tse.jus.br
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
Why are you comfortable supporting a retired leader’s involvement in politics in one country, yet attack another retired leader for doing the same in another country? Isn’t that hypocrisy?
There are many football fans who don’t actually watch football. A lot of younger Gen Z fans seem to believe statistics tell the whole story of an era. That is how you end up with fans who think Haaland is a better player than Ronaldo Nazário, or that Harry Kane is better than Marco van Basten or Roberto Baggio.
Many of us older fans who watched Cristiano Ronaldo in 2007/08 know that it was the greatest individual season we have seen from a player in a European league. This is not about career totals or the number of Ballon d’Ors won. It is about a single season in which a player was so dominant that he swept the major individual honours in England, across Europe and worldwide.
Statistics alone cannot tell you what we watched.
Dear African, please be on notice.
This is a familiar template.
In this alternative reality, the opposition leader who is out of power fleeing into exile, and the father who is in prison are the authoritarians. And the guy who controls all security forces of the state, the electoral system, and largely the media through state subsidies, and who ordered a travel ban on his opponent within seven minutes of being declared the winner of the presidential election after having his former lawyer acting as judge extend the closure of the polls and suspend the counting for two hours is the democratic man representing the will of the people.
Please follow @AOC for more daily comedy and satire.
What has become clear to me, particularly across Africa, is that opposition candidates confronting leaders willing to do anything to stay in power must win decisively with margins that make results harder to manipulate and any attempt harder to conceal.
But a decisive victory alone is not enough. They must protect the vote at every stage, from polling stations to the final tally. Record everything. Preserve the evidence. Make every discrepancy visible.
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
brazil supreme court decision to seize flavio bolsonaro’s passports immediately after the election looks like political retribution to most brazilians (and to me).
rule of law not what it should be here.
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
不可思议，但是又在意料之中的巴西选举，和最新的戏剧落幕：
1、周日，巴西举行总统大选复选，第一轮赢了现任总统卢拉2个百分点的博索纳罗，因为吸纳了初选时另外两位保守派候选人的票，本来应该更加大幅超出，但结果居然以3.5%的差距落败。
1400万张复选的选票，居然有1000万张「投给」卢拉，只有370万张投给博索纳罗，「完成」数学上不可能的选举。
2、在周日下午5点投票截止前，卢拉以3个城市的20+%的公共汽车没有开动、阻止了穷人投票为由，要求巴西选举法院延长投票两个小时，博索纳罗也以暴雨阻止投票为由，申请延长投票时间。
3、但是最高法院大法官Zenin，卢拉的前私人律师，在5点过后越过选举法院批准了卢拉的请求，这时大多数投票站因为时间到期，都关闭了投票机，这是一个不可逆的行为，投票机再打不开了。但是卢拉选区的投票机却如有先见之明一样没有关闭，得以继续投票两小时。
同时，博索纳罗的自由党在巴西利亚的选情总汇室的监票员被赶了出去。
4、之后卢拉的票源源不断进来，最后卢拉大幅超出博索纳罗430万张票。
5、博索纳罗宣布不接受选举结果，要求申请选举作废。
6、周一，博索纳罗在拜访他父亲、拘禁在家的老博索纳罗之后，在回家路上收到巴西最高法院的命令，24小时内交出护照。
7、与此同时，世界各国领袖纷纷祝贺卢拉「当选」总统，但是美国总统川普没有，川普说：「看起来是被操纵的选举」
8、周一下午，博索纳罗在「形势比人强」的局势下，被迫宣布承认大选结果。
9、卢拉在电视上要求声援博索纳罗的阿根廷总统米莱向他道歉，米莱对记者说：「讲真话为什么要道歉？」
10、报道说，博索纳罗带着全家出逃巴西，经阿根廷，搭乘私人飞机飞抵美国佛罗里达。据说，这是在美国国务卿卢比奥的安排之下完成的。
博索纳罗在选举之后的出逃，以行动告诉所有祝贺卢拉的世界各国：卢拉不仅违法当选，而且迫害政治对手！
他身后，留下一个巴西版的委内瑞拉。
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
It has been officially confirmed that Flavio Nantes Bolsonaro, Fernanda Antunes Figueira Bolsonaro, Carolina Figueira Bolsonaro, and Luiza Figueira Bolsonaro entered Argentina via a land crossing to then continue their journey onwards to the United States.
This is absolutely incredible stuff. Milei and Trump pulled off an absolutely incredible feat in extracting Flavio while the entire police force of Brazil was looking for him to arrest him on Lula’s orders.
Trump & Rubio have done it again. This time with the help of Milei. Absolutely fantastic stuff that was done here! This will be talked about in the history books!
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
Free elections depend on neutral courts that stay within their limits. In Brazil’s latest election, they did not, and that undermines trust in the democratic process, writes Cato’s @hiperfalcon.
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
Nicki Minaj is one of the greatest rappers alive, and she just did something almost no artist dares to do: openly back Trump and show up at SpaceX to thank Elon. To understand why that's so rare, you need to understand why the overwhelming majority of actors and artists are anti-Trump. And it's not because they're smarter, more sensitive, or more moral than everyone else. It's because they live inside a system where thinking differently costs you your career. Let me explain how it works.
An artist starts with nothing. No capital, no distribution, no audience. Everything they have, they receive from someone else. An agent who decides to sign them. A studio that decides to cast them. A label that decides to push them. A brand that decides to attach them to its image. A festival that decides to select them. An academy that decides to reward them. At every step, there's a gatekeeper. And those gatekeepers form a tiny ecosystem, concentrated in Los Angeles and New York, socially homogeneous and politically aligned. Historically, the entertainment industry's political money flows overwhelmingly to one side.
This system works like modern patronage. In the 16th century, artists depended on the prince or the Church, and they painted what their patron wanted to see. Today it's the same, except the patron is called an agency, a streaming platform, a selection committee, or a "brand safety" department. The mechanism hasn't changed: you depend on their money, so you adopt their values. Not necessarily out of cynicism. Usually by osmosis. You go to the same dinners, the same galas, the same schools, and you end up thinking like the people who feed you.
And for those who don't align on their own, there's punishment. It's never official. Nobody calls to tell you your career is over. The roles just get rarer, the brands stop calling back, the invitations disappear. Gina Carano got fired from The Mandalorian over her posts. The entire industry got the message loud and clear. Everyone knows what stepping out of line costs. So the line holds. Even Oscar eligibility rules now include ideological criteria. The system no longer just rewards talent, it rewards conformity.
The result: when you see 95% of celebrities signing the same open letter, that's not a consensus. It's a cartel. It's exactly what Gramsci described: culture as an instrument of consent, and artists as the organic intellectuals of a system that pays them to legitimize it.
That's why Nicki Minaj's move matters so much. She has a historically progressive fanbase, and she had absolutely everything to lose. And yet, since late 2025, she's publicly backed Trump. She went on stage with him in Washington. She went to Starbase to watch the Starship launch and thanked Elon live on air for what he's doing for humanity. She's been insulted, mocked, attacked by her own fans, roasted in the middle of the Grammys. And she hasn't backed down an inch.
That's courage. The real kind. Not the "courage" of signing an open letter your whole industry applauds. The courage to think for yourself when your entire economic and social ecosystem is pushing you the other way.
And that's why the culture war won't be won by convincing Hollywood. It'll be won by making Hollywood unnecessary. When anyone can make a film without asking a gatekeeper for permission, the cartel collapses on its own.
Elon Musk is investing in culture. A billion into Skydance, Grok Imagine aiming to release its own Odyssey before the end of the year. I think a few years from now, this will be seen as one of the smartest moves he's ever made.
To understand why, you need to reread Gramsci. Delicious irony: it was an Italian Marxist who best understood how power actually works. From his prison cell in the 1930s, he theorized that domination doesn't rest only on force or economics, but on consent. Whoever controls culture controls what people consider "normal," "fair," "obvious." That's cultural hegemony. Before you win political power, you have to win minds. And to win minds, you have to hold the schools, the media, the universities, the movies, the music.
The left applied this lesson perfectly. Look at Hollywood today. A huge share of actors aren't artists anymore, they're relays. Puppets of a system promoting an ideological model that, everywhere it's applied, makes people poorer. Mark Ruffalo is the perfect example: every role, every interview, every awards show becomes a pamphlet. And millions of people absorb the message without even noticing, because it comes wrapped in entertainment.
For decades, the right and the tech world believed the battle was about numbers, innovation, the economy. Wrong. The battle is about the stories we tell. Elon gets it. He's not just building rockets anymore, he's building the narrative.
And the real revolution is that AI is breaking the monopoly on cultural production. Making a film used to require studios, hundreds of millions of dollars, a Hollywood network. Tomorrow, all it'll take is an idea and something to say.
That's exactly what we're building at Argil: a product that lets anyone make films far more easily. We abstract away all the technical stuff so you can focus on what matters, the story. I made the video below with it. Watch it, it's pretty funny.
try it here : argil.ai
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
I agree with you, especially on stocks. If you look at pension balance sheets, they should be doing more. But the risk profile is a mess. They need to split capital properly and hire people who can allocate cash more efficiently across risk bands. Then they need to be active in the repo market. We need a proper rethink of how our pensions operate. We’re sitting on useful savings.
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
If pensions still have a stake, it is a good result. My main gripe is transparency and how things were done. Sir, you know me. As a communitarian libertarian, I don’t mind more money in the pocket from capital gains. But the money belongs to the member, and if the nation builds with it, it must be on terms and in the open. I don’t believe the government is an efficient market participant, though I acknowledge this is the best economic team we have ever had. Dignity and order are one system. A gain that rests on a buyer nobody could have known about in February without inside information is luck, not process.
Dean N Onyambu retweeted
Charles, you’ll get serious bile from Kenyans, but the numbers do not lie. We have a real doping problem. I was in denial myself until I sat down and worked through the data.
Blaming it on more testing does not hold up. Extra tests do not magically produce positive samples for recombinant EPO, steroid metabolites, or manipulated blood passports. That is deliberate enhancement, not contaminated pharmacy syrup.
If it were limited to fringe runners chasing small road-race purses, you could almost understand the pressure. But it is hitting the very top. World Marathon Major winners, world record holders, and global medalists are receiving multi-year bans, including for tampering with forged medical records.