-N.M.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer and geopolitical commentator
based in London, England.
Mike Tyson is a boxing legend but often lacking in sound judgment.
I've heard that he likes Trump because Trump supposedly stood by him after his rape conviction. So, he presumably thinks that he is doing the "honourable" and "loyal" thing by supporting Trump at a campaign rally when Trump's poll ratings are at an all-time low.
Personal loyalty can be a good thing, but it can also be an albatross.
Personal friendship and loyalty must have limits.
Trump presides over a regime which:
1. Began an unwinnable war against Iran because Israel insisted that America attack Iran and that America continue the war without Israel.
2. Embarked on tariff warfare with other countries in the world which has cost the United States the trust of other countries and has provided a route to de-dollarisation and the removal of their gold reserves from America.
3. Presided over a rise in gas prices. The cost-of-living crisis is biting harder among Americans.
4. Threatens other nations like Venezuela who capitulate leaving the US to loot their resources and then have Trump brag about it.
5. Is beholden to the State of Israel which uses money and blackmail to control the US Congress and Trump himself.
6. Is explicitly for "white" supremacy and "white" chauvinism. They interpret every black person in a position of high authority -including the U.S. military - as unmerited so-called "DEI" hires. As retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson once put it: "They don't like black people. Let's be frank about that".
They explicitly hate Muslims too even though Tyson professes to be a Muslim.
Yet Tyson analogises what he refers to as Trump’s “struggles” with those faced by the Black American community at large.
7. Has abandoned the rule of law and any notion of international law. Trump has admitted that he has no morality or sense of limitations except what is in his mind.
8. Has continued what most of the globe know to be a GENOCIDE by Israel in Palestine and the attempt by Israel to extend its borders - both goals of which are consistent with what is the objective of Political Zionism.
9. Is composed of grotesque personalities such as Hegseth, Rubio, Miller etc who are crude and cerebrally limited thugs who possess no qualities expected of statesmen.
Hegseth is a drunk and a sexual predator who belongs to a "Christian" cult beholden to the cause of Zionism. Rubio is in the pocket of Zionist benefactors and a clown of a "foreign minister" whose limited engagement in foreign affairs is encapsulated by Trump's use of two New York real estate brokers to negotiate with Iran, Russia and Lebanon, while the hideous Miller is a Jew who bizarrely utilises Nazi imagery and Goebbelesque language.
Does anyone who is compos mentis see these idiots as the "saviours" of America and the "white race"?
10. Is fiscally and strategically incompetent. The DOGE episode has not prevented a waste in expenditure because of failed or failing military adventures in Iran and Ukraine. America's sovereign debt and continued to rise sharply under Trump. Strategic oil reserves in the US have dipped to a dangerous low, as have munitions, missile interceptors etc leaving the US vulnerable if it had to fight Russia or China.
11. Is extraordinarily corrupt. Trump, who Tyson recently said in an interview was "broke" in 2026, has used his position to enrich himself and his family on a scale far in excess of the corruption of Clinton (Clinton Foundation), Pelosi (insider trading) and others.
Now, Mike may not be aware of much of the above, but he must surely have an inkling that Trump has been a fundamentally bad president who is leading America to the abyss.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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Saturday, October 29th, 1966.
A Pan-American World Airways flight enroute to Lagos is making a stopover at Accra Airport. On board are the foreign minister of Guinea, Louis Lansana Beavogui, and three diplomats on their way to a pre-summit meeting of the Organisation of African Unity’s Council of Ministers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Also on board are 15 Guinean students who are scheduled to disembark at the aircraft’s next stop at Lagos where they will study English as part of a cultural exchange agreement between the governments of Guinea and Nigeria. Shortly after its landing, the languid atmosphere is shattered by the arrival of a detachment of Ghanaian security officers who noisily roam the aisle of the aeroplane seeking all the Guinean nationals on board. Demands for identification and threats are exchanged with protests and physical resistance. Newspaper dispatches would report that the security officers “dragged 19 kicking and screaming Guineans” from the plane. Some had clung to their seats and had to be carried from the airliner. They were arrested and taken to places of detention. What followed were 7 days of highly charged threats between the governments of Ghana and Guinea, as well as frenzied mediation efforts conducted by the OAU to resolve the crisis. It was a crisis which the Guinean President Sekou Toure had reason to believe had been engineered by the United States, which led to a rise in anti-American sentiment in Guinea that culminated in mob violence, house arrests and the expulsion of members of the U.S. peace corps from Guinean soil. Thirteen years before the seizure of its embassy by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran, the United States had to handle a hostage crisis while the three-year old OAU discussed the possibility of expelling Ghana from the body. This extraordinary episode of state-sponsored kidnapping and high-drama diplomacy was rooted in fierce personal loyalty and inter-state political antagonism that played out against the backdrop of the global ideological Cold War.
The setting to the incident was the overthrow of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah earlier that year on February 24th. Nkrumah had been on a foreign tour of nations when news of his deposing reached him soon after his arrival in China. In the following days, he made his way to Guinean exile where his ally President Sekou Toure would make him honorary co-president.
It was the least that Toure felt that he could do.
When in 1958, Toure had rejected Charles de Gaulle’s offer to join the Communaute francaise, famously uttering the words “Il n'y a pas de dignité sans liberté: nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans l'esclavage," France had retaliated by withdrawing its civil servants along with professional and technical experts. Widespread sabotage of equipment also occurred. The French took everything from telephones and typewriters to furniture and electric light sockets. They also took government records. Guinea faced economic catastrophe, but an injection of $10 million from Nkrumah’s treasury significantly relieved the burden.
Nkrumah had been overthrown by a junta which had had received covert assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and which explicitly sought to position itself as an ally of the United States. This radical realignment of Ghana’s foreign policy and economic doctrine almost certainly guaranteed an adversarial relationship with Guinea which along with Nkrumaist Ghana and Modibo Keita-led Mali had formed a socialist bloc of nations in West Africa.
However, what later developed between Guinea and Ghana went beyond conventional rivalry and competition. It degenerated into outright enmity because Nkrumah was not subject to the typical conditions imposed on exiled political leaders who are often foresworn to disengage from overt political conduct. Toure had enabled Nkrumah’s use of the radio waves to criticise the policies of the Ghanaian military regime on his “Voice of the Revolution” programme which was broadcast under the aegis of Radio Conakry. Nkrumah’s frequently strident oratory irritated Ghana’s military rulers who from the beginning began to supress and persecute his followers, as well as those who were felt to have been close to his government.
Beyond irritation was the not irrational fear of the junta that Nkrumah’s penetration of Ghana’s airwaves through his sermons from Conakry could form the basis of a future insurrection. This scenario along with a threatened Guinean military invasion were taken seriously because of repeated pronouncements by both Nkrumah and Toure. For instance, shortly after Nkrumah’s arrival in Conakry following his overthrow, he declared that “I have come here on purpose to use Guinea as a platform to tell the world that very soon I shall be in Accra, in Ghana”, adding that he would overthrow the military government to “teach them the lesson they deserve”.
Toure for his part did not hide the fact that he considered the Ghanaian military regime to be an illegitimate one consisting of “traitors of Mother Africa”. Three days after Nkrumah’s overthrow he noted in a broadcast on Radio Conakry that Guinea “must consider itself in a state of war”. He would go on to state that he would mobilise and integrate into the Guinean armed forces a sizeable number of ordinary Guinean men and women who would liberate Ghana.
It was under these circumstances that the Pan-American plane had been stormed and its passengers apprehended.
Beavougi and the diplomats; Fily Sissoko, Abdoulaye Diallo, and Kassory Bangoura, were taken to Whistler Barracks in Teshie Camp, several miles from Accra, while the students were held at another army post a few miles away. The students would later allege that they were subjected to beatings and torture. They also claimed that valuables which had been confiscated from them by the police were not returned.
In a press conference held on Monday, October 31st, Lieutenant General Joseph Ankrah, the Chairman of the National Liberation Council as the Ghanaian junta styled itself, justified the action by claiming that the members of the 81-strong Ghanaian contingent which had followed Nkrumah into exile were being “held against their will” by the Guinean government and demanded that they be allowed to leave Guinea. Failure to accede to this would mean that the 19 Guinean citizens, who Radio Accra described as “hostages”, would remain in detention.
It was a stunning assertion by a state of its right to blackmail another state.
Ghana’s actions clearly violated both the spirit and the letter of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations which was signed in 1961. Article 29 provides that “The person of a diplomatic agent shall be inviolable. He shall not be liable to any form of arrest of detention.” The protection encompasses situations where the diplomat is in transit in a third-party country to which they are not accredited. Article 40 afforded them such protection notwithstanding that they did not have Ghanaian visas because they did not intend to leave the plane at Accra.
During his press conference, Ankrah sought to remind the world that Ghana had been victim of what he termed “undiplomatic acts” by the government of Guinea after the coup which had brought him to power. Guinean security forces had raided the Ghanaian embassy and permission given to Ambrose Tankey, the head of Nkrumah’s security guards, to sign cheques on embassy accounts. Further, the Ghanaian ambassador and his wife had been removed from an airliner and briefly arrested. While Guinea’s earlier conduct in the aftermath of Nkrumah’s overthrow had violated the convention, it did not give the Ghanaian regime the right to do the same. The presence of the Ghanaians attached to Nkrumah in Guinea -even if they were being held against their will- did not give Ghana the right to arrest the Guinean students who did not have diplomatic status because none of them were subject to an international warrant of arrest. None was wanted by the Ghanaian authorities or under suspicion of having committed an offence while on the flight.
While an infuriated Toure denounced the Ghanaian regime, referring to them as “that stooge of the imperialists”, his wrath was mainly directed at the United States which he blamed for orchestrating the crisis. He claimed that the United States was “entirely responsible” for the apprehension of the Ghanaians from the aeroplane and demanded America strongly condemn the Ghanaian government and ensure the Guineans were released and transported to their original destinations.
Toure knew of the suspicions at the time -later confirmed- of CIA involvement in the anti-Nkrumah coup, and his loathing of the junta’s obsequious trait of aligning itself with U.S. foreign policy objectives in return for receiving favours from the Americans informed his unwavering conclusion that the Americans had overseen Ghana’s action. Indeed, in a memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson dated March 12th, 1966, Robert W. Komer, then a senior staff member of the U.S. National Security Council informed Johnson that while Nkrumah had been doing more to undermine American interest than any other Black African, “the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-American.”
Toure’s heavy suspicions were justified.
He believed that the United States, acting in concert with Pan-American Airways, had tipped off the Ghanaian authorities about the presence of the Guinean passengers on the flight. The American input was vital because back in the 1960s, the automated sharing of passenger manifests was practically non-existent for routine international flights. Airlines compiled paper manifests which were carried on board. The tradition was not to hand over a passenger list during a fuel stop provided the passengers remained on the aircraft or in a secure transit lounge.
Toure’s indignation at the United States was manifested by the retaliatory measures he would take over the course of a few days. Three days after Robinson McIlvaine, the American ambassador had handed his credentials, he was summoned to the Guinean foreign office which announced that he was being summarily put under house arrest. His fate was shared with the local Pan-American Airlines representative and other staff members of the U.S. embassy who State Department spokesman, Carl Bartch announced had been placed under what he termed “office arrest”. Describing the situation as “serious”, Bartch noted that most Americans in Conakry were in protective custody with police guarding their homes.
With Radio Conakry filling the airwaves with denunciations of U.S. complicity in the kidnapping of their countrymen and women, a wave of anti-American feeling was stirred without much difficulty. On October 31st, a demonstration was held outside the U.S. embassy in which Radio Conakry claimed there had been “50,000” participants. They shouted slogans such as “Down with the Yankees!”, “Yankee’s get out of Africa!” and “Down with American Imperialism!” Other slogans chanted included “The Imperialist Plot Will Not Succeed in Guinea” and “Down with the Accra Puppets!” Meanwhile, a mob stormed the residence of McIlvaine where they broke windows and furniture as his wife and their two children cowered under an upstairs bedroom. He had been allowed to travel to the embassy without a guard.
Toure’s directives were of course strictly in breach of international law.
The Guinea-Ghana crisis presented a severe test for the OAU. As delegates began gathering for the impending summit in the marble splendour of Africa House in Addis Ababa, there was a notable growth in support of the expulsion of Ghana from the OAU. Others felt that the OAU should be neutral on the matter. But led by Emperor Haile Selassie, the organisation set about the task of finding a solution because it would be inconceivable that the conference could go ahead while the Guinean diplomats remained in Ghanaian custody. Selassie had been quick to dispatch his justice minister to Accra in the hours following the seizure of the Guineans and by Monday, November 1st, the organisation had assembled a three-man team to proceed to Accra and Conakry. They were Justin Bomboko, foreign minister of Congo-Kinshasa, Vice President Joseph Murumbi of Kenya and John Nelson Williams, the Sierra Leonean minster of information.
The OAU team departed on November 2nd and arrived in Accra the same day. They called on Ankrah to give them a full account of his grievances against Guinea, and they interviewed three Ghanaian security guards who had recently arrived from Guinea.
The key issue for the team was of course to discover first hand whether the Ghanaians, housed in the Villa Syli compound in Conakry were being held against their will. This was put to rest when every member of the Ghanaian entourage explicitly stated they were in Guinea by choice and expressed deep loyalty to Nkrumah. They all signed a voluntary declaration refusing to return to Ghana under the military regime. On his return to Addis Ababa, Murumbi reported that he was satisfied than none of them had been intimidated by the Guinean government. “At the moment,” he said, “they have good jobs and are quite content.” The mission concluded that Ghana's claims of unlawful detention were entirely baseless.
The findings made the stance of Ankrah -by now in Addis Ababa- untenable.
On Saturday November 5th, the three elder statesmen of the organisation: Selassie, President William Tubman of Liberia and President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt met with Ankrah in a closed conference which lasted for almost four hours. When they emerged from the meeting the contrast between the grim exterior of Ankrah and the smiling trio of Selassie, Tubman and Nasser could not have been any starker. The Black American newspaper the New York Amsterdam News opined that “three skillful elders cornered a bristling stallion (and) tamed him.”
Ankrah had no alternative other than to order the immediate release from detention of the Guinean hostages. Thus, ended a saga which some observers felt had the potential for destroying the organisation.
Toure had emerged victorious but remained dissatisfied with the OAU. Despite President Nasser sending a special aircraft to Conakry to bring him to Addis Ababa, Toure refused to attend the OAU conference in person because he asserted that the “insult” to Guinea was “not wiped out” because Ankrah and the Ghanaian delegation had not been barred from attending the summit. Instead, he sent an observation team led by Leon Maka, the President of the Guinean National Assembly to enlighten what he described as “friendly delegations” about the poor treatment suffered by the Guinean “hostages” while they were in Ghana.
Toure’s indignation at the Americans was not satiated. Earlier on November 2nd, Edward M. Korry, the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia handed a letter to Diallo Telli, the OAU Secretary General, which expressed disapproval of Ghana’s action. It had, Korry admitted, been “contrary to accepted international practice”. It also protested Guinea’s reprisals directed at the United States.
But Toure was not finished with the Americans.
On November 8th, he announced that he was expelling the contingent of U.S. Peace Corps from Guinea. The 64 corpsmen, staff and their dependents were given one week to leave. Personnel of the U.S. Information Service were also instructed to depart Guinea. The Guinean government also declared Pan-American Airlines “off-limits” in the country, in other words, the airliner’s landing rights were revoked.
The action, taken against peace corps, an organisation created by President John F. Kennedy, a man whom Toure respected and admired, took many by surprise. It was the final measure taken in expression of Guinean disapproval of what Toure believed to have been American connivance with Ghana’s detention of its diplomats and students.
However, another incident involving his hardline attitude had at some point during the height of the crisis, but which was only brought to public attention after it had ended. A few days after the Conakry demonstrations, Guinean troops seized an American cargo ship, the De Mundo, soon after it berthed at Conakry port. The ship’s radio room was shut down, and the crew was prevented from going ashore. The incident occurred around the time that another ship carrying 500 tons of U.S. aid for Guinea unloaded its cargo in Dakar, Senegal. The sequence of action and reaction remained uncertain, but an American source claimed that the unloading of Guinea-bound cargo at Dakar had been in reaction to the conduct of the Guinean army in Conakry. The State Department is said to have insisted that it reload and proceed to Conakry after the withdrawal of the Guinean troops from the seized ship.
The question of American aid to Guinea unsurprisingly became an issue. Why, American columnists asked, should the Toure, now viewed as a Marxist-believing ingrate, be allowed to benefit from such assistance? They reported that since 1962, Guinea had received up to $60 million in economic help from the United States with half of it consisting of surplus farm products.
This had been an issue for some long before the events of late 1966. In a syndicated column written which appeared in the Columbus Ledger Enquirer in June 1962, Fulton Lewis jr. excoriated the Kennedy administration for sending millions of dollars in aid that included the provision of “American experts and modern radio equipment”, as well as funding to schools respectively for “one for African administrators” and “the other for vocational students”. All of this, Lewis noted, was being done to win Toure over from the Soviet camp.
But what was not mentioned by Lewis and most of the others who criticised the Johnson administration was continuing such aid was what Guinea was giving to the United States. This was the granting of bauxite mining rights to U.S. companies in the lucrative Boke region.
The American government, which in August of 1966 had announced that it was contemplating a drastic reduction of aid commitments to Guinea, announced on November 2nd that it was suspending aid to Guinea. This may have been the trigger for the Guinean authorities to send in the army to secure what they assumed would be the last batch of aid the country would receive. But aid to Guinea would continue while it was gradually wound down. The activities of the American mining companies would remain unaffected.
The state of relations between Guinea and Ghana would remain fraught for a good number of years. A major step towards the thawing of relations occurred after the death of Kwame Nkrumah in April 1972. President Toure, who gave his friend a state funeral the following month in Conakry, had initially fended off the entreaties of the Ghanaian military regime led by Colonel Ignatius Acheampong to have Nkrumah’s body returned to his homeland. However, after negotiations, Nkrumah’s body was released to the Ghanaian authorities and he was buried in his hometown of Nkroful. And four years later, fully a decade after he had been detained on the orders of the junta led by Lieutenant General Ankrah, Louis Lansana Beavogui, by then Toure’s Prime Minister, visited Accra where he held talks with Acheampong aimed at solidifying bilateral and regional relations.
©
Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
As
a current affairs obsessed-child, I did often laugh in amusement when listening
on shortwave radio to the strident, unyielding tones of the voices of Soviet
newscasters when announcing the USSR's triumphs in heavy industry and crop
harvesting. I knew that they were perennially jamming radio signals emanating
from "enemy capitalist states".
But fast-forward to the contemporary situation.
Why does the U.S.-led West seek to do what the USSR did? It bans channels such as RT and Press TV from the Internet and TV platforms.
The EU for its part enforces draconian measures on the likes of retired army Colonel Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence officer who worked for NATO, simply because his analysis of the Russia-Ukraine does not conform with the Western political class and the mainstream media? Baud was sanctioned even though his books only used Ukrainian and Western originated source material and he declined repeated offers to appear on various Russian media outlets.
NathalieYamb, the Cameroonian-Swiss activist, has also been sanctioned for "spreading" so-called "Kremlin narratives" and calling for Francophone African states to reject France's shadow empire on the continent. She also asserts that her specific criticisms of French President Emmanuel Macron played a major part in the decision to have her sanctioned.
The imposition of sanctions means that persons such as Baud and Yamb are not allowed to travel within the EU member states. Apart from travel bans, their assets are frozen and third parties who help them are subject to punishment.
The banning of media platforms and sanctioning of individuals are redolent of the sort of actions typified by the "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes to which the EU professes to be opposed.
Western
governments and the EU are in effect acting in the manner of an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.
Rewind back to the little boy who chuckled at Soviet broadcasting style and Soviet clamp downs on the information space:
It would have been inconceivable to him that decades later he would only be able to tell certain truths as he saw it on Russian media.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2026).
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
