The Puppet Corridor and the Sahel Fault Line: Diverging Paths of Sovereignty in Contemporary Africa

This article compares two contrasting trajectories inside the same global system: the tightening of “puppet corridors” in Central Africa and the sovereign rupture emerging along the Sahel fault line. Drawing on the Imperial Selection Model (ISM) and the Puppet Diagnostic Index (PDI), it argues that recent events in the Sahel, the Great Lakes region and the Atlantic mining corridors are not isolated crises but different branches of a predicted process. On one side, the article analyses the consolidation of relay states and extraction corridors linking the Democratic Republic of Congo to external powers through critical-minerals routes, legal reforms and security guarantees. On the other side, it documents how a cluster of Sahel states have broken with the usual script: expelling certain foreign bases, challenging CFA-linked monetary structures, and experimenting with new regional alliances. The text revisits earlier predictions that the Sahel would “wake up” before Central and Southern Africa and assesses them against concrete policy and security developments up to 2025. The central contribution is a liberation blueprint organised in phases: (1) refusal of the existing script and naming of asymmetric treaties as acts against sovereignty; (2) creation of parallel sovereignty structures such as National Sovereignty Assemblies and a Continental Sovereignty Council; (3) economic and corridor-level counter-strategies, including alternative export routes and local refining; and (4) long-term constitutional reforms that embed psychopolitical screening tools like the PDI into eligibility rules for high office. The article defines clear falsification conditions for its claims and insists on a non-essentialist approach: it is political choices and institutional designs, not inherent cultural traits, that push countries along either the puppet-corridor path or the sovereign-fault-line path.   KeywordsSahel; Democratic Republic of Congo; sovereignty; imperialism; corridors; critical minerals; security alliances; Pan-Africanism; Imperial Selection Model; Puppet Diagnostic Index