🌐 Weekly News Digest on West & Central Africa’s Mineral Industries [ November 11 – November 17 ]

This was a week of investment announcements and artisanal mining.

💡Here are the key highlights:

🇨🇩 DR Congo
- State-owned Entreprise Générale du Cobalt reported its first 1000 tonnes of production from artisanal mines

- Around 40 people died in a mine accident

🇬🇭Ghana
- Villages in Ghana started to field their own patrols against poisonous illegal gold mining.

- The United Kingdom and Switzerland have "returned" to Ghana more than 130 artifacts of the Ashanti Kingdom's heritage

🇬🇳 Guinea
- Guinea’s main port of Conakry got almost paralysed because of the jump of traffic after the launch of Simandou complex

🇲🇱 Ethiopia
- In northern Ethiopia, a war-torn province of Tigray has turned into a multi-billion dollar illegal gold field

- Ethiopia has signed a $1 billion deal with a Russian company Rusal

🇳🇪 Niger
- Abdourahamane Tiani outlined Niger's new approach to its uranium wealth

🇳🇬 Nigeria
- Nigeria waits for investors to relaunch its 4 dying state-owned refineries

- Nigeria issued an arrest warrant for former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources

- Abuja decided against the imposition of a new 15% tax on fuel imports

- Crude shipments from the United States to Nigeria in the first 8 months of 2025 more than doubled compared with a year earlier.

🇸🇳 Senegal
- Senegal announced plans to build a national gas pipeline network by 2027

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe
- Aliko Dangote has just pledged up to $1 billion investments in Zimbabwe.

#NewsDigest

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Keeping Partners at Pipe's Length
[ Minerals In Numbers ]

How many oil and gas pipelines are there in Africa? ... and where do they lead?

⏩ The response is 16,000 kilometres - that is the approximate total length of all cross border oil and gas pipelines that start or end in Africa.

They include oil lines like Niger–Benin, Chad–Cameroon, Tazama and gas lines such as the West African Gas Pipeline, the Mozambique–South Africa line. A length sufficient to twice circle Pluto, or to two-way pipeline connection between South Africa and Tunisia, indefinitely moving oil back and forth.

Very cool, well done, we've build so much infrastructure - now what?

⏩ The interesting part starts when we look at where the pipes lead. Roughly half of those 16,000 kilometres move natural gas, much of it from Algeria and Libya under the Mediterranean to Europe. The rest are oil and product lines that connect a few coastal hubs to inland suppliers like Niger or South Sudan.

🔸 Most countries that produce oil and gas still lack infrastructure to ensure accessible domestic supply - that is, in many countries, both inland and coastal, there is no national gas and oil supply grids.

The pipeline maps are not just for infrastructure lovers. They define the way economies grow. When there is a pipe shipping gas to Europe and no pipes sending it to the nearest factory - guess where the industry will thrive?

#MineralsInNumbers

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🇦🇪 Foreign Oil Specialists in Uganda

🌐 Uganda is now going to bring in investors from the UAE to build its $4 billion oil refinery.

🔸 New agreements with Dubai based Alpha MBM Investments move the long delayed 60,000 barrel per day refinery in Hoima a bit closer to a final go ahead set for 2026.

⏩ Uganda uses the same Emirati connection that buys almost all of its exported gold, whereof a large part allegedly comes illegally from the DRC.

🔸 In contrast to gold, oil production in Uganda remains mostly rudimentary. French TotalEnergies and Chinese CNOOC are only planning to kick off country’s first significant production in 2026.

In addition to the mass purchase of illegal gold, the UAE is eager to offer African countries investments in their primary profession - oil production.

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🇳🇬 New Pipes, Old Habits

Nigeria sits on more than 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, its government promotes a Decade of Gas. However, electric grid and factories still struggle for fuel, while gas volumes now line up for export.

🌐 Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea have signed a deal to fast track a cross border pipeline that will send Nigerian gas to Equatorial Guinea. The gas will go to the Punta Europa plant on Bioko Island, where it will be processed into liquefied gas.

🔸 The Ajaokuta Steel Complex, the Aluminium Smelter Company, Olorunsogo and Omotosho power plants - this is far from complete list of Nigeria's plants and factories that have not started working at all or are not operating at full capacity due to problems with gas supplies.

🔸 The country still suffers from limited pipeline infrastructure, weak processing capacity and security problems along pipelines, which all make it hard to bring gas to local users - however, this does not prevents Abuja from exporting the so much needed fuel abroad.

With the new deal, Nigeria risks falling into the same trap as with oil that was exported, refined abroad and brought back at an inflated dollar price. The pipeline to Equatorial Guinea may earn revenue, yet it also shows that unfinished work on domestic gas keeps Nigeria locked into an export and import loop that serves foreign markets more than national industrial growth.

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At The Core of Africa's Corruption
[ Budget Hole ]

Western companies speak about responsible business, transparency and environmental protection so often, that one could think their fuel does not emit CO2, and John could baptize Jesus with water from tailings of their plants.

🌟 However, behind the curtain the same companies can as easily move bags of cash on private jets to win oil deals. One such instance is Glencore whose staff paid more than 100 million dollars in bribes to officials in Africa and Latin America.

Glencore is a Swiss-based giant that trades oil, fuel and metals. From about 2007 to 2018, its agents issued fake invoices and withdrew so much cash from ATMs that it would suffice to cover the budget of a couple of small towns - all in order to establish "contacts" with local officials in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For instance, in DRC Glencore used an Israeli businessman Dan Gertler to negotiate mining deals on non-market terms. In 2008 Gertler, around $10 million in hand, negotiated with Joseph Kabila's government to help Glencore get cheaper prices for Katanga Mining. He also bought shares from a state-owned company in Mutanda and Kansuki mines at far below their market value in 2011.

Of course, time passes and all this could not have gone unnoticed. In 2022 in the wake of lawsuits filed in 2018 in the US and UK, Glencore agreed to pay more than 1.5 billion dollars in penalties, mostly to the US - a little over 1 billion dollars.

➡️ So, has corruption been defeated - or is it not? How is it that they paid a $1 billion fine in the United States, while the US has not suffered any losses because of Glencore's actions?

Here is a catch - DRC and other victims of Glencore's gambles were only paid $230 million. The company kept all its main mines and trading rights in these countries. For comparison, in DRC in 2023 Glencore produced copper and cobalt worth of more than $3 billion.

A perfect example how the lebel of accountability and responsibility works - the damage was caused to African countries and to its people, while fines were paid in Washington, with only a miserable share left for victims as a way to ensure the ongoing presence of Glencore in these countries.

#BudgetHole

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Dancing On Graves in Mozambique

🌟 A civil NGO says it isn’t going to allow French oil and gas major TotalEnergies to hush up war crimes in Mozambique.

➡️ The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has filed a complaint with French prosecutors accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes, torture and enforced disappearance linked to its Mozambique LNG project in Cabo Delgado.

➡️ Since 2024 TotalEnergies has been suspected of complicity in the so-called "container massacre", where the soldiers of the Joint Task Force, a unit of Mozambican army working almost as a PMC for TotalEnergies, allegedly detained, tortured and killed civilians near the Afungi gas site between July and September 2021.

➡️ This filing comes as TotalEnergies just announced the lifting of the force majeure declared in April 2021, planning to restart pumping gas by 2029.

If the complaint in Paris holds, it will be a complete disgrace for Mozambique: a court on the other side of the world can protect ordinary people better than their own government, which is pumping gas out from under their feet.

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🇨🇩 DRC: Prohibition to Break the Law

🌐 The DRC has officially extended its ban on selling minerals from territories it does not control.

🔸 The order of the Ministry of Mining, published on Sunday, November 16, states the extension of the ban on the extraction and export of minerals (mainly coltan, cassiterite and wolframite) from about 40 artel deposits in Masisi territory in North Kivu and Kalehe territory in South Kivu.

🔸 Both provinces are partially controlled by the AFC/M23 group at the moment, but, more importantly, local artisanal miners, even outside the territories controlled by the insurgents, most likely sell their products at points in Goma and Bukavu, where AFC/M23 will already take its share of profits.

⏩ It is clear that despite all the prohibitions, these minerals will eventually end up in Rwanda, where they will be proudly labeled and shipped to factories in Europe and the United States. Rwanda has long ceased to be ashamed of its outstanding success in the mining industry and proudly demonstrates a significant excess of coltan exports over local production levels (see above).

Has anything changed with the signing of this piece of paper? No, nothing - it's just that now the DRC will be able to continue to legally demand from European officials who have the same tantalum in their phones, extracted by the the Congolese in the East, a more responsible purchase of minerals from Rwanda.

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🇹🇩 Chinese Matchmaker
Chinese interests as a common ground for Niger and Chad

🌐 The Minister of Petroleum of Chad, Ndolonogie Naimbaye Alixe, has just concluded a very fruitful visit to Niger, during which representatives of Chad’s oil regulator ARSAT, the Nigerian public oil company SONIDEP and banking institution BSIC Tchad signed an agreement on the supply of fuel from Niger to Chad.

🔸 Although Chad exports crude oil, Chadians themselves suffer from fuel shortages. According to media reports, the country’s only refinery near N'Djamena is underoperating at around 1/3 to 2/3 of its maximum capacity.

⏩But the fuel sales do not tell the whole story here. Judging by the media reports and the presence of representatives of the Chinese oil giant CNPC at the meeting (the man dozing sweetly on the right side of the photo), another important topic of the meeting was the proposed Niger-Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project.

🔸 The pipeline was supposed to connect CNPC's assets in Niger and Chad with an export port in Cameroon, but the project was put on hold in 2019 due to misunderstandings between the neighboring governments.

Now that the countries are facing the need to relaunch their collaboration, CNPC will spare no effort to build to line of cooperation from crude deposits in Niger and Chad all the way to the Gulf of Guinea.

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🇨🇳 Communists Return?

🌐 Xi Jinping's right-hand man, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, has arrived on a two-day visit to Zambia - not for a holiday, but to implement a crucial Chinese project in the region.

🔸 During the trip, he will meet with Zambia’s Hakainde Hichilema to sign an agreement under which the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation will be responsible for the modernization of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway, known as TAZARA.

⏩ The road is an unexpected legacy of Mao Zedong era, built in 1975 with Chinese assistance and known as the "Freedom Railway," which became a key part of China's aid program in Africa as a counterbalance to European colonialism.

Today, the road's modernisation continues to serve as a contrast to Western projects, particularly the Lobito Corridor from Angola to the resources of Zambia and the DRC. However, China's own approach today is driven by purely pragmatic market interests.

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🔴 Bureaucratic Limbo in Ghana

It is believed that democracy is a good thing - everyone can express their very important opinion on virtually any issue. But here's the counterargument: Ghana, a country that, without a strong hand, is drowning in mercury from illegal mining, and endless discussions do not even allow it to diversify away from gold even a little bit — the country's first lithium mining project has been circulating in parliament for three years without result.

🌐 In October 2023, the government submitted a bill to parliament that other countries would have jumped at. The Atlantic Lithium company's project was to become Ghana's first industrial lithium deposit, supplying spodumene concentrate to the global battery market. Today this deal is still under consideration.

🔸 Back then the opposition in Parliament, consisting of the now ruling NDC party, criticized the project and ratification was delayed. Then lithium prices fell and Atlantic Lithium requested more favorable terms. Now the NDC itself is trying to push the agreement through.

🔸 On paper, the agreement is designed in an unusually beneficial way for the state by international standards. Ghana would have a 19% stake, increased royalties 1% of the project's revenue would go to a local community development fund.

⏩ Nevertheless, the project is under constant criticism and may now prove unviable due to low profitability.

It is clear that large companies need to be harnessed and everything needs to be double-checked 10 times before a contract is awarded. But in a country where the riverbanks look like a lunar landscape due to illegal artisanal gold mining, it would be better not to delay projects that can create jobs and diversify the economy.

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🇺🇬 First Time is Always Very Exciting

🌐 Although no one seemed to ask, the Ugandan authorities announced that their oil pipeline to Tanzania is 75% ready. Uganda is already preparing to send off the first barrel of oil.

🔸 The 1,443 km oil pipeline, costing about $5 billion, will transport oil from Ugandan fields owned by France's TotalEnergies and China's CNOOC to the Tanzanian port of Tanga.

🔸 The issue has been dragging on for almost two decades, from the discovery of the fields to the current stage. During this time, Uganda tried to route the pipeline through Kenya, rewrote laws, attracted new partners, and increased the budget from $3.5 billion to $5 billion.

⏩ While the Chinese and French authorities solemnly announce their commitment to clean energu and green transition, their companies are just as solemnly rushing to Africa for new oil.

🔸 Over the previous month alone, TotalEnergies joined extraction projects in Namibia, Mozambique, and Nigeria, while Chinese oil giants such as CNOOC and CNPC are promoting their projects from Niger and Chad to Uganda.

Apparently, the French and Chinese believe that they can manage African oil much more ecologically than Africans themselves.

Devils Below