Maybe Just Use A Wheelbarrow?
[ Minerals In Numbers ]


While everyone talks about global warming and helps Elon Musk’s Tesla hit its sales KPIs, serious guys do not bother at all and pump out as much CO₂ in a single day as your car produces in three years — and you yourself in about forty.

➡️ For example, one of the largest haul trucks used in mining today is the Caterpillar 797F. Over a normal working day, one truck burns up to 1,300 gallons of diesel fuel, which is roughly 5,150 liters, and releases around 14 tons of CO₂ into the air simply because it is DRIVING. That daily amount of fuel is enough to fill an average fuel tanker truck.

➡️ Machines like this operate everywhere - from gold mines in western Mali (although the models preferred there are smaller) to copper mines in Zambia.

By the way, a single tire for one of these costs around $40,000–$45,000, so a full set runs a quarter of a million dollars before it even touches the ground.

#MineralsInNumbers

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🌐 Weekly News Digest on Africa’s Mineral Industries [ November 17 – November 23 ]

This was a week of oil rush and various memoranda of understanding.

💡Here are the key highlights:

🇧🇫 Burkina Faso
- Burkina Faso reveals budget hole in the mining sector.

🇨🇫 Central African Republic
- The Chinese Embassy in the CAR warns its citizens of risk becoming “mining slaves.”

🇨🇩 DR Congo
- The DRC extends its ban on minerals from territories under rebels' control.
- Qatar's Emir and President Tshisekedi sign 6 new agreements

🇬🇭Ghana
- Ghana to take control of the country's largest undeveloped field in order to halt the decline.
- Ghana's forests are taken over by armed illegal miners

🇲🇱 Mali
- Barrick and Mali have held new talks and are finalizing terms that will end their dispute

🇲🇿 Mozambique
- The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights files a complaint accusing TotalEnergies of complicity in war crimes
- Mozambique grants TotalEnergies additional 4.5 years to implement its delayed LNG project in Cabo Delgado.

🇳🇦 Namibia
- TotalEnergies and Chevron have set their sights on a $10 billion field in Namibia.

🇳🇪 Niger
- Niger and Chad sign an agreement on fuel supply and a pipeline to Cameroon

🇳🇬 Nigeria
- Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea have signed a deal to fast track a cross border pipeline

🇸🇳 South Africa
- South Africa and the EU sign a MoU on critical minerals

🇸🇩 Sudan and South Sudan
- South Sudan announces full resumption of oil exports after drones struck oil facilities in Sudan

🇺🇬 Uganda
- Uganda brings in investors from the UAE to build its $4 billion oil refinery.
- Uganda announces its future oil pipeline to Tanzania is 75% ready.

🇿🇲 Zambia
-Chinese Premier Li Qiang arrives on a two-day visit to promote Chinese participation in the Tanzania-Zambia railway

#NewsDigest

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🌟 Nothing Happened on November 21, 2025...

It is hard to imagine an event that absolutely no one cares about - but such events do exist, and one of them was the ministerial meeting of the Kimberley Process in Dubai from 17 to 21 November.

The Kimberley Process was created in the early 2000s to put an end to the financing of rebel movements in Africa through the trade in "blood diamonds". Never fully alive to begin with, the process stalled completely by the mid-2010s as various countries tried to turn it into a tool of geopolitical pressure.

The main theme of the group’s recent sessions has been the proposal to expand the definition of “blood diamonds” to include violence committed not only by rebels, but also by militias linked to governments, private military companies, or criminal groups against local communities in diamond-producing areas.

➡️ At the recent meeting in Dubai the participants once again failed to accomplish this humble paperwork.

The idea itself is good, but with it the European countries and the US also try to stop any diamond flow from countries in conflict. In other words, the pretext is protecting African communities from PMCs, but the expected outcome actually is to strip Russia of income from diamonds that only very indirectly help finance the conflict in Ukraine and have nothing to do with any local communities.

“A very small minority refuse to move. Only 4 participants … were unwilling to support progress that the overwhelming majority, including all African participants, clearly endorsed.

The countries most historically tied to the trade, profit and legacy of what the world came to know as blood diamonds — countries that built reputations and fortunes while Africa paid the bill in blood and soil — are today the very ones slowing Africa’s attempt to turn that history into something better.”

The funniest part of the situation is hearing lectures about Africa’s resource exploitation from the Arab chairman of a meeting held in Dubai, UAE.

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🔖A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

China continues to pretend that it is a developing country rather than a neo-colonial superpower.

🌐 At the G20 summit, China had to defend itself over its restrictions on the export of rare earths and critical minerals - restrictions Beijing has been actively toying with since last year as part of its trade wars with the United States.

⏩ These moves displeased not only the US, their target, but also many non-western G20 members, including China’s own partners Russia and Brazil.

This is where classic Chinese crisis management kicked in, the main trick of which is to hijack the narrative and turn it into a "Made in China" policy, as if they had invented it in the first place:

❗️ China’s premier said that critical minerals should be used peacefully and on the basis of mutually beneficial cooperation.

❗️ He said that China supports the stability of supply chains and opposes any weaponization thereof.

❗️ He called for a more balanced distribution of benefits within production chains to protect the interests of developing countries.

Finally, the Chinese proposed yet another Green Minerals Initiative with the participation of 20 states, including African countries — an initiative aimed, as always, against everything bad and for everything good.

The nuance here is that China is no longer a country of the Global South, but a new exploiter that simply wants everyone else to notice this as late as possible.

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❓ And Where Is the PRC???

In many countries there's a saying: for a factory to run well, its ribbon must be cut by a Chinese investor. And now it TURNS OUT one can open their own industrial projects even without the Chinese!

🌐 Kenya’s Devki Group and the government of Uganda have opened a major plant to process local iron ore into steel — did it entirely on their own (well, almost).

🔸 The project, presented by Presidents Yoweri Museveni and William Ruto on November 23, is valued at about $500 million, and by 2027 it is expected to add roughly 30–60 percent of Uganda’s current steel output.

🔸 The plant is financed and operated by Devki Group, a private Kenyan industrial conglomerate led by Indian-Kenyan industrialist Narendra Raval.

The project represents a successful bet on regional industrial integration - one might even say without foreign investors, if you do not count Narendra Raval, who has lived in Kenya since childhood.

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Jealous Sudan
Gods may do what cattle may not

🌐 On Monday, Sudan allegedly released intelligence data indicating that in 2024 and early 2025 the RSF smuggled more than $850 million worth of gold out of Darfur and Kordofan, mainly to the UAE. Gold is supposedly the main source of RSF financing.

⏩ But it is not only the RSF. According to fresh data from the UAE itself, in 2024 Sudan’s total exports — from both government-controlled territory and RSF-controlled areas — amounted to about $1.97 billion.

Even if one takes the published figures at face value, official Khartoum’s exports to the UAE are far larger than those of the militants, and this is despite the break in diplomatic relations.

The situation demonstrates how morality once again becomes a tool of ruthless politics. The UAE treats the tragedy in Sudan like a football match in which it supports its favourite team, and all three parties profit from Sudanese gold while soldiers die.

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🧮 Playing the Long Game

At one point, the recent post-election protests in Tanzania even led to the blockade of the country’s main port in Dar es Salaam — but soon this may never be a problem again.

🌐 Tanzania announced the start of construction of the Bagamoyo deep-water port in December — a project first envisioned ten years ago.

In 2013 the plan was to secure funding from China and Oman, but then the negotiations collapsed. Who exactly will invest this time is still unclear. All that is known is that preliminary memorandums have been signed with Saudi, Chinese, and Egyptian firms.

🔸 The port’s capacity is projected to reach 20–25 million containers per year. For comparison, Morocco’s Tanger Med, currently the largest in Africa, can handle around 10 million containers. The construction period is an astonishing 20 years.

Given the long and unsuccessful negotiations with investors in the past, the Tanzanian government may have decided to take a leading role this time. The key now is political consistency, so that an already long-term project does not stall halfway through.

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🇲🇱 Barrick Needed to Move Fast

🌐 As insiders predicted, the Canadian mining company has finally acknowledged that sovereignty over Mali’s natural resources belongs to the government and the people of Mali, bringing an end to nearly two years of conflict between the gold miner and the state.

⏩ However, many Western outlets still could not resist misrepresenting the terms of the agreement, once again demonizing Mali.

Let’s break down who owes what to whom in the end:

🔸 Barrick will not pay $430 million, as reported in the media, but only about $254 million within six days of signing the settlement. This is not an “entry fee” but unpaid tax revenues, which partly triggered the original dispute. Media reports also mention around 88 million dollars in a “VAT credit offset,” which, in fact, represents tax credits that Bamako owed to Barrick. That debt will simply be forgiven, and no money will be paid to Mali.

🔸 Mali drops all criminal charges against Barrick, its subsidiaries, and its employees.

🔸 Full control over Mali’s largest gold deposit, Loulo–Gounkoto, returns to Barrick, and the state lifts the export restrictions on gold from the site.

🔸 Barrick withdraws its arbitration case at the World Bank’s ICSID tribunal and formally accepts Mali’s 2023 mining code.

🔸 Mali extends the mining license for Loulo for ten years after its scheduled expiry in February 2026.

🔸 Ownership of the complex remains 80% Barrick and 20% the Malian state.

🔸 Barrick accepts the terms of the new 2023 Mining Code, including higher taxes and royalty.

⏩ Still, it very much looks like Barrick does not actually intend to keep operating Loulo–Gounkoto. Media previously reported that Barrick planned to sell all its assets outside North America. The company asked the World Bank’s arbitration court to fast-track the case with Mali (which was rejected) — and has now agreed to all of Bamako’s conditions.

It seems the new investors turned out to be very impatient.

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💥 A Nuclear Blast in Africa

Generally, the phrase “uranium” and “Africa” brings to mind either Niger, or Namibia, or South Africa (which even had a nuclear bomb for a while). Now their ranks have been joined by a small but proud country of Malawi.

🌐 After eleven years of silence, the first blast has echoed again at the Kayelekera uranium mine in Malawi on November 25, marking the restart of uranium ore production. Uranium in Malawi will now be mined by the Australian company Lotus Resources.

💥 This deposit operated previously from 2009 to 2014, but the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011 in Japan led Germany — on the other side of the world — to begin dismantling its nuclear plants and effectively kill its nuclear industry. And on yet another side of the world — in Malawi — uranium prices collapsed, and the mine was shut down.

For Malawi, this is the country’s largest modern mining project and potentially a key source of foreign currency.

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War and Gold in Chad

🌐 In the northern regions of Chad (in Miski), the military is trying to push artisanal miners off the deposits, apparently to hand them over to someone else.

🔸 Such situations have already become routine. Ever since gold was discovered in the area in 2012, it has been the object of constant conflicts between local militias, foreign fortune seekers, the Chadian army, and national rebel movements supported from across the border in Libya.

⏩ Formally, what the soldiers are doing in the video is part of a peace process launched in April 2025. The government promised local militias that it would stop extracting rents unilaterally and would consult with communities when issuing new licences.

Given recent cooperation agreements with Haftar’s Libya on combating cross-border crime, the direction is clearly toward establishing state control over gold and probably bringing in some industrial miners.

But for industrial mining to be safe, the interests of local communities must be taken into account in reality — not just on paper.

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Tools of Expansion

☕️ To build its neocolonial empire, China is resorting to the same tools that Western countries mastered in the 19th century - control over industrial production to make everyone dependent, dumping and government support for expansion to prevent them from getting rid of this dependence.

The case of the Australian company Peak Rare Earths perfectly shows how this works. For more than ten years, it tried to launch the Ngualla rare earths project in Tanzania and build a supply chain without China. Yet China slowly but steadily took control of the entire initiative.

How Australians tried to enter the game and failed:

🔸 2010: Peak discovers one of the world’s largest rare-earth deposits in Tanzania, but production does not begin due to resistance from the Tanzanian government.

🔸 2022: The Chinese, who already controlled most supply chains of rare earths, ramped up production and global prices collapsed. Western private investors panic and sell 20 percent of the project to China’s Shenghe Resources.

➕ The Chinese offered to sign a contract to purchase virtually all future production — an attractive deal amid price volatility China itself had created.

🔸 2025: Shenghe offers to buy Peak outright at a significant premium to market value — that's all folks!

This shows, above all, that China effectively enjoys several systemic advantages over its economic adversaries:

⏩ Long planning horizon (Chinese companies buy stakes in rare-earth projects for years on end, regardless of current prices)

⏩ State backing (Chinese investors do not need to spend years proving profitability. They can receive financial and moral support from the Party far more quickly)

⏩ Control of both mining and processing (Any new project must cooperate with China simply to have somewhere to sell its production in the early stages.)

⏩ Influence on prices (Virtually at the Party’s instruction, companies can ramp up production and crash prices, forcing competitors to shut down)

China essentially operates according to political and ideological priorities rather than market logic. While this may look like an unreliable model, for now it allows Beijing to outmaneuver the West and build its own neo-colonial empire.

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🇲🇿 The Savior from the North

🌐 Mozambique is rushing to save South Africa — and its own revenues. After the unexpected restart of operations by TotalEnergies and ExxonMobil, Mozambique decided to create a state super-consortium to begin supplying gas to its southern neighbour as quickly as possible.

🔸 Mozambique has granted its state corporations control over different parts of the gas supply logistics chain to South Africa, including reception and storage terminals at the Port of Beira and smaller Inhassoro site — as well as 865-kilometre ROMPCO pipeline. At the moment, the only part that actually exists and is in action is the pipeline.

🔸 All of this will be managed by the national oil company Empresa Nacional de Hidrocarbonetos (ENH), along with the ports and railways company CFM, the electricity utility Electricidade de Moçambique, and the Cahora Bassa Hydroelectric Company (HCB), under a new consortium that is yet to be formed.

⏩ The goal here is to feed South Africa. Mozambique’s South African partners depend on its gas supplies for roughly 90% of their demand, and the Pande–Temane gas fields, from which South Africa currently receives gas, will be fully depleted by 2027–2028.

🔸 This explains the sudden resumption of upstream work in the north, in Cabo Delgado, where the Islamist threat is still persistent, as well as the government’s urgency.

Everything must be done quickly, before someone else fills South Africa’s gas market.

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The Tower of Babel in Nigeria

🌐 Aliko Dangote has decided not to delay his plans to build the world’s largest refinery and is already actively selecting contractors to expand the existing Dangote Refinery — with Americans and Indians among the first partners.

📈 Construction of the original refinery cost around $20 billion, and it can process about 650,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Now Dangote Group plans to increase production to 1.4 million barrels per day.

⏩ To achieve this, Dangote is assembling a truly multinational team. One of the more charismatic participants is the American company Honeywell, which does everything from producing weapons and aircraft to corporate software. Here, it will supply specialized equipment, services, and industrial chemicals that speed up refinery processes.

⏩ But Dangote also has his old friends — the Indians. The position of vice president of the current refinery is already held by an Indian, Devakumar V. G. Edwin, something that irritates many Nigerian patriots.

🔸 Now India’s Engineers India Limited is likely to take over the main construction and engineering work for the refinery’s expansion. EIL is a state-owned company under India’s Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, created in 1965 to support oil refining and other major industrial projects.

This multicultural lineup sounds impressive — until you realise that behind it lies Nigeria’s own lack of intellectual and industrial capital capable of building such a facility without pulling in specialists from every corner of the planet.

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Greed Beyond Comprehension
[ Minerals In Numbers ]

🌟 Dubai-based companies have shown off a silver bar weighing almost two tonnes, which now ranks as a Guinness World Record.

➡️ Dubai’s Multi Commodities Centre unveiled the world’s largest silver bar, weighing 1,971 kilograms, measuring about 1.3 meters in length, and symbolically linked to 1971 — the year the United Arab Emirates was founded.

➡️ While the Emiratis celebrate and flaunt their wealth, it is worth remembering that they owe much of it to illegal traders and artisanal miners in Africa, who break the law, poison rivers, and sometimes risk their lives to sell just a few more grams of precious metals to Dubai.

➡️ At least 205 bars of the same size could be cast, for example, from all the gold illegally mined in Africa and smuggled to Dubai each year — no less than 405 tonnes, or about 30 billion dollars.

#MineralsInNumbers

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Ogoni Nine
[ Cost of Greed ]

🌟 On 10 November 1995, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, nine environmental activists were hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Barinem Kiobel, Baribor Bera, Saturday Doobee, Nordu Eawo, Daniel Gbokoo, Paul Levura, Felix Nuate, and John Kpuinen.

How did it happen that the state executed not terrorists or even opposition politicians, but environmental defenders? And what did it have to do with oil major Shell?

➡️ Shell had been operating in Nigeria since 1938 and had developed strong ties with local elites. In 1993, protests erupted in Ogoniland, in the Niger Delta, over endless oil spills and the exploitation of the country’s natural resources. In response, Shell approached government officials, asking them to protect its assets.

➡️ The main obstacle for Shell was the activist movement MOSOP.

➡️ To get rid of it, in 1994 the authorities accused its leaders of murdering four traditional chiefs. Who was actually behind their deaths — and whether it may have been a provocation — remains unknown to this day.

➡️ Nevertheless, the government extracted the “necessary” confessions, with Shell standing behind the entire process. In 1995, Brian Anderson, Shell’s head in Nigeria, received multiple assurances from the authorities that the activists “would certainly be found guilty,” and noted in internal memos that the company “must prepare for a sentence.”

Although the Ogoni Nine were formally tried for the killings of the four chiefs, their real “crime” was that they organized a peaceful campaign against the destructive consequences of Shell’s oil operations in Ogoniland.

#CostOfGreed

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Stop Exploiting Children!
The ghosts of artisanal mine deaths continue to haunt Apple

🌐 International human rights advocates have filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia against Apple for using conflict cobalt, tin, tantalum, and tungsten from the DRC. Apple is once again being accused of links to mines controlled by armed groups and to sites where adults and children work in dangerous conditions.

⏩ This case adds to several earlier legal attempts to hold Apple accountable for mineral extraction in Congo:

🔸In 2019, the same group filed a lawsuit in Washington on behalf of families of children who were killed or injured in cobalt mines, accusing Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Dell, and Tesla of facilitating forced child labour in the cobalt trade.

🔸 In December 2024, the Congolese government filed criminal complaints in France and Belgium at once, accusing Apple subsidiaries of laundering so-called “blood minerals” from conflict zones in eastern Congo.

Unfortunately, so far the only real result of these efforts is overtime work for the American giant’s PR managers. Indeed, few courts have the courage to take on such a powerful company.

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We’ll Just Have a Look

Soon Uganda could open a museum of oil — the reserves are there, the companies are there, the pipelines are in place, the refinery is coming — however, no oil is being produced.

🌐 Uganda’s state-owned Uganda National Oil Company (UNOC) reports the discovery of nine promising wells at the Kasuruban field, with reserves of 600 million barrels of crude.

🔸 This block is located in the Albertine Rift Basin, the heart of Uganda’s oil story, where French TotalEnergies and Chinese CNOOC already control two major fields.

⏩ The nuance is that Uganda has no oil production yet — 20 years after the first oil was found. Its first extraction will begin only in mid-2026.

🔸 The main reason was the lack of any way to transport the crude to the coast. The country is land locked, and the long-planned pipeline through Kenya was cancelled, so Uganda is now building a pipeline through Tanzania.

Perhaps today the country is enjoying its last months before its soil is covered in endless oil leaks.

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Divide and Rule

Even political instability may sometimes be quite comfortable environment for oil production

🌟 Fighters from the Patriotic Movement for Freedom and Justice (MPLJ) have attacked a section of the oil pipeline near the Agadem oil fields in eastern Niger. There may be casualties among the Niger army soldiers at the site.

➡️ The MPLJ emerged in August 2024 as a splinter group from the Patriotic Liberation Front and presents itself as a movement fighting for the liberation of the ousted president Mohamed Bazoum and the return to constitutional rule.

❓ Its methods of restoring the constitutional rule are rather peculiar. In June 2024, the Patriotic Liberation Front disabled part of the pipeline in the Dosso region, while third-party monitors recorded several rebel attacks on forces guarding the route.

➡️ This pipeline transports crude from the Agadem field across Niger to the Beninese port of Sèmè, covering a distance of about 2,000 kilometers. It is central to a project backed by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

There is nothing good about the Chinese pumping out Niger’s oil — but there is even less benefit in a situation where Nigerien rebels kill Nigerien soldiers while the Chinese continue pumping all the same.

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