🧮 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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1984 in Real Life

⚡️A French court has unexpectedly discovered that oil giant TotalEnergies was lying about its environmental friendliness.

✏️ A court in Paris has ruled against TotalEnergies for misleading consumers. The company, which extracts oil and gas around the world, had claimed it wanted to become “carbon-neutral by 2050.”

The already absurd picture is made even more surreal by the fact that this is the world’s first full-fledged court ruling against an oil company that branded itself as environmentally friendly.

🚩 The French oil giant TotalEnergies is constantly accused of harming the environment and violating human rights, especially in Africa (including in Mozambique and Uganda). The company has been extracting oil and gas from the continent since its origin in the colonial era.

Now the company will finally stop lulling the public to sleep, and African human rights activists have gained a strong argument to use in national courts.

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🇳🇬 The Congolisation of Nigeria

Since 2023, Nigeria has been determined to wash away its status as Africa’s gas station and invested heavily in what is expected to be the pillars of global fossil-fuel phaseout — solar panels and lithium used to produce batteries. Yet behind the large-scale investments still lies the same old exploitation of human labour.

🔸 Timeline of investments in Nigeria's lithium processing:

2023 — construction begins on Chinese Ganfeng Lithium Industry’s $250 million lithium processing plant.

2024 — still Chinese Avatar New Energy Materials launches another $250 million lithium processing plant.

October 2025 — these two plants along with smaller projects, had supposedly brought about $850 million in investments to Nasarawa State, Nigeria.

2025 — Nigeria's Minister of Solid Minerals Dele Alake announces total lithium investments of around $1.3 billion.

⏩ Nigeria has become a hotspot for Chinese investment in lithium processing. The $1.3 billion figure is the latest estimate from Nigerian authorities of China’s presence in the sector. One might think: foreigners are coming and, notably, not just mining and exporting raw ore but actually processing it locally — a dream, right?

A dream it would be — but what if all these investments and projects depend on low-paid, dangerous manual labour?

🚫 While we know there is simply no industrial lithium mining in Nigeria, all these shiny new Chinese plants rely on poor people whom economic hardship has left with no choice but to dig in the ground for the feedstock China needs — often illegally, often side by side with children.

"I can’t stop the children because throughout Nasarawa State, if you go to all the lithium mining sites, all the work being done at the mining sites is illegal. It’s not the work of a company. If companies come and realize there is lithium on the site, they will not allow children to work there; they will fence off the entire area and ensure that no one enters, especially children, who are beggars and who, if they do not work, cannot afford to feed and care for their families."

— said one illegal miner to journalists in 2024.

That's the cost of Nigeria's lithium rush. And so another African country is emerging — just like the Democratic Republic of Congo with its cobalt — where the minerals powering the world’s bright green future are extracted by the hands of hungry children.

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🇨🇲 Passive Income for Everyone — You Just Need to…

To earn passive income that will instantly make you a millionaire, you only need to meet 2 simple conditions: 1) have a neighbouring landlocked country with oil, and 2) lay a long pipeline across your territory so that it can sell that oil through you.

🌐 This is exactly what Cameroon did — and its national treasury estimates since the beginning of the year it has earned 20.3 billion CFA francs (about $34 million).

Since 2003, the 1,070-km Chad–Cameroon pipeline has transported oil from the Doba Basin in Chad to a marine terminal near Kribi, under a scheme designed jointly with the World Bank and a consortium originally led by ExxonMobil and Petronas.

🔸 But even this jackpot — obtained without much effort — did not satisfy Cameroon’s authorities. Their target for this year is to squeeze about four times more out of the pipeline (around $140 million).

❓ On what basis Cameroon calculated this figure, and whether the target came to Paul Biya in a dream, remains unclear. In recent years, Cameroon has usually earned exactly what it earns now — between 36 and 40 billion CFA francs annually.

🔸 For income earned from a project in which your role is simply to let oil flow from the fields to the ports, the current numbers are more than acceptable. And if oil from Niger also begins flowing through this same pipeline, Cameroon may well see even more wealth.

A pity that only a tiny fraction of the population will ever feel it.

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Europe To Help End Colonialism?

Wherever one is — in Nigeria with its lithium, in Guinea with its iron, in Ghana with its still untapped aluminium — they must understand that Africa now is at the centre of a struggle for critical minerals between "the North" and China. And China, having concentrated almost all global processing capacity for key solid minerals, is clearly winning.

🌐  Against this backdrop, the EU–Africa summit held earlier this week in Luanda was striking: European countries promised Africa — attention — liberation from colonial-style exploitation.

“We will promote the sustainable development of value chains to enhance the capacity of local industries to participate in regional and global markets and to diversify and secure global supply chains, for instance in the field of strategic and critical minerals.”

— states the Joint Declaration signed at the summit.

🌟 Words that touch the soul. But what stands behind them? What stands behind them is Europe’s desire to see mineral processing take place anywhere — anywhere except China.

But, is this good for African nations anyway?

✅ Of course it is — but only if governments ensure Europe truly delivers on the following:

⏩ Europeans must actually invest in building processing plants — so far, they prefer to fund railways and ports for export.

⏩ The new plants must be at least partly owned by local companies and fully staffed by local workers — if everything is owned by foreign capital, it is simply a new form of exploitation.

⏩ The level of domestic processing must continuously increase — if the new facilities merely sort ore for export, that is not local processing.

For fear of Chinese dominance, Europe may now promise anything. Promises are fine — but will the Europeans truly fulfill them?

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⏰ Better Late Than Never

Zimbabwe has finally started thinking about the future — at a moment when the future has already been here for several months.

🌐  The authorities of Zimbabwe have at last considered raising the gold royalty. Instead of the previous modest 5%, royalties on gold will now range from 3 to 10% depending on the price (and at current prices, that means 10%).

⏩ Gold exports brought the country around $2.5 billion in 2024 and remain Zimbabwe’s main source of hard currency. Gold accounts for roughly one-third of all export value.

📈 Gold prices have been rising for several years, but especially sharply over the past six months — prompting many governments to revise old mining terms in favour of greater state participation or higher taxes. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Côte d’Ivoire moved in this direction long ago, while some others, for instance Ghana and Nigeria, are still falling behind.

Even though the decision was clearly taken late, most analysts expect gold prices to remain high for the next few years — so Zimbabwe will still have time to catch some profits.

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✏️ Peculiarities of East African Bureaucracy

Building a giant pipeline without paperwork — no problem. Listening to human rights defenders — “your application was filed on the wrong form.”

🌐 On 27 November 2025, the Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice upheld an earlier decision to dismiss a case filed in 2020 by civil society groups from Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, which challenged the construction of the EACOP oil pipeline running from Uganda to Tanzania’s coast.

❗️ While the petition raised concerns about risks to the Lake Victoria Basin, the lack of approval from Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority, missing environmental impact assessments at the start of construction, the appellate judges cited a violation of technical filing procedures.

⏩ According to independent research and media reports, the pipeline — being built by France’s TotalEnergies and China’s CNOOC — has displaced around 13,000 people in Uganda and Tanzania.

National authorities and courts are even more favourable toward the oil giants and their project. There is nothing left to hope for — only to wait until the roughly 1,500 kilometres of land in Uganda and Tanzania turn into one long strip of oil spills, just like Nigeria's Ogoniland.

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