Say My Name

📍 Illegal gold mining exists in almost every country — but only where illegal miners are truly numerous do their communities begin to form their own culture, and locals give them special names.

🇿🇦 In South Africa, illegal miners are called zama zamas.

The term comes from the isiZulu verb ukuzama, meaning “to try” or “to take a chance.” Today the term refers to people who enter abandoned underground mines with no safety guarantees.

🇬🇭 In Ghana, small-scale such outlaws are known as galamsey.

Linguists link the word to the English phrase “gather them and sell.” The name reflects an important fact: illegal gold mining in Ghana does not take place in deep mines but on alluvial deposits along rivers.

🇿🇼 In Zimbabwe, illegal or unregistered gold seekers are known as makorokoza.

Makorokoza is a term meaning simply “illegal miners.” Although the word carries a negative connotation, it is often used by local cultural figures as a badge of identity — a way of highlighting their connection to grassroots culture and to risk.

❓ Remarkably, these names genuinely reflect different attitudes toward fortune-seekers and the different methods of gold extraction across countries.

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Nigeria Is Losing Its Gas

Economic expediency still trumps ecology and rational resource use

🔥 In a single month — September 2025 — more than 11.3 billion cubic feet of gas from Nigeria’s went straight into the sky as flame and smoke.

🔸 Although associated gas can be captured, sold, used in other sectors of the economy, or even reinjected into oil reservoirs to aid production, oil companies continue to flare gas simply because it is cheaper than ensuring its reuse.

⏩ Remarkably, the government plays along with corporate interests. The gas-flaring data in question was published by the state oil company NNPC, while the relevant regulator, NOSDRA, has stopped sharing this information with the public since May.

⚠️ The result is enormous environmental harm. The gas flared in September alone produced around 630,000 tonnes of CO₂ — to emit the same amount it would alternatively take some 140,000 cars and an entire year.

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Rats Are Leaving the Ship

While the French and the Mozambican authorities hope to profit at any cost, Britain has assessed the real odds and walked away

🌐 The UK has withdrawn its $1.15 billion export credit guarantee for TotalEnergies’ gas project in Mozambique, in Cabo Delgado.

🔸 Officials described the reversal of the deal dating back to 2020 as a response to financial risks for British taxpayers in light of stricter UK legal requirements.

⏩ In reality, the reason for the royal retreat is simple: the TotalEnergies project is surrounded by swarms of extremists.

🔸 The project had been on hold since 2021 but was restarted in November, despite the fact that the threat from insurgents has only grown.

⏳ The French at TotalEnergies and the Mozambican authorities are tired of waiting endlessly for profits — especially now that alternative gas export sources are on the verge of depletion.

Soon we will see whether Mozambique and TotalEnergies win the roulette with the insurgents.

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Green Energy, But Not For All

Many corporations love to boast about their environmental credentials — and some even do so without lying — but in certain places green energy is simply the only option

🌐 DRC's major copper company Ivanhoe Mining, backed by Chinese and Arab investors, has launched at its Kamoa-Kakula copper mine what it calls “the largest and greenest copper smelter in Africa”.

🔌 At the event —where the investors also paraded traditional rulers — the company noted that the enormous 60-megawatt giant furnace would be powered by one of the DRC’s hydroelectric plants.

⚡️ The achievement is indeed commendable, but its scale fades a bit once you consider that the DRC has virtually no “non-green” electricity at all — roughly 99% of its power already comes from hydropower.

⛔️ So far, companies are trying to create a national image by inviting traditional chiefs, while only about 22% of the Congolese have access to electricity. Congolese green power generation is not the result of elaborate climate policy but of poverty and economic underdevelopment.

Let us thank the Chinese investors for not building oil burners all around Congo — but it would be nice if ordinary people could plug into the green socket too.

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🇬🇧 Traditional British Casino

Investors from the foggy British Isles are once again trying to seek their fortune in Uganda — once again with very slim chances of success

☕️ In 2027, the UK-based Blencowe Resources plans to begin graphite mining in Uganda. If the project succeeds — which is unlikely — Uganda will become the 4th African country to produce graphite.

🔖 On social media, the company is trying to tap into anti-Chinese sentiment and promises a graphite supply chain independent of China.

⚰️ However, in a world where China controls about 3/4 of global graphite production and practically monopolises its processing, a single round of price dumping would send this project straight to the graveyard of past British attempts to re-enter Uganda.

⏳ British investors have tried to play big in Uganda’s extractive sector before, but without much success. During the colonial period, Uganda did have some copper mining, but the colony’s main profile was agricultural.

➡️ In modern times, the British company Tullow Oil drilled the first successful oil wells near Lake Albert — but never managed to start production and eventually sold its assets to the more patient French.

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👑 Mali Closes the Era of Turbulence

Good accounting has earned Assimi Goïta an additional $1.2 billion

💵 Mali has just recovered about $1.2 billion from its mining sector after a large-scale audit of mining companies’ accounts.

➡️ This outcome symbolically closes the turbulent period that followed the introduction of a new Mining code in 2023, which ensured the state gets a greater share of gold profits. The code was followed by audits of companies’ past operations, renegotiations with foreign mining companies, and nearly two years of dispute with the country’s largest miner Barrick.

📈 The special debt-recovery commission has so far collected 761 billion CFA francs, almost twice the initial estimates of what companies owed.

Now that all renegotiations are over and Barrick has accepted the new rules, Mali can confidently name itself Africa's most impressive example of successful resource nationalism policies.

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A Poor Transnational Corporation Has Been Hurt 😢

TotalEnergies’ gas project has always been extremely important to the Mozambican authorities — but only few could have guessed to what extent

🛡 Apparently having run out of domestic problems, Mozambique’s president has decided to defend the oil and gas giant TotalEnergies, after a European human rights group recently accused it of being linked to the deaths of around 100 innocent people near its project in Cabo Delgado.

“There are those who take advantage of a sensitive context to spread disinformation and create an environment hostile to investment … There is disinformation and manipulation of public opinion claiming there is no respect for human rights”,

Daniel Chapo said during a visit to Cabo Delgado.

💊 His remarks are clearly aimed at restoring at least public confidence in the project, which has already suffered from recent withdrawals of foreign partners in the context of persistent terrorist threat.

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💡 1,000 Years of Light
[ Minerals In Numbers ]

Have you ever wondered how much oil has already been pumped out of the planet — and how much is still left?

🛢 When it comes to Africa, calculations by the South African organisation Africa Energy Chamber tell us that Africa has produced around 420 billion barrels of oil equivalent over the period of recorded extraction.

A barrel of oil equivalent (BOE) is a unit of measurement equal to the energy released by burning one barrel of crude oil, allowing both oil and natural gas to be measured with a single metric.

⚡ 420 billion BOE is an enormous amount of oil and gas — enough to power and heat the entire continent for approximately 715 years at current levels of electricity consumption.

⌛️ The number itself is both awe-inspiring and depressing. But what looks even more discouraging is the fact that the remaining known reserves of oil and gas are less than half of what has already been produced — 180 billion BOE versus 420 billion.

In other words, we have already extracted 70% of known reserves. And the saddest part is that the benefits have gone to all and sundry — foreigners, local elites, armed groups — except ordinary people.

#MineralsInNumbers

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Create Waste and Walk Away

The French were apparently unable to clean up properly before leaving Niger

☢️ Niger’s Minister of Justice, Alio Daouda, announced that the state plans to sue Orano, the French state-owned nuclear company, over several million tonnes of radioactive waste at an abandoned uranium site near Arlit in the north of the country.

Radiation measurements at the site show 7–10 microsieverts/hour, compared to the normal 0.5 microsieverts/hour and samples contain Bismuth-207 and Chromium-10, both dangerous to human health even at a distance of 10 metres.

⚙️ The French had been operating uranium mines in Arlit for decades. Independent field studies by Greenpeace and French human-rights groups in 2009 and 2010 already documented abnormally high radiation levels in residential areas and uranium contamination in drinking water.

🗑 In 2025, the authorities ended cooperation with Orano and nationalised the mine. Although the Minister of Justice did not say it outright, it seems likely that the “sale of uranium” to Russia that the French media have been lamenting recently actually referred to radioactive waste — which the government decided to transport for processing.

Ironically, now it looks like the French prompted the Niger-sells-our-uranium outcry — and in doing so revived themselves the long-standing issue of careless treatment of nuclear waste. Whoever in Niger came up with this PR move deserves a bonus.

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🎞 Israeli Mafia in Congo

A Jewish businessman helping to launder billions of dollars in one of the poorest countries on Earth — it sounds either like a joke or a Hollywood thriller starring Nicolas Cage

🛫. Young Israeli diamond trader Dan Gertler arrived in Congo in the late 1990s. An inexperienced businessman might easily have stayed unnoticed — if the country’s new president Laurent-Désiré Kabila had not been in desperate need of cash.

Dan Gertler (born 23 December 1973) is an Israeli billionaire businessman in natural resources. Until 2022, his group had mining and oil interests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and has invested in diamonds, iron ore, gold, cobalt, copper, agriculture, and banking. As of 2025 his fortune was estimated at $1.5 billion by Forbes.

💎 That is when the diamond dealer caught the government’s eye. Gertler offered the fragile president $20 million, and in return received a monopoly over diamond trade in the DRC.

🇺🇸 After the death of the elder President Kabila, Gertler became a close ally of his heir, Joseph, serving as his wallet and lobbyist. He even connected the new president with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — a meeting that helped Kabila secure international recognition.

🗳 In 2011, elections caught the regime short of cash again — and once more Gertler was there to help. He offered to buy state shares in mining projects.

🇨🇭 To do this, Gertler teamed up with Swiss giant Glencore, which still mines copper and cobalt in Congo. Together they carried out more than a dozen deals worth over a billion dollars.

💸True, the prices were far below market value — but Kabila did not care, as he won the re-election.

⛔️Gertler’s schemes were so brazen that even the US imposed sanctions on him in 2017. In 2022, Kinshasa did reclaim some of the assets gifted to him — this time at an outrageously inflated price.

And so he — as well as his Swiss partners — continues to live comfortably, profiting from minerals stolen from the Congolese people.

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A New Minister in Namibia

📰 Namibia has appointed a journalist as its new Minister of Industry and Mines.

🌐 The President of Namibia has nominated Modestus Amutse — a former journalist, deputy minister of information, and chair of the parliamentary committee on legal and constitutional affairs — as the country’s new Minister of Industry, Energy and Mines.

Namibia is a major producer of uranium and diamonds, and has discovered large offshore oil reserves in the Orange Basin. Its first crude production may begin around 2030.

🚩 The ministerial seat Amutse has received is highly influential but also volatile — the president frequently reshuffles industrialisation ministers, and for a brief period in October she even held the portfolio herself.

⏩ Amutse’s appointment may reflect a desire to install someone from outside the entrenched industrial and mining networks, someone who would be less tied to existing elites and more directly accountable to the president.

🔸 Alternatively, his background in PR and IT may have been decisive factor - instrumental in terms of establishing new communication patterns and maintaining stronger informational oversight over miners.

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Côte d’Ivoire’s Hazardous Flying Dutchman
[Cost of Greed]

Twenty years ago, off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire, an event occurred in which no one drowned — yet it could easily overshadow the tragic sinking of the Titanic.

In 2006, a multinational company called Trafigura faced an unusual problem: it had purchased an extremely sulphurous but cheap petroleum product known as coker gasoline, which needed to be somehow refined into regular fuel.

⏩ The goal was not only to refine the hazardous substance, but also to save as much as possible along the way.⏪

⚓️ Instead of hiring a proper refinery, Trafigura decided to process the toxic feedstock at sea — on an old ship called Probo Koala, using an outdated method known as "caustic washing", in which coker gasoline is treated with caustic soda.

☣️ The scheme worked, and the company sold the resulting fuel for $19 million — but what remained on board was toxic waste.

💵 And once again money was accorded priority: Trafigura rejected an offer to treat the waste in the Netherlands for $620,000, and the Probo Koala began wandering along the coast of West Africa in search of anyone willing to rid it of its poisonous burden.

⚠️ Eventually the company hired shady contractors in Abidjan for miserable $17,000. Upon arrival, after the ship unloaded the waste, the material was allegedly spread by subcontractors across the city and its surroundings, dumped in waste grounds, public landfills, and along roads in populated areas.

In the weeks that followed, the BBC reported that

17 people died

,

23 were hospitalized

, and another

40,000 sought medical treatment

.

🤝 For fear of prosecution, Trafigura agreed in 2007 to pay the Ivorian government around $200 million — for an indulgence that granted the company sweeping immunity from prosecution.

Hazardous waste still lie in the soil underneath Abidjan.

#CostOfGreed

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🤖 Now It’s Safe for Sure

An unusual cutting-edge solution has been introduced to protect pipelines in the Niger Delta

🌐 Pipeline Infrastructure Nigeria Limited, the company responsible for monitoring Nigeria’s Trans Niger Pipeline, has decided to hire town criers.

🙂 The idea is that the criers will (no doubt sincerely) sell the pipeline to people in 215 communities across Rivers, Bayelsa, Imo, and Abia States — and keep watch over local sentiment toward the project.

➡️ Thus, instead of addressing the source of popular discontent — endless oil spills and resource exploitation — the pipeline beneficiaries opted for primitive propaganda.

In any case, talking to people and engaging in dialogue is always better than cleansing activists.

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👋 China. Go Out.

How China’s policy of encouraging overseas investment created lunar landscapes across Africa

🌍 In the 1990s, China launched its “Go Out” policy, encouraging state-owned and private entities to expand abroad in search of resources and investment opportunities. One of the main drivers was the need to secure mineral supplies at low prices to sustain a slowing domestic economy.

“We need to implement a ‘going outside’ strategy, encouraging enterprises with comparative advantages to make investments abroad, to establish processing operations, to exploit foreign resources with local partners, to contract for international engineering projects, and to increase the export of labor.”

— Zhu Rongji, Premier of the State Council
Report to the National People’s Congress, 2001

👥 Alongside state companies, thousands of ordinary fortune-seekers from also headed overseas, emboldened by the prospect of “quick enrichment” amid rising gold prices.

🌍 The influx of Chinese enthusiasts was most visible in West Africa, especially Ghana. Estimates suggest that between 2008 and 2013, more than 50,000 Chinese nationals entered the country to participate in illegal gold mining.

⚙️ But Chinese diggers were notable not only for their numbers. The “Go Out” policy allowed them to bring in heavy machinery on a massive scale — something previously unseen in illegal gold mining.

⏩ The scheme was simple:

🔸A major Chinese investor arrives in Country X with heavy equipment backed by the Chinese government and its loans under the "Going Out" policy
🔸Part of that equipment is then written off and quietly sold to illegal groups
🔸Those groups use it to level forests and dig enormous pits nearby.

🏁 As a result, local artisanal miners are either pushed out or join the Chinese operations, and the soil is left contaminated with mercury and lead all across the continent.

#PolicyReview

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It's Not the Black Pearl, Again…

🏴‍☠️ Fifty nautical miles off Equatorial Guinea, a routine gas shipment turned into an action thriller complete with a ship hijacking and a kidnapped crew

🌐 On December 3, armed pirates boarded the CGAS Saturn, a liquefied gas carrier en route from Gabon to Equatorial Guinea, seized 9 crew members, and vanished without a trace.

🌼 The pirates showed remarkable prudence — and environmental awareness — by leaving 4 people on board, apparently to maintain minimal control of the vessel.

🧭 There are enough pirates in the Gulf of Guinea to gather a full-fledged criminal navy. The Institute for Security Studies has even identified one group of 270 fighters under the unified command of a figure known as a "Border King". Such pirates mostly hide in the Niger Delta and along the Nigeria–Cameroon border.

⏩The fate of the gas carrier hijackers remains unknown. If they are not eaten by the Kraken, they will soon make a public demand for ransom.

The reason this ship became a target, however, is entirely clear: since there are no pipelines or rail links between Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, the two countries can trade — including in gas — only by sea.

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Oblivion in Congo

🛸In the not-so-famous 2013 Tom Cruise film Oblivion, aliens send huge flying machines to Earth that remotely harvest water and transfer it up to an orbital reservoir

🇨🇬 Why mention this? Because in Congo, Italian Eni has just put into operation a massive floating gas-processing ship designed to send gas straight to Europe.

📐The vessel the Italians dragged to the Congolese coast is 60 metres wide and 376 metres long. It was built in China beginning in 2023.

🏗Constructing a classic onshore LNG terminal in Congo would have required multibillion-dollar port works, new high-capacity pipelines, and the construction of the plant itself — something Eni clearly did not want to pay for.

👐 The result is very convenient: Congo’s role and the role of its population are reduced to a minimum, the gas flows to Europe, and the government receives whatever “change” falls out of the deals.

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Chains — But in Exchange for What?

Trump gathered an entire assembly of African leaders to sign agreements on peace in eastern DRC and the Great Lakes region — but in the end, Congo's Tshisekedi simply sold him the country

🇨🇩 On 4 December, the leaders of the DRC and Rwanda, as well as Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Angola and Togo, met in Washington to sign the “Washington Accords” — a package of agreements supposedly aimed at establishing peace in the Eastern DRC. However, it seems the only outcome of these accords will be unrestrained exploitation of the DRC by the US.

📄 The main terms under which Félix Tshisekedi effectively sold his country are laid out in the US–DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement.

According to it:

⏩ The DRC will create a Strategic Asset Reserve (SAR) — a special fund for resource assets managed by a joint commission of 5 members from Washington and 5 from Kinshasa (Article 4).

⏩ The fund will include a list of projects involving critical minerals and gold reserved for American investors. The DRC is obliged (Art. 4, para. 3) to constantly update the fund adding new assets.

⏩ The US investors enjoy the Droit du seigneur - that is the right of first refusal on resource shipments from SAR projects, as well as preferential rights to participate in those projects (Arts. 6–7).

🔸 Beyond the SAR, the DRC is obliged to export a fixed share of its resources via the US-backed Lobito Corridor (Art. 9).

🔸 Finally, there will be another structure — a Strategic Minerals Reserve, essentially a warehouse which is to be replenished by the Congolese state-owned companies (like Gecamines) and from which the US may withdraw critical minerals at its discretion in the event of a future confrontation with China (Art. 11).

❓ It is unclear what Congo gets in return. It is highly doubtful that the United States — having already secured such an agreement — will want or be able to force insurgents in eastern Congo to pack their bags and disappear.

🇨🇳 The only smidgen of “benefit” for the DRC in these slave-like terms is that the country’s existing exploitation by China will now be counterbalanced by a second (potential) exploitation by Washington.

Bravo, Félix! An exemplary colonial partition.

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🇳🇬 Nigeria’s Old Friends

Nigerian tycoons, the Chagoury brothers, have been doing business in the country longer than its modern political system has existed. And they have always managed to keep up with the times — constantly gathering new assets under their belt, now including lithium.

🧑‍⚖️ The UK-based company Jupiter Lithium has filed a lawsuit against the Nigerian government, claiming its rights to develop lithium in Kaduna State were violated. Reportedly, part of its assets was revoked over the summer and effectively transferred to another company — Atlantic Mining Technologies.

💰 Atlantic Mining Techniques is a Nigerian firm backed by local tycoons Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury, along with Australian investors.

🤝 The British, who had already invested millions of dollars in exploration and project development, seemingly have just goofed. The Chagoury brothers consistently secure the juiciest multi-billion-dollar concessions in Nigeria and maintain a close friendship with President Tinubu — whose son Seyi Tinubu allegedly holds stakes in some of their ventures.

💪 The Nigerian Govt has thus mounted a brave defense against Western companies grabbing local resources —only to promote the interests of elites with Nigerian citizenship (and, admittedly, also Lebanese citizenship and who knows what else).

Most likely, the small and not particularly wealthy Jupiter Lithium will eventually leave Nigeria empty-handed — a more important partner has appeared.

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🇹🇩 Chad: The West Returns

Western companies are once again engaging in Chad’s oil sector — and for now, with relative success

🛢 The Franco-British company Perenco has almost doubled its crude oil production in Chad, having reached 18,000 barrels per day.

📏 While this result would barely register in neighboring countries — in Cameroon or Nigeria it would be dismissed as a statistical error — for Chad it amounts to more than 10% of total national oil output.

➡️ This is a major shift in the oil industry of Chad, which is currently dominated by China’s CNPC.

➡️ For years, Chadian authorities hounded foreign companies, though the goal was more about securing kickbacks than about any real local development. In 2023 the government nationalized what remained of the Western majors’ footprint by taking over Savannah Energy’s assets. Leaving CNPC effectively the only serious player.

This is unlikely to have any impact on the general well-being of the Chadian population, but probably we may soon witness at least some competition between one of the richest companies in the world and a smaller but ambitious Franco-British venture for Chad’s resources.

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