Trump Seems to Have Found the Map of Africa 🗺

After signing the deal with the DRC and taking aim at Tanzania, the US has now set its sights on Zambia.

🗽 An American delegation arrived in Zambia to promise President Hakainde Hichilema financial support in exchange for reforms and “collaboration in the mining sector”. According to reports, the financial assistance will also be directed toward social needs.

🤝 It is clear what kind of cooperation Washington wants from Zambia: the country has huge copper-mining operations and reserves, but the sector is crowded with Chinese companies, which also recently secured an official concession to modernise the TAZARA railway linking Zambia’s deposits with ports on the Indian Ocean.

💰 As usual, Zambia will receive American "financial aid" only after meeting criteria set by Washington. Given that the Chinese typically offer investments and financing with almost no conditions, this offer may be considered to be not worth the effort .

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Enigmatic Noises from Zimbabwe 🌟

Analysts are puzzling over the reshuffle in one of Zimbabwe’s most important ministries

🌐 On 8 December, President Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa unexpectedly replaced the country’s top mining official — now former minister Winston Chitando — with his former deputy, Polite Kambamura.

📄 Since the government didn't bothered to explain, people are reading the move from opposite angles: either Chitando was caught in corruption or failing to meet targets, or, on the contrary, he stood in the way of the president’s family members enriching themselves through mines.

🗳 A third version is political — that he did not show enough enthusiasm in supporting the planned extension of Mnangagwa’s presidency to 2030.

⚙️ The most plausible explanation is that Chitando obstructed some murky deals — although this does not necessarily imply the Mnangagwa family/ It may simply have been a desire to indulge "investors" in general.

❓ The corruption/ineffectiveness version seems unlikely, given that his ministry’s policies clearly aimed at local processing of ore (especially lithium) and at raising gold royalties. While the idea that he was removed for insufficient political zeal seems hardly relevant to the role of a mining minister.

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Nationalising Ambition

Senegal has announced the nationalisation of a project that is yet to be built

🌐 Senegal’s minister of energy declared plans to nationalise the Yakaar-Teranga gas field — one of the largest in the world — which is currently owned by the American company Kosmos Energy.

⛽️ The project in question is still on paper. The field was discovered in 2016, but construction has never effectively started, and in July 2026 Kosmos’s current licence will anyway simply expire. In practice, nothing has been built at the site.

⚔️ A dispute on the future use of its gas has been the main obstacle. The government constantly reiterates its desire to see the project as the main source of gas for domestic industry — Senegal recently announced plans to to create a domestic supply system. Meanwhile, license holders want higher revenues in foreign currency. In 2023 this dispute even made BP leave the project.

🔸 The government itself takes up a serious challenge: even if production does begin, the temptation to sell gas abroad for hard currency and thereby mitigate inefficiencies of economic policy will always be strong.

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How to Earn on Geopolitics 🤝

True entrepreneurs never miss a chance to profit from someone's national interests

🇺🇸 US lawmakers accuse the State Department of advancing China’s economic agenda. Representative John Moolenaar, Chairman of the Select Committee on China, criticised Secretary of State Rubio for supporting the bid of the American company Ivanhoe Atlantic to gain control over the Yekepa–Buchanan railway in Liberia.

🌟 Suddenly it "turned out" that the company (called Ivanhoe Atlantic, once again) is linked to another mining company, Ivanhoe Mines — through its head, Robert Friedland, who, as if by surprise, is the founder of and one of the chairs in both firms. Ivanhoe Mines, in turn, is at least 33% owned by the Chinese — Zijin Mining and the state-owned CITIC — and operates copper projects in southern DRC.

🗽 Remarkably, while one third of one of Friedland’s assets is held by the Chinese, Ivanhoe Atlantic sells its projects to general public as a way to reduce China’s control over critical minerals in West Africa.

🔸 For years such schemes — telling everyone you are defending their interests while collecting money from all sides — could work. But Washington and Brussels are now increasingly suspicious of any form of Chinese involvement, even if the Chinese were merely breathing air somewhere near the project.

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Money: Connecting People 🫂

Sudan, South Sudan and the RSF have united to preserve their oil assets

🌐 The anti-government RSF handed over the Heglig oilfield on the Sudanese-Sudanese border to the South Sudanese army — all to prevent a key asset from falling into ruin.

💋 Sudan, South Sudan and the RSF may love or hate each other as much as they like, but they all share one important thing: a poor region dependent on oil exports. So, the 8 December capture by the RSF of the Heglig oilfield on the border between the two official Sudans inevitably triggered negotiations between all 3 sides, unwilling to lose the infrastructure.

🛢 The field is most important for South Sudan who sends a lion's share of its exports through Heglig. When the engineers were switching everything off ahead of the RSF’s arrival, South Sudan had already stepped in, launched talks and secured the control of Heglig in exchange for neutrality.

🔸 But preserving the infrastructure does not mean preserving the status quo. It is likely that the RSF’s withdrawal was contingent on a share of the oil profits — a new source of funding for their operations, while the Sudanese government, in turn, loses one.

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Ore transportation somewhere in DRC’s Katanga province.

💸 Would be nice to build at least a railroad here (let alone processing all this where it is extracted), but saving money is paramount apparently.

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$10 Million for the World’s Largest Deposit
[ Budget Hole ]

📍 In the second half of the 2010s, one of the world’s largest iron ore deposits in Guinea was given to a company with no experience in mining. The price of the deal: $10 million for the president’s wife.

✡️ Between 2006 and 2010, the Israeli businessman Beny Steinmetz and his company BSGR were in a collecting mood. They were gathering licenses for the Simandou deposit and nearby iron ore fields in southeastern Guinea.

✅ To make their collection truly complete, they needed to intercept certain rights already held by another company. So in 2008, Steinmetz approached the young wife of President Lansana Conté, Mamadie Touré, and offered her about $10 million.

🏷 Brief background:

🔴Today, the Simandou deposit — one of the largest in the world — is being operated by a consortium of Chinese firms and the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto. The first shipment of iron ore, around 200 thousand tons, was sent to China in early December 2025.

🔴According to forecasts, once at full capacity, Simandou will be able to export up to 120 million tons of ore per year, which will increase global seaborne supply by almost 9%.

🌟 The magical effect of the First Lady worked, and the president, already literally on his deathbed, signed a decree stripping several licenses from the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto and awarding them to BSGR, which had no experience working with iron ore.

💰 In 2010, Steinmetz, satisfied and having invested only around $170 million into the entire venture, sold 51% of his assets to a company called Vale for $2.5 billion.

🔴 The story surfaced thanks to a change of power in Guinea. In November 2010, a new president, Alpha Condé, came to office. He decided to clean up after his predecessor and revoked all rights held by both BSGR and Vale.

🇨🇭 At the same time, in 2013, at Guinea’s request, a legal case was opened in Switzerland. Although in 2019 Steinmetz and the Guinean government, with the mediation of French president Sarkozy, resolved their disputes (again in a not transparent way), in January 2021 a Geneva court sentenced Steinmetz to five years in prison.

#BudgetHole

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Sticky French Hug 💦

France’s TotalEnergies is encircling Southern Africa with its assets

🌐 TotalEnergies has taken control of Mopane, supposedly the largest oilfield in Namibia and potentially in Africa. The company now operates Namibia's two main oil projects — the Mopane and Venus offshore fields.

Mopane is a relatively recent oil discovery (2023), located offshore Namibia near the Venus discoveries.

Mopane’s potential is estimated at tens of billions of barrels — if these estimates are confirmed, Mopane will become the largest undeveloped oil cluster in Africa.

The field is owned by TotalEnergies (40% and operator of all activities), the Portuguese company Galp (40%), the National Petroleum Company of Namibia (10%) and a local company Custos Energy (10%).

🌍 On the opposite side of the southern part of the continent, the same TotalEnergies leads Mozambique LNG — a gas project in Cabo Delgado that sits at the center of the Mozambican government’s gas dreams.

👑 All these projects, both in Mozambique and in Namibia (which so far has no oil production of its own btw), remain at an early stage. If the French manage to bring them to fruition, one could say that TotalEnergies will effectively have all major fossil-fuel deposits of Southern Africa at its disposal.

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Thanks for the advice. 👍

The Chinese ambassador in Ghana is busy gaslighting the local audience

🌐 Chinese ambassador Tong Defa has called on Ghana to take the problem of illegal gold mining seriously, claiming that the state is not acting decisively enough against galamsey.

🏮 As is well known, it is Chinese illegal migrants who make up the core of foreign illegal miners in Ghana. Since 2009, Ghana has deported at least 1,600 such fortune seekers and has recently tightened visa procedures particularly for PRC citizens.

👠 Nevertheless, the Chinese ambassador consistently acts like a toxic spouse. One moment Ghana is to blame for not granting Chinese nationals licenses, the next moment Ghanaians themselves are luring Chinese nationals to work in inhumane conditions, besides, Ghana is not fighting fiercely enough – and anyway, just look at what China helped you build and stop making noise!

🔸 Ghana really does need to take galamsey more seriously, but not because the ambassador said so — when 60% of water bodies are contaminated with mercury, that is already too much.

P.S. The video is from an earlier speech in June 2025.

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Tragedy in Sierra Leone

BBC reports a makeshift mine collapse in Sierra Leone

🌟 On 9 December, 16-year-old Mohammed Bangura and 17-year-old Yaya Jenne went down into a makeshift gold mine near Nyimbadu in Kono District, Sierra Leone, to earn money for their families. The walls of the pit, about 4 metres deep, collapsed, leading to the tragic death of the young miners.

Artisanal gold production in Sierra Leone reaches around 3 tonnes of gold a year, most of it illegally, including by parents and children who, instead of learning arithmetic, are forced to dig for gold to earn a living.

Unfortunately, neither a start of industrial production nor tighter state oversight will be able to eliminate such cases completely, because the main villain in this film is the surrounding poverty, pushing even children into mines.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow