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.

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Guinean Pride
[ Cost of Greed ]

⚙️ Guinea-Conakry’s flagship industrial project may put its real treasure at risk

🥇 The railway from the Simandou iron ore project to a port on the Atlantic Ocean runs almost across the whole of Guinea, which has become a source of pride for the local authorities, some local patriots and the foreign beneficiaries of Simandou. However, many forget that the land on which the tracks lie did not belong to them alone.

🏷 A smidgen of background information:

🔴Simandou is Guinea’s flagship high grade iron ore project in the country’s southeast, the largest of its kind in the world.

🔴Simandou is so huge that it is being developed by two mining companies at once, the Chinese Winning Consortium and the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto.

🔴The infrastructure backbone is its 600 km railway, where Rio Tinto and Winning each hold 42.5% and the Guinean state - the remaining 15% stake. The corridor includes a new railway running across Guinea, plus new coastal port facilities around the Moribaya estuary near Senguelen.

🛑 A railway this long inevitably disrupts animal migration routes, including those of forest elephants, of which only about 60-140 remain in Guinea at all. Both the railway and the deposit itself have already led to a reduction in the natural habitats of rare species. In the area of the deposit alone, at least 4 protected monkey species live – or already used to.

🧬 Beyond the fact that elephants will no longer be able to walk back and forth, there are also problems that affect people directly. Animals that can no longer find food in the forest now constantly come out onto farms and plantations, destroying crops.

As a result, Guinea is losing not only its iron ore, but also its native inhabitants, who lived there long before rails were ever invented.

#CostOfGreed

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Nostradamus Predicted This 🔮

After several years of indignant cries in the French press that Niger was just about invite the Russians to its uranium sites, these accusations have become reality

🌐 According to Niger's official media outlet, on 9 December 2025 Niger’s Timersoi National Uranium Company (TNUC) signed a memorandum with the Russian company Uranium One Group on cooperation in uranium extraction.

❓ Of course, they forgot to say where exactly the mining is planned and what timelines are set. Presumably, the easiest entry for the Russian company would be Niger's Arlit uranium site, previously run by France's Orano.

The French state company Orano has worked in Niger’s uranium sector for over 50 years, mainly through the SOMAÏR operation near Arlit (mining since 1971).

After the July 2023 coup, relations deteriorated, and in June 2025 Niger announced plans to nationalise SOMAÏR, while in December 2025 the row further sharpened after Niger accused Orano of environmental wrongdoing.

Why now?

There may be several reasons:
🔴 Niamey tried to mine on its own for a while but did not succeed
🔴OR Niamey was afraid of sanctions, but the recent manoeuvre with uranium trucks that showed up in the press demonstrated that Niger is free to do what it wants with its uranium and nothing will happen
🔴OR Niamey right now needs alternative sources of revenue because of attacks on oil infrastructure
🔴OR all of the above.

🔸 Now the main thing is not to fall into the same trap and make sure that the new foreign partners don't dump radioactive waste and walk away, as Orano did.

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🗣️ December 9, Trump:

"But I actually stopped the war with Congo and Rwanda, and they they said to me: 'Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals.' Which we'll do...” 👇

You Don't Know What Real Bureaucracy Is 🖨

Three years after the relaunch of a flare-gas-for-sale programme, Nigerian officials have finally got around to printing 28 licences

🌐 Nigeria’s upstream petroleum regulatory commission has just issued permits to 28 companies to access and sell associated gas.

❓ Associated gas is usually produced at oil fields together with crude but burned off in flares as oil producers deem it unprofitable — so the idea is to involve other companies in this task, so as to make the gas available to people and industry.

📈 At a ceremony on Friday, the head of the commission, Gbenga Komolafe, rushed to boast that measures aimed at commercialising associated gas would lead to:

🔴 The creation of 100,000 jobs

🔴 The production of 170,000 metric tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas annually to supply roughly 1.4 million households

🔴 And the attraction of up to $2 billion in investment

⏳ Most likely, such results are expected sometime around the year 2100 or 2300, since Friday’s event was about issuing licences to those who had submitted their applications back in 2022. Already in October 2023 the authorities said that 42 companies had successfully passed the same tender, but 14 apparently did not have the patience to wait.

🔸 Meanwhile, according to World Bank data, Nigeria remains one of the world’s top countries, alongside the US, Russia and Iran, in terms of the flared gas volumes. In 2023 and 2024 these volumes only increased.

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UAE Expansion Into Senegal

The UAE has staked out projects in Senegal’s most sweet sectors of gold, logistics and gas

🇸🇳 During a visit on 10 December, an Emirati delegation led by the UAE Minister of Foreign Trade sealed several agreements with Senegalese government and state-owned enterprises transferring the implementation of projects in Senegal's key resource sectors to Emirati companies.

⏩ Above all, the Senegalese state-owned Société des mines du Sénégal (SOMISEN) signed an agreement with the Emiratis to help create Senegal's new National Gold Trading Centre.

The National Gold Trading Centre announced on 12 November is Senegal's attempt to establish a national centralized hub for buying and selling gold, which will serve as an official bridge between production (above all, artisanal mining) and subsequent sales.

⏩ Besides, state-owned mining companies and Emirati firm Resources Investment agreed to develop jointly logistics infrastructure and iron mines.

⏩ Senegal's national gas distribution company Réseau gazier du Sénégal (RGS) signed several contracts with Emirati company Equiline Energies, which specialises in gas exploration.

🔸 The most important element is arguably the agreement on the National Gold Trading Centre. Now the Emiratis will help set up this centre, which means the UAE has managed to inserted itself into the country's main mining sector, which accounts for about 30% of Senegal's total extractive exports.

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Liberia Is Bringing Americans to Africa Again

Liberia has approved the entry of a US company linked to the Trump administration into its railway sector

🌐 Liberia’s parliament has endorsed granting access to the Yekepa–Buchanan railway to the US company Ivanhoe Atlantic. It is Liberia’s logistics backbone, and Ivanhoe Atlantic needs it to ship iron ore from neighbouring Guinea, where its largest iron ore asset is located (750 million tonnes).

📅 This decision crowns 6 years of negotiations accompanied by friction with global steel giant ArcelorMittal, which for a long time effectively held a monopoly over the management of this corridor.

🇺🇸 Washington has carefully nurtured the deal: it was singed on the eve of Trump's meeting with Liberia's president Boakai in July 2025, while a week before the deal was sent to the parliament Liberia’s foreign minister met with Marco Rubio to discuss US investment in the country.

🫂 Special attention from the US enjoyed by Ivanhoe Atlantic is not accidental. Ivanhoe Atlantic is chaired by Peter Pham, who had served Trump’s first administration as the US Special Envoy for the Sahel & Great Lakes Regions of Africa. Besides, Ivanhoe Atlantic itself is selling its projects to Washington as a way to circumvent Chinese control over supply chains.

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You Don’t Want To, But You Have To 🇲🇱

An unpleasant truth: sometimes peace also entails concessions...

🌐 According to Reuters, a Malian court has ordered that 3 metric tonnes of solid, beautiful, shining gold worth about $400 million, confiscated in January 2025 from the Loulo-Gounkoto complex in Western Mali, be returned to the Canadian company Barrick.

👑 Reuters sources also claim that next week Barrick will regain operational control over the entire Loulo-Gounkoto gold complex, where a provisional administration was put in place in June.

⚔️ This points to a real de-escalation of the nearly two-year dispute between Bamako and the Canadian miner, following the settlement reached last month.

🥇 The very fact the confiscated gold was neither sold nor invested — though the temptation must have been great, given the record-high prices — suggests that Bamako never intended to break up with Barrick completely and wanted only to force it to abide by the rules.

🔸 Such an outcome makes it clear that the government, despite its somewhat unfriendly approach, has never sought to overhaul the previous system of partnerships with foreign companies. Since the coup, Mali has neither tried to nationalise active mining projects and run them itself, nor significantly changed the geography of its partners, which remain mainly European and North American companies.

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