ℹ️Troubles with the Law ℹ️

A year of persuading everyone that the law must be obeyed

✔️ Côte d’Ivoire has finally dealt with all gold producers who had refused to pay the increased 8% gold mining royalty.

📅 The law raising the levy from 6% to 8% was adopted back in January, but many producers refused to comply, citing the terms of their contracts allegedly not allowing for an increase in royalties.

⏩ Once again, it turned out that when the state and private companies lock horns, the former always has more patience and resources than the latter — and "investors" do not run away anywhere.

❓ A fine example, isn’t it, Zimbabwe?

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🇿🇼 Zimbabwe: Marange Blood Diamonds
[Cost of Greed]

🌟 In June 2006, one of the most significant diamond discoveries of recent times was made in the rural Marange area of eastern Zimbabwe, offering its economy a unique development chance.

🌟 By 2012, Zimbabwe had become the world’s 4th-largest diamond producer, while Marange had become synonymous with blood diamonds and human rights abuses, drawing international attention, leading to sanctions against Zimbabwe and involvement of the global diamond watchdog.

🌟 At the heart of the tragedy was the government’s 2008 decision to expel individual miners from the deposit, even though in a burst of populism after the discovery it had initially declared the field open to everyone.

✈️ Once the government itself wanted to capture diamond profits, the military was sent to the site. In helicopters. With machine guns. To drive out artisanal miners.

🔥 Unsurprisingly, this decision was a straight route to tragedy. During the three-week Operation "No Return," from October 27 to November 16, at least 200 people were killed, while the military established near-direct control over the deposit.

💵 The troops deployed to Marange set up labor camps at the site. Their control lasted until November 2009, when the government began issuing mining licenses. Of the 6 main companies that received them, only one was not directly owned by the government itself.

🌟 The massacre and forced labor drew the attention of the international community. In 2008-2011, the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions on companies operating there, including the state-run Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation. In 2009, members of the Kimberley Process banned the sale of diamonds from Marange.

🌟 Although human rights abuses continued after 2011, international concern soon faded, and over time both the sanctions and the ban on diamond sales were lifted.

🔽 This allowed the state-owned companies to extract diamond profits and use them for off-budget financing of the army and secret services — but that is a topic for a separate post.

#CostOfGreed

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Just Like Adults

🚩 Guinea is planning to hold its first mining conference. The decision was prompted by the launch of the large Simandou iron project in the southeast of the country.

🛒 Unlike many conferences, whose organizers overtly seek to sale their countries’ resources, the event in Guinea will be more about showmanship and Guinea’s new status as an iron exporter. Even the name of the upcoming gathering — the Simandou Mining Summit — speaks for itself.

🇿🇦The main conference of this kind — Mining Indaba — is held annually in South Africa, but many countries enjoy organizing their own small mineral asset sales and not only countries — even Somaliland has its own mining conference.

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The Glass Is Half Full 🥛

Nigeria recovers a share of its oil

🌐 An association of Nigerian oil producers claims that more than half of Nigeria’s crude oil is now produced by indigenous companies.

⏩ Although no specific sources are provided for the estimates, the transfer of part of the oil sector into the hands of local producers is a well-known recent trend in the country.

🔸 In general, major foreign firms began selling their Nigerian assets around 2010, but in 2024–2025 the process intensified. The main pretext was oil theft and pipeline vandalism. Eni, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies all said farewell to some of their assets.

🔸 There was, however, a more important factor behind their exodus: as if by surprise, many of the departing companies had with unpaid, multimillion-dollar obligations to local communities for endless oil spills and environmental damage, which even attracted the attention of the UN.

⏩ So alongside the positive trend, there is another side: the assets are extremely old, requiring modernization, while new owners just cannot afford to clean up the environmental damage left behind by the majors.

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Cargo Cult in Gabon 🇬🇦

🌐 Inspired by the examples of Ghana and Mali, Gabon announces its own audit of the mining sector.

💪 The plans are ambitious: to make public all existing mining agreements in full and to conduct a comprehensive audit of contracts signed between 2010 and 2024.

📉 But unlike Mali, which has already carried out a similar review and recovered foregone revenues from mining companies, and Ghana, which is only planning to audit its mining sector in 2026, Gabon is unlikely to gain anything substantial from these efforts.

⏩ First, the main goal is not to put the house in order or provide transparency to the citizens, but to please the IMF, with which Gabon is negotiating possible financial support.

⏩ Second, although Gabon produces large volumes of manganese, mining accounts for only about 7% of extractive-sector revenues. The state earns most from oil, yet for some reason the government is in no hurry to make all oil agreements public.

⏩ In the end, this looks less like an audit and more like a fiction: examining a tiny sector, and not even for the sake of fairness, but to win the IMF’s favor. It is clear that the usefulness of such an exercise will be about the same as that of a makeshift wooden cargo plane.

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How Much More

🛢 The Nigerian government is proposing to resume exploration for new oil deposits in Ogoniland, Rivers State. Exploration in this region was halted several decades ago because of environmental degradation and civil unrest.

🔴 The area in question still looks on oil spill maps like a wartime fortified zone that underwent carpet bombing — and those are only the recent spills, linked to the fact that oil pipelines still run through the area. It is hard to imagine what would happen if new extraction projects were launched there as well.

🔥 In the 1990s, Ogoniland became a site of confrontation between oil companies, primarily Shell, and civil activists protesting environmental pollution from oil spills. Since then, many projects were shut down, but as we have written here before, the shutdown of operations resulted in the absence of cleanup, leaving the land contaminated to this day.

📌 The government began testing the waters back in 2024, and now an entire contingent of senior officials has been deployed to the area, including several ministers and the national security adviser.

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🌐 Weekly News Digest on Africa’s Mineral Industries [ December 15 – December 21 ]

That was a week darkened by several fatal mining incidents.

💡Here are the key highlights:

🇧🇼 Botswana

- Botswana intends to buy a diamond giant despite having no money and IMF alarms

🇹🇩 Chad

- Chad invites Algeria to it oil sector, seeking to exit dependence on China

🇨🇩 DR Congo

- Forced evictions in eastern DRC examined by the UK OECD body.

🇬🇭 Ghana

- Ghana may adopt a progressive royalty scale linked to mineral prices.

🇬🇼 Guinea

- Guinea wants to sell bauxite to an Emirati firm, whose mine it nationalized in July
- The end of construction of a 600-km railway for the Simandou iron megamine may leave thousands unemployed

🇲🇱 Mali

- Australia’s Marvel Gold sells a gold project in southern Mali to an indigenous enterprise
- Gold will drive Mali's economic growth in 2026

🇲🇿 Mozambique

- Australian company South32 threatens to shut down one of the largest aluminium smelters in Africa

🇳🇦 Namibia

- Namibia's revenues from gold and uranium exceeded revenues from diamonds.

🇳🇪 Niger

- Paris Prosecutor's Office investigates Niger's uranium affairs

🇳🇬 Nigeria

- Nigeria's oil tycoon Aliko Dangote accuses the head of the Nigerian downstream regulator of corruption
- Nigerian President dismisses the heads of two key oil and fuel regulators after Aliko Dangote's criticism
- 12 miners killed and three others abducted by unidentified armed men on December 16

🇸🇳 Senegal

- Ten people died in the collapses of two gold mines in southeastern Senegal between December 12 and 17.

🇸🇴 Somalia

- Somaliland wants to start oil and mineral exploration by 2027.

🇿🇦 South Africa

- SA doubles coal exports to Israel

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe

- Seven people were killed and four others injured in a gold mine collapse in central Zimbabwe
- Zimbabwe will not raise gold royalties to 10% for current prices, according to the approved 2026 budget plan.

#NewsDigest

Devils Below

A Soft Power Playbook

🔊 A vivid guide to manipulating public opinion: a Zimbabwean NGO Centre for Natural Resource Governance, which lives on European and American grants, has published what it claims are images of illegal lithium exports from Zimbabwe to China.

🔸 Beyond the fact that real illegal exports cannot be photographed from the middle of a loading zone, the manipulation is also evident in the scale involved. No one would ever move such large volumes illegally and so openly.

🔸 Unfortunately, such manipulations may divert people's attention away from real instances of illegal schemes in the mineral industry and compromise the whole cause.

⏩ The images are still disturbing. The only thing that slightly softens the sight of thousands of big bags of lithium concentrate flowing abroad is the fact that Zimbabwe does, at least for now, appear to be pursuing in good faith a lithium localization policy, planning to ban all exports of unprocessed lithium from the country starting in 2027.

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An Evening Ritual of Overthinking

⚽️ Nigeria has just beaten Tanzania 2–1 at AFCON. At first glance, what do resources have to do with this? 🤔🤔

Without embarrassment, now I want to tie this article into the football championship currently taking place in Morocco. Reading endless news about mine collapses and pollution can drive anyone mad, so let’s turn to football — but how does it fit in here?

⏩ First, the somber part. This cheerful tournament quite openly serves as one of the image-building tools of TotalEnergies, the title sponsor of the event.

⏩ Second, Tanzania’s kit catches the eye. Tanzania officially brought three sets of uniforms, including a blue kit with a diamond-like pattern (though they weren’t wearing it today). But then the question arises: what does Tanzania itself have to do with diamonds?

💎 It would have seemed more logical for, say, Botswana’s players to wear something diamond-themed — diamonds there are now seen as the backbone and future of the nation. In Tanzania, by contrast, diamonds are relatively scarce and not strongly associated with the country.

🇹🇿 Although no firm confirmation could be found, it appears that the pattern on Tanzania’s shirts is not diamonds at all, but tanzanite — a unique gemstone mined only in Tanzania — albeit depicted rather unsuccessfully.

⏩ That's the way the team expresses their identity — even though it might not the most intuitive design.

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Debt Forces Haste

New disputes around the Cabo Delgado gas project

⚔️ A rift stroke the camp of Mozambique’s authorities and TotalEnergies. While both sides are eager to restart the Cabo Delgado gas project as quickly as possible, Total now pushes for more favorable terms by threatening delays.

💵 Project revenues are urgently needed by the government. Beyond delayed income, the issue is the $900 million bond debt, which awaits repayments in 2028. Cabo Delgado will produce its first gas in 2029 at the earliest.

🔥 Fully aware of this predicament, Total is refusing to relaunch the complex until the state agrees to extend the license and compensate the company for the 4-year shutdown caused by insurgent attacks in Cabo Delgado in 2021.

⏩ TotalEnergies is thereby trying to negotiate better terms with the government anticipating the lack of foreign currency to service its debts.

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Where Are Geopolitics?

🇲🇼 Though Malawi does nothing special, it's a nightmare for mining companies. Yet another "investor" has announced delays to its project in Malawi — this time, it is a niobium venture, now not expected to kick off before 2028.

Despite the presence of rare minerals and absence of competition, the premature demise of loudly announced projects is a Malawi classic.

❓ But why is that? Why do the international "investors" which are usually ready to kill each other for assets and which move thousands of tons of soil in neighboring countries do so bad in Malawi?

⏩ Malawi does have resources, but it has almost none of the “traditional” ones like oil or gold. So, companies usually go for something rarer. Over just the past few months, there have been announcements about uranium, rutile, and now niobium projects in the country.

⏩ Whenever deposits of yet another element from the depths of the periodic table are discovered, another British or Australian company spawns on the doorstep of the Malawian government, full of ambition to build a "China-free" supply of this unquestionably-useful-element-of-the-future. Very quickly, however, it becomes clear that while the foreigners have plenty of ambition, they have very little money.

⏩The financing problem in turn exists because the hypothetical guys on Wall Street cannot quite grasp why they should mine the unquestionably-useful-element-of-the-future in Malawi when there are countries with established production and the infrastructure. And what is niobium anyway?...

🔽 As a result, Malawi turns into a place of endless tragedy for companies that get licenses, loudly announce grand plans, and then sit on those licenses, waiting for some international bank to come and finance their plans.

#PolicyReview

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China Is Losing Partners

Chinese companies abandon one of their oldest allies in Africa

🌐 A 30-year chapter in the relationship between Chinese oil producers and Sudan has come to an end. Against the backdrop of ongoing fighting and the continued advance of the RSF, China’s CNPC is seeking to terminate its existing oil contracts, including its rights to Block 6.

🚩 For China, this is not only a financial loss but a symbolic one. In the 1990s, Sudan was one of the first frontiers of China’s oil expansion, as Beijing anticipated shortages in domestic production amid rapid economic growth.

💰 The financial implications are no less serious. Along with the loss of assets, Chinese analysts are warning that Sudan may soon be unable to service its debts to China. In addition, oil supplies from South Sudan, where CNPC is still present for now, are also under threat.

🔽 Such cases are the inevitable downside of China’s style of economic expansion. While Western investors often flee as soon as conditions stop being comfortable, Chinese companies can afford more stubbornness, backed by state support. But insensitivity to risk can also lead to a grim ending — as Sudan has shown.

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A Terrible Christmas Gift

🇨🇩 The Congo dips into the pockets of artisanal miners

🌐 The DRC government seems far more concerned about leaking revenues than about the M23 problem in the east. Having barely finished the saga of the cobalt export ban, the Congolese authorities moved on December 19 to ban processing units from accepting copper and cobalt from artisanal miners.

⚙️ These efforts are part of an old government strategy. Back in 2019, the state created a special company, Entreprise Générale du Cobalt (EGC), granting it a monopoly on purchasing cobalt from artisanal miners. Yet from its creation until now, EGC has managed to collect only about 1,000 tonnes of cobalt — some 20% of their annual production.

🔧 The purpose of the latest decision is obvious: to fix this imbalance. With plants and marketers no longer allowed to buy directly, miners will have no option to sell their ore to the nearest facility. The only way to get paid will be through EGC.

🔽 One might hope that this would finally put an end to child labor and the endless casualties resulting from poor safety conditions at cobalt and copper sites. But today it looks more like the government will simply pocket part of the revenue, while the citizens lose the already meager incomes they earned from artisanal mining.

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Dubious Results of the Year

🇳🇬 Niger has overcome its foreign trade deficit — but what did it cost?

🌐 In 2025, Niger’s exports finally exceeded the value of its imports, meaning it now has more hard currency to service debt, invest, and purchase goods abroad. Yet once again, oil was the main driver of this growth.

📈 Over the past few years, Niger has posted striking export growth: from CFA 0.6 billion in 2023 to 0.9 billion in 2024, and then to CFA 1.6 billion in 2025. A major factor was the launch of the oil pipeline to Benin in 2024, which made it possible to ship larger volumes of crude oil for sale.

⏩ For Niger, this is essentially a turning point. Either it begins reinvesting the revenues it is already earning into more promising sectors of the economy, or oil prices will fall (by the end of the year they are already quite low), or exports will take a hit from insurgents who are already working overtime to blow up pipelines — and the opportunity will be lost.

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Who Knows What Trump Wants? 🇺🇸

Where the White House’s interest in Nigeria comes from

💥 After a public polemic over the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, the United States went even further and carried out airstrikes on IS targets in northwestern Nigeria, on December 25. This once again raises the question: what lies behind this apparent obsession with interreligious relations on the other side of the world — humanitarianism, geopolitics, or a desire to get access to Nigerian resources?

🔸 The last option is suggested by a similar situation with Venezuela, where Trump has openly claimed its oil. Nigeria, however, is different. There've been no such statements, nor are there few signs that American economic interests have been infringed. Nigeria is Africa's largest exporter of crude to the US, and the Dangote refinery actively purchases crude and technology from the US itself.

⏩ However, this may well be linked to the recent noise around proposals to resume oil exploration in Nigeria's Ogoniland. There may be a deal with the US companies getting new oil permits, and in exchange the US will "help" Nigeria's government deal with extremists. This is particularly interesting given that the president's national security adviser Nuhu Ribadu is responsible for both issues.

🔸 This can hardly be simple humanitarianism. Christians are persecuted and human rights violated here and there. It is hard to believe that the White House resident would spend missiles out of sympathy for ordinary Nigerians.

⏩ The last option is geopolitics — more precisely, an attempt to establish some basic format of permanent US presence in West Africa, just to keep Nigeria and other countries withing the US sphere of influence.

⏩ It's not clear what the balance may be between these considerations. Today the oil factor seems to be an unlikely driver of the US interest in Nigeria — I would bet on geopolitics — however, it may well turn out vice-versa when the whole story unfolds.

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Mysticism All Around Us ✨

What is wrong with oil production and refining in Ghana?

🧿 Ghana’s only oil refinery has resumed operations after years of downtime. But this is not just about a refinery. It is about an almost mystical pattern that keeps preventing the country from getting oil production and oil refining to work at the same time.

🌟 The plant in question, Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), itself is already remarkable. It was built by Italians back in 1960 — exactly 50 years before Ghana began producing its own oil — and was designed to process low-quality crude from Angola and Nigeria.

⚙️ The refinery lived happily right up until 2010, when Ghana started producing its own oil. At that point, it turned out that the plant, by then state-owned, was obsolete and held together only by multimillion-dollar debts.

💥 On top of that, local crude grades were simply not suitable for it. Time and again the refinery halted operations, saw an explosion and fire in 2017 and was finally shut down in 2021.

🚩 Today, fresh and modernized, it is opening its doors once again — but this time a crisis threatens Ghana’s oil sector facing the depletion of the country’s main fields.

❓ How long the refinery will coexist with the local crude production this time and whether it will once again have to be rebuild for crude from another part of the continent, remains an open question.

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Gas for Everyone 🏭

Nigeria is nearing the completion of a gas pipeline to northern regions, but which ones?

🌐 Summing up the outgoing year, the head of Nigeria’s NNPC said that engineers are already welding the final seams on the 600-kilometer Trans-Nigeria gas pipeline, which will for the first time connect the country’s northern regions to the gas fields in the South.

Naturally, the construction of the pipeline promises ⚡️immediate economic growth⚡️. However, the question of to what extent this gas pipeline is really meant for northern Nigeria remains open. If the goal were simply to supply the region with fuels, sources in neighboring Niger and Chad might have sufficed.

🔗 Beyond supplying gas to remote regions, the project has another purpose. It is the starting point for a roughly 4,000-kilometer pipeline across Africa to Europe, which the same NNPC hopes to build together with Algeria’s Sonatrach by 2030.

🔽 In that sense, the “northern regions” this pipeline ultimately leads to could turn out to be Italy, Spain, and other European folks who will certainly have more money to buy gas than any entrepreneurs in northern Nigeria. On the other hand, no one knows when the mega-pipeline will actually be completed — so the Nigerian north still has a chance.

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🌟 Secret Agents and Diamonds in the Heart of Africa
[ Secret Agents ]

📍 We have already written about the military operation "No Return" and tragic expulsion of artisanal miners from the Marange diamond field by the Zimbabwean authorities. This is a continuation of the same story, but now about how diamond sales covertly financed Zimbabwe's security services.

🛑 Having expulsed the miners, the Zimbabwean government transferred Marange diamonds to a small group of companies. Each was set up by the state itself, usually in partnership with a private investor.

💥 In total, 6 such companies were created. Although on paper they looked like standard concessions, international muckrakers suggest that in reality they served the interests of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) and Zimbabwe’s military-industrial complex.

🫥 One of these companies was Kusena Diamonds, allegedly created and partially managed by members of the CIO’s economic department. The CIO itself was often described as highly partisan and helping the ruling ZANU-PF hold power. The agency could use diamond revenues as an additional source of funding implying no public accountability.

🚗 Two other companies, Anjin and Jinan (yes, they simply rearranged the syllables), were 50% genuinely owned by Chinese investors. In practice, they operated as a single entity, with 40% of Anjin — the larger of the two — belonging to Zimbabwe Defence Industries, the state arms manufacturer. After US sanctions in 2005, it went into survival mode and began dabbling in anything it could, from banana plantations to diamond mining.

🇺🇸 In this sense, Zimbabwe is not unique. Using illicit or opaque sources of financing is a favorite pastime of intelligence services everywhere, even — especially — in the United States. The Zimbabwean case, however, illustrates a typical local pattern, with off-budget revenues flowing from mineral extraction rather than from drug or arms trafficking, as was the case in the American Iran–Contra scandal.

#SecretAgents

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Dressing Up the Bride 👗

The Nigerian government engages in legalistic tinkering to polish the image of a state corporation

🇳🇬 It has emerged that Nigeria’s president Tinubu has written off about $1.4 billion in debts owed by the state oil corporation NNPC to the government — effectively all of the company’s debts before 2025.

🔖 Fixing the image of a company long seen as inefficient and corrupt is viewed by the current president as one of the symbols of his tenure. Over the past year, the corporation has changed its head and begun actively seeking private partners for stalled projects.

📣 There have been no fewer loud statements than real changes. At various points, NNPC has claimed to have defeated oil theft or to have posted record profits. Given that its 2024 profits alone ($3.6 billion) would have been more than enough to cover all debts, the decision to write them off is clearly not driven by economic logic.

🧻 The guys in Abuja are trying to further whitewash the company’s image — though the debt write-off is aimed less at the general public than at "serious" investors. In addition to attracting new partners, the government also wants to sell a stake in NNPC on the stock exchange.

⏩ The welfare of millions of citizens and Nigeria’s energy security depend on whether the government can genuinely rehabilitate NNPC. Despite all the noise, this may turn out to be little more than stage dressing with no real change, and such blanket debt forgiveness hardly helps the fight against corruption within the sector.

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🌐 Weekly News Digest [ December 22 – December 28 ]

That was a week of delays, resumptions and terminations of resource projects.

💡Here are the key highlights:

🇨🇩 DR Congo

- DRC bans processing units from accepting ore from artisanal miners

🇬🇦 Gabon

- Gabon announces an audit of the mining sector

🇬🇭 Ghana

- Ghana’s only oil refinery resumes operations after years of downtime

🇬🇼 Guinea

- Guinea is planning its first mining conference

🇲🇼 Malawi

- An Australian company delays its niobium project

🇲🇿 Mozambique

- President and TotalEnergies clash over Cabo Delgado gas project schedule

🇳🇪 Niger

- Niger’s exports exceed imports, driven by oil

🇳🇬 Nigeria

- Nigeria to resume oil exploration in Ogoniland

🇸🇩 Sudan

- China’s CNPC is seeking to terminate its oil contracts amid war

#NewsDigest

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