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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No Days Off

😐 World Bank’s arbitration body (ICSID) staff must be getting fed up with West Africa. After the recent settlement of the Mali–Barrick dispute, the institution has picked up a new gig: a $29 billion complaint by UAE-based Axis International against the government of Guinea.

📅 At the center of the dispute is what the complainant calls Guinea’s 2nd-largest (of course it is!) bauxite mine, where Axis operated from 2013 until May 2025, when its license was revoked (the company says illegally) for failure to meet obligations.

💵 This pretext isn't entirely accurate. When Guinean authorities decided to examine the company’s operations, it emerged that Axis had subleased the deposit to two other miners — a Chinese company and a firm allegedly linked to Guinea’s former minister of mines.

👥 Judging by what leaked to the media a few weeks ago, the government opted to simply remove Axis as an intermediary and transfer the asset to companies that are actually prepared to operate it.

⏩ The government also has its own interests in mind. By cutting out speculative subleasing costs, miners would pay more taxes and management of the deposit would become more transparent — if the authorities manage to buy their way out of conflict with the former friends.

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What Is the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline?
[ Megaprojects ]

🌍 Sometimes people like to come up with gigantic and hard-to-implement projects. They can be completely utopian, like the idea of building a massive hydroelectric plant in the Strait of Gibraltar, or theoretically feasible, like Elon Musk’s plan to launch 10,000 internet satellites — which he has done. It is clear that sheer scale does not automatically make a project a good one.

♦️ One project on the border between reality and fantasy is the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline. The idea is so simple that people came up with it back in 2001: Nigeria has gas, Europe needs gas — let's build a pipeline from Nigeria to Europe through Algeria.

👀 Yet even such a basic concept as laying pipes in a line has failed to materialize. Every 8–10 years since 2001 governments have been signing memorandums, but without any real progress.

🏹 The main problem of this mega-pipeline, whose cost is estimated at $13 billion, lies on the surface: it would run straight through the most dangerous and unstable parts of the continent — northern Nigeria, Niger, and southern Algeria. For a 4,000 km pipeline assigning just one guard per 100 meters would require 40,000 people — roughly the entire Nigerien army today.

📺 Moreover, if one is to build such a monstrosity, there must be confidence that it will pay off. Nigeria itself still struggles with gas supply and electricity shortages — would it really supply northern signori and messieurs at the expense of its own needs?

▶️ As a result, for decades now the pipeline has existed not on the ground, but on paper. And perhaps that is for the best. Maybe one day rulers will realize that gas can be sold to domestic industries, and the need to stretch an iron tentacle all the way to Europe will simply disappear.

#Megaprojects

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A Feast in the Time of Plague

📈 Sudanese authorities have reported record volumes of gold exports — 70 tonnes in 2025, 13% higher than in 2024. Against the backdrop of an unending war, the growth in gold exports remains one of the few islands of stability, one that oddly unites both Sudan’s official authorities and their opponents in the RSF.

🛢 For Sudan, being associated with gold is not the norm. In the past, crude oil provided most of the country’s export revenues. However, after the recent Heglig oil field seizure by the RSF forces, gold is likely to become the main source of income for Khartoum in 2026 — the financial backbone for continuing the fighting and keeping afloat what locals still call an economy.

🚗 The same logic applies to the rebel RSF forces, which also use gold as one of their key lifelines. There are, of course, no comparable official statistics, but it is believed that in 2024–2025 the RSF sold around $850 million worth of gold to the UAE.

⏩ Sudan's case is starting to display an exemplary instance of “blood diamonds” — except that instead of diamonds, it is gold — a situation where the state and armed groups directly use natural resources to sustain a war.

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Frustrating the Tea Drinkers

The Pyramids vs. Big Ben

🥇 A non-obvious fact: most gold trading physically takes place in places where no gold is mined. These are London, the UAE, and Switzerland. In the case of the UAE and Switzerland, this originates from political neutrality and geography; in the case of London, it is a legacy of the colonial era, which tightly bound global trade to British insurance and banking services.

🌐 The Egyptian government has decided to change this — at least rhetorically. Between Christmas and New Year, the Egyptian authorities and Afreximbank agreed on the creation of a pan-African Gold Bank in Egypt.

⚙️ The main substance lies in plans to establish an internationally accredited refinery, secure vaulting facilities, and associated financial and trading services. That is to replace the infrastructure on which the London Bullion Market Association’s (LBMA) central role in gold trading is built.

⏩ Creating such a gold hub is not really about constructing anything, but about financial services and security. Whether dear commodity traders will agree to strike hands in Egypt — or whether they'll still prefer locations further removed from the sites of extraction — is an open question.

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🇹🇷 Invincible Armada, but Without Guns

⛴ Against the backdrop of Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, Turkey has decided not to drag its feet and to stake its claim in Somali gas as early as next month. Turkish vessels are to arrive to explore deepwater deposits off Somalia in February.

📈 While since 2024 Istanbul’s interest in Somalia’s seabed had been primarily economic, the Turkish presence is now taking on a political hue. Recently, one of the Somali splinters — Somaliland — received recognition from Israel seeking to establish presence in the Bab al-Mandab Strait and contain the Houthis.

▶️ In response, on December 30 President Erdoğan strongly condemned Israel, and explicitly promised to expand Turkey’s fleet of gas drilling vessels in Somalia by two new ships. Drilling and producing Somali gas thus becomes a tool for entrenching influence in the region.

▶️ Somaliland itself, now recognized by Israel, has already announced plans to start its own gas production by 2027, but it still lacks a friend comparable to Turkey. Whether Israel will help it, or whether a bigger fish will appear, remains to be seen.

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📺 What Is Known About Cameroon’s Missing Gold 📺

Cameroon’s authorities reveal disappearance of national wealth

💬 Around 15 tonnes of gold have vanished from Cameroon, according to a 300-page 2023 transparency report published by Yaoundé under its membership in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) on December 30.

👀 Against 15 tonnes of smuggled gold declared exports look really bizarre: just 22 kg — less than 2 standard gold bars. The main destinations for the shadow gold flows were the UAE (92%) and Uganda (the remaining 8%).

🎥 Although already overdue, the publication in question was accompanied by extreme caution. It was first presented exclusively to some 2.5 journalists on December 10, while the public version only appeared this week. So as to save face, authorities hedged their bets and said the day before the publication they were planning to close certain mining sites in January.

↗️ How closing a few mining sites is supposed to end gold smuggling remains unexplained. Given the delay in reporting, Yaoundé had clearly been aware of the disaster. At best, the regime will put on a show of vigorous action to pull the wool over the eyes of both its citizens and foreign partners. Maybe there will be some decorative reshuffle.

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The World We Live In
[ Global ]

🌟 These days many people like to talk about a "global rebalancing", the end of the US-led world order, and other things that sound very abstract and detached — until one evening the president of your country is kidnapped by Americans, as has just happened to Venezuela’s Maduro. That is precisely the kind of thing that signals the arrival of a brave new world, whether we like it or not.

▶️ The US attack on Venezuela is something genuinely new, even compared to Iraq and Afghanistan. Back then, many also said the US was looking for oil although Washington never actually made net oil profits from Iraq, and Afghanistan had nothing to do with oil at all. In both cases, the reasons were ideological: the need to impose “democracy”, and perceptual: the US saw itself as a global policeman and sought to live up to that role.

🛢 Now Trump is openly saying that he'll take Venezuela’s oil — although oil is only part of the issue. In total it seems that he wants not just oil, but de facto obedience from Caracas and any other country that Washington decides to fold into its sphere of influence.

🔥This kind of behavior is a direct result of the gradual erosion of the US status as a global hegemon. As China gains ever more weight in the economy and in our beloved minerals, Washington will act ever more aggressively — not through competition, but through force — so as to preserve its positions and economic assets.

✈️ This applies to us no less than to anyone else. True, the US is not as close to, say, West Africa as it is to Venezuela. But are you really sure that if your president tomorrow denies Washington preferential access to resources, or strikes a deal with someone the White House does not like, he would be any more protected than Maduro?

#Global

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Better Cautious Than Dead

🏴‍☠️ Pirates from the Gulf of Guinea, who abducted 9 crew members of a liquified gas carrier off the coast of Equatorial Guinea in December, have released the hostages.

💵 Apparently, the Danish company Christina Shipping, which owned the vessel, simply negotiated a ransom, as there were no reports of any rescue operation.

🚢 The 9 sailors spent about a month in pirate captivity after their LNG carrier was attacked in early December. The ship itself, laden with gas, was of little interest to the pirates — they even left a skeleton crew on board to bring the vessel into port and inform the world of what had happened.

↗️ This tactic — settling for to ransoms without threatening the economic interests of major players — worked perfectly. In doing so, the pirates are minimizing the risk of provoking an armed crackdown, the thing that once destroyed their Somali counterparts.

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📺 And You Say We Lack Local Production 📺

🗣️ As Trump might put it: they had 500 beautiful refineries, very good ones — but they managed them so badly...

🌐 Nigeria’s security forces report having dismantled more than 500 illegal refineries in the Niger Delta, having arrested some 780 oil thieves and returned roughly 20 million litres of crude oil and petroleum.

🔥 Oil theft is an old, yet still urgent problem in Nigeria. Every year, there is some officials declaring the end of oil theft, and every year the volumes stolen appear enough to supply a small country.

🏹 It is mostly the trade of mid-tier criminals, who need it as a way to stay afloat — much like kidnapping for ransom or drug trafficking. This is slightly different in southeastern Nigeria, where militants who call themselves fighters for the independence of the state of Biafra also resort to oil theft to sustain their struggle.

⏩ Oil theft is one of the few issues where the interests of the government, companies, and ordinary people really converge. Whatever one may think of Shell or Biafra, when the soil is suffering from endless oil spills caused by pipeline intrusions — that's another thing.

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📺 Endless Decline 📺

⚡️ If you are reading this, you probably have access to such cutting-edge technology as electricity. You are lucky — because at this very moment South Africa is at risk of losing its own manganese production simply because of high electricity tariffs. The case in question is Transalloys, a company previously linked to Russia, which is saying it may close the last manganese smelter in SA.

🔪 South Africa is rapidly losing not only manganese but its entire mineral-related industry, exporting raw materials to China instead. Over just the past few years, a dozen major smelters have already gone dark across the country. How South Africa managed to build what many of its neighbors can only dream of — processing plants — and why they are now dying off, you can learn here.

🏭 In a nutshell, the visionary strategists of the 2000s spent years neither building new power generation capacity nor raising electricity prices, trying to attract foreign companies into the energy-hungry metals processing sector.

⏩ As a result, the plants were built, but tariffs were then raised — and the plants began to shut down. Now this is threatening SA’s last manganese smelter. The nation holds the world’s largest manganese reserves.

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