🌐 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 bauxite mine, where Axis operated from 2013 until May 2025, when its license was revoked (the company says illegally) for failure to meet obligations.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.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

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.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

🇹🇷 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.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 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.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

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.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 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.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 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.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

What Is Venezuela Guilty Of 🇻🇪
[ Global ]

🇺🇸 In the current Venezuelan affair the oil factor should not be absolutized — the issue is rather about establishing broader control over all countries in both Americas. However, the US clearly does intend to take Venezuela's oil as well: Trump mentioned it a dozen times at the Saturday press conference, calling Venezuelan oil "stolen" from the US.

But what exactly are Washington’s grievances against Venezuela?

Venezuela did challenge US economic interests:

▶️ Since 1976, long before Maduro, the country has seen several waves of oil nationalization, with the most recent one in 2007, when it forced out ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. In response, the oil companies rushed to international arbitration, which awarded them compensation — around $10 billion of which Venezuela still “owes.”

▶️ No less important is the fact that since 2023 Venezuela has laid direct claims to an oil-bearing region of neighboring Guyana, where US major ExxonMobil has been developing oil production from scratch since 2014. By 2023, Exxon’s output in Guyana had caught up with Venezuela’s entire national production.

▶️ By contrast, China and Russia have little to do with Venezuelan oil: about 50% of production is handled by state-owned PDVSA, US Chevron still holds roughly 25% of operations in Venezuela, with about 10% in joint ventures led by China, another 10% by Russia and 5% by European companies.

➡️ Against such a backdrop, since his first term, long before kidnapping Maduro, Trump has been strangling Venezuela with sanctions, which also contributed to the reduction of its oil output to some 30% of what it was when Maduro assumed office. Now all that remains is to impose US companies and lift the sanctions — and proudly present the appropriation of Venezuelan oil as an unprecedented success of American investment.

#Global

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How did the world media react to the Trump's claims on Venezuela's oil?
[ Global ]

🇺🇸 Fox Business (Republican):

Once home to major U.S. energy investments, Venezuela systematically pushed out Western oil companies under a nationalization campaign launched by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez. Although Maduro claims to have won re-election to a six-year term in 2024, the U.S. and other international observers say his loyalists stole the election from Edmundo González.

🇺🇸 New York Times (Democratic):

Mr. Trump paired that with a declaration that a key American goal was to regain access to oil rights that he has repeatedly said had been “stolen” from the United States. With those statements, the president opened a new chapter in American nation building.

🇶🇦 Aljazeera:

But within hours of the US attacks on Caracas that killed dozens of civilians, officials and military personnel, Trump pivoted to openly discussing oil and US control of Venezuela.

🇬🇧 Guardian:

Analysts can trace the origins of Trump’s claim – decisions by previous Venezuelan governments to nationalise production – but they argue that the US has no legal claim to Venezuela’s oil.

🇷🇺 Sputnik:

The expulsion of the US oil majors had given US President Donald Trump the cover to say that Venezuela had "stolen" US oil, says critics of the US president, who contend that the United States itself was now robbing the Latin American state of its sovereign resources.

#Global

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📺 West Africa's Advanced Exploration Methods 📺

A way to discover oil fields through prophecy is being tried out in Ghana

🌐 A Ghanaian prophet and leader of his own religious movement has predicted the discovery of major onshore oil deposits in Ghana. Whether this was revealed to him by a crystal ball or by someone-we-all-know appearing in a dream is left unspecified.

🧿 Since a prophecy must have an air of mystery, the prophet didn't say exactly where to drill. In his view, the major find will be somewhere between the Northern Region, the Volta Region, and the Central Region — which effectively puts roughly half the country in the crosshairs.

🔍 Like any other wise prophet, Ghana’s herald of oil prepared well before making such statements. At the very least, he learned that in 2026–2027 Ghana does indeed plan to carry out its first exploration operations around the very regions he outlined.

↗️ So something there will almost certainly be found — and people who don't closely follow who's drilling what in their backyard will be able to rejoice at the fact that their country has such an accurate prophet. But will he also be able to name the companies that will come for Ghanaian oil?

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Africa's Own UAE 📺

Equatorial Guinea moves its capital to a brand new city built on oil revenues

🛫 The government of Equatorial Guinea is relocating from the island capital Malabo to a new city deep in the eastern mainland of the country. The construction of the new capital, Ciudad de la Paz, situated closer to the majority of the population (around 80% live on the mainland), began in 2012.

▶️ Building an entire new city in the middle of the jungle was made possible by oil revenues. Oil has turned Equatorial Guinea, with a population of roughly 1.6 million, into one of Africa’s wealthiest countries, providing around 80% of the state budget.

▶️ Naturally, the construction did not come without corruption. Earlier this year, investigative journalists reported kickbacks of about $90 million from the Portuguese construction firm Zagope to the forestry company Somagui, allegedly owned by the son of President Teodoro Obiang.

↗️ It's clear which country with a similarly small population, oil wealth, and megaprojects Guinea’s elites took as their model. True, infrastructure and urbanization could help EG become a regional trade and business hub. But beyond construction, this also requires investment in education, healthcare, and social security — in short, such one weird trick as starting to share oil revenues with the entire population, not only with relatives.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Congolese Clergy Dislikes USA 📺

🔥 The so-called strategic partnership between the DRCo and the US has sparked sharp outrage from the local Catholic Church. On Christmas Day, Archbishop of Lubumbashi and Head of the powerful bishops’ conference CENCO Fulgence Muteba publicly decried the agreement as a sell-off of national resources and of the future of young Congolese.

🇺🇸 The Strategic "Partnership" in question links the extraction of copper, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals in Congo to US-backed projects, granting American investors a right of first refusal. It also obliges the DRC to create a stockpile of critical minerals for the US at the expense of the Congolese state-run companies.

🏹 The government chose to counterattack and criticized the bishops for their harsh rhetoric toward Washington, while claiming they speak too little about Rwanda-backed violence and the illegal export of minerals from the east of the country. It remains very unclear how monks, in Kinshasa’s view, are supposed to influence the war in the east — a war the government itself keeps messing up.

↗️ Such criticism on the part of the Archbishop of Lubumbashi, a city at the heart of the Congolese mining industry, can further alienate citizens from Kinshasa's handling of the country's resources and its geopolitical decisions.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Jihadists Want Neither Gold nor Hostages 📺

🌐 On Sunday, JNIM militants attacked a gold mine in southeastern Mali, set equipment on fire, and took 7 workers hostage — only to release them the following evening.

Since October last year, the mine has formally belonged to Flagship Gold, which became the first US firm to come for Malian gold after new mining laws were effected in 2023. The mine in question is the Morila gold mine, a world-class open pit that was nationalized in June 2025 after an Australian company abandoned it in 2022.

🪖 Given that no announcements have followed since October about the American company actually coming to the site the site, it is reasonable to assume that the kidnapped workers were Malian employees of the state-owned company SOREM, which had been running the mine after nationalization.

❓ Of course, there is an elephant in the room here: since when does JNIM take hostages for just one day? If the Americans are yet to arrive, one can assume that government representatives showed wonders of persuasion or gave the militants everything they asked for to avoid a scandal. Or perhaps the jihadists simply changed their minds.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Paper War in Sudan 📺

📉Sudan’s central bank and the state-owned Sudanese Mineral Resources Company (SMRC) have set up a joint commission to curb illegal gold exports. Beyond the massive gold outflows from the territories controlled by the RSF, Khartoum is also facing chaos in the gold sector in its own regions.

▶️ In September, Sudan’s central bank attempted to establish a monopoly over gold transactions by banning private exports. The bank’s suspicion was that companies were selling gold abroad at unnaturally low prices. Some 53 tonnes of gold were officially produced in Khartoum's Sudan in January-September, worth several billion dollars — yet official exports reached only $909 million.

▶️ The monopoly decision, however, was reversed in less than 2 months after producers pushed back. The bank then required companies to measure export batches domestically, so as to prevent price recalculation abroad.

▶️ The joint commission is clearly meant to implement such measures on site. While the central bank has the initiative, it's SMRC that actually has the personnel and resources to realise bank's whims, being the main authority overseeing Sudan's gold sector.

↗️ With gold leaking out of Sudan like water through a sieve, the authorities’ legalistic efforts do look awkward and comical. But for people in Khartoum there is little to laugh about — gold may soon become the main source of revenue for the government at war.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

This Little Maneuver’s Gonna Cost Us 51 Years
[Megaprojects]

🌍 We have already written about the idea of the Trans-Saharan Gas Pipeline, meant to sell Nigerian gas to Europe via Algeria. One of its main problems was that between the two ends of the pipeline there is the unstable zone of northern Nigeria, Niger, and southern Algeria. So, an alternative emerged — a detour along Africa’s Atlantic coast, also known as the Nigeria–Morocco Gas Pipeline.

🇲🇦 The idea of laying the pipeline in such an elegant crescent was proposed by the King of Morocco back in 2016. Compared with the previous project, it has 3 key new features:

🔸The pipeline is planned to run along the ocean floor rather than over land;

🔸 The project is aimed at supplying a larger number of African countries;

🔸 Its implementation has actually progressed beyond mere declarations (i.e. nearing the phase of construction).

🐠 It's clear that the project’s relative success stems precisely from a broader African customer base and a lower risks. Not only does it skirt the most dangerous regions, but it also lies on the seabed — so unless fish start converting to radical Islam, politicians have little to worry about.

🔽 Still, the project — which could become the longest offshore gas pipeline in the world — faces the same question as its onshore counterpart: what about the gas in Nigeria itself? Given that the timeline stretches into the 2040s, one has to ask whether Nigeria will be able to offer enough gas by then.

#Megaprojects

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Clearing Out the Old Legacy 📺

Nigeria Purges the Entire Leadership of Its Oil Sector

🌐 Following the replacement of the CEOs of the two key oil and fuel regulators, NUPRC and NMDPRA, Nigeria’s Tinubu has reshuffled no fewer than 21 members of the governing boards of these bodies. The CEO changes took place in mid-December, after one of them came under public criticism from oil magnate Aliko Dangote.

🚮 The growing scale of the shake-up increasingly resembles an effort to replace the appointees of former president Buhari, under whom the two regulators were originally created. Of the 21 new board members, only 3 had previously held these positions, and just 2 were appointed back under the former president.

👑 At the same time, since Tinubu’s inauguration there had been almost no changes to the boards’ leadership, meaning their composition was effectively inherited from his predecessor.

⏩ The president appears to be seeking tighter control over Nigeria’s most critical sector, aiming to ensure unquestioning compliance with his directives while minimizing the risk of internal sabotage — a consideration that is particularly salient in the run-up to the 2027 elections.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow