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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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.

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📺 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.

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📺 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

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📺 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

📺 Uganda and Tanzania Thumb Their Noses at Eco-Activists 📺

Uganda is going to see first oil exports by October

🇺🇬 Uganda’s Museveni is expecting a real celebration in October 2026, as the country is finally planning to launch its first-ever oil exports via the EACOP pipeline. The project has faced resistance from environmental activists, who have even coalesced into the StopEACOP movement.

💰 The main beneficiaries are the oil producers — France’s TotalEnergies and China’s CNOOC — which have been unable to sell Uganda’s oil due to the lack of access to seaports. The pipeline will stretch roughly 1,500 km from Lake Albert to the terminals of Port Tanga in Tanzania.

⚠️ The project has drawn criticism over concerns that construction of the pipeline would require the resettlement of local communities and could lead to pollution in the event of oil spills.

🎉 If the pipeline does come online, it will be a genuine triumph for President Museveni, who has ruled the country for decades. Uganda discovered first oil back in the mid-2000s, but exports are yet to come.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Let’s Pretend This Was the Plan All Along 📺

After Protests, Kinshasa Backs Down to Its Own Population

✔️The DRC government has once again allowed processing units to accept copper and cobalt from artisanal miners, reversing the ban imposed on December 19 last year. Authorities claim that a week of work by a special commission created on December 26 was enough to inspect the sector and resume purchases of artisanal cobalt.

“At the end of the commission’s work (established on December 26) … the commission found violations of the Mining Code and Mining Regulations by all processing entities,” the government said.

🔥 Despite having identified violations on the part of every company processing artisanal ore, the government nevertheless decided to restore people’s ability to earn a living. In December, the ban triggered mass unrest among miners in Lualaba province. Notably, the renewed authorization will apply only to Lualaba.

✉️ The government says that following the reopening it will send letters to companies outlining the shortcomings they are expected to correct. In this way, public anger over the tightening of controls in the mining sector is being shifted from Kinshasa onto companies themselves.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Revolving Doors in Sahara 📺

Niger Replaces Its Oil Minister Yet Again

🌐 A year after the replacement of the head of the ministry most critical to the country’s economy, Niger has once again handed the post to a new figure. The new oil minister is Hamadou Tinni, who replaces Sahabi Oumarou — himself appointed in August 2024.

⏩ As is customary in Niamey, the reasons behind the constant reshuffling at this key ministry are not disclosed. Niger’s oil sector has shown explosive growth in recent years, and aside from recurring disputes with the Chinese company CNPC and occasional pipeline sabotage by insurgents, there are few signs of any serious crisis.

⏩ Given that the new minister is widely described as an accounting specialist, it is reasonable to assume that the logic behind the reshuffle is to fine-tune a system capable of capturing a larger share of budget revenues from oil exports, whose volume has more than tripled since 2023.

🔖 For Niger, the management of oil remains a matter of utmost importance, as crude exports via Benin are the country’s main source of foreign currency and the financial backbone of the government.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 The Oil Apocalypse Is Postponed 📺

Ghana Hopes to Keep Its Oil Fields Viable Until 2040

🌐 Against the backdrop of a looming production crisis, Ghana is extending the licenses of its two operating oil projects — the Jubilee and TEN fields — by several years. At the same time, the state-owned GNPC is expected to receive an additional 10% stake in both assets.

❗️ The licenses for Jubilee and TEN were due to expire in 2034–2036, roughly the same time their oil is expected to be depleted. With no new discoveries so far, this would have meant a premature death of Ghana’s oil sector, which was born in 2010 with the launch of Jubilee.

⏩ Instead, the lifespan of both projects is now expected to be extended to 2040 through the drilling of new wells. In parallel, in 2036 GNPC will increase its stake in both projects by 10%, i.e. to 17%.

⏩ The government is actively trying to turn oil production from a temporary venture into a fully-fledged sector of the Ghanaian economy, pursuing onshore exploration while also courting foreign partners for further exploration efforts.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

🇺🇸 How Trump Is Threatening You Personally 🇺🇸

Nigeria, Niger, Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon — if you live in any of these places, Trump is threatening you.

🌐 It’s unlikely that you personally will be kidnapped, taken away, and tried for drug charges in New York. It’s also unlikely that an American missile will land on your head anytime soon — although, who knows? Does that mean Trump’s actions in Venezuela will have no impact on you?

❌ No — they will affect you in the most direct way.

💸 While the details of how Donald Trump wants to use Venezuela’s oil are still to be worked out, one thing is already clear — he plans to sell it aggressively. If he succeeds (which is not guaranteed though) it will crush the already low oil prices of around $60 a barrel.

🛢️ All of the countries listed above are still living off oil in 2026. In every one of them, oil accounts for more than half of exports, and at least in Nigeria, Angola, Congo, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, oil makes up >10% of budget revenues.

⚡️ That means there will be less money. True, business elites and beloved children of corrupt officials will also feel it, but ordinary citizens are to bear the brunt. Even the most corrupt states do provide some services — from pensions and subsidies to public construction and counterterrorism efforts.

▶️ And these things, not kickbacks and offshore schemes, will be cut first.

⬇️ Governments that failed to build diversified economies will be forced either to slash spending or to dive into new debts from the IMF or China.

↗️ That said, there is also an unlikely yet positive scenario: with investing in oil getting less profitable, governments might finally turn their attention to such marginal and “unscientific” tools of economic policy as developing agriculture, manufacturing, or IT.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

🇿🇲 Zambian Authorities Forgive the Chinese 🇿🇲

💧 Nearly a year after the major tailings dam spill, which released thousands of litres of acidic materials into Zambia's soil and rivers, including the major Kafue river, the authorities officially publish an environmental damage report — one that recognizes only 160 people as direct victims.

💧 Released on January 5, the report on the February tailings dam collapse near Kitwe, not far from the Zambia–DRC border, identified only 5.35 km² of affected soil and some traces of contamination in local rivers, declaring acidic levels in the key Kafue river to be “within acceptable bounds.” Only 158 people living were recognized as unquestionable victims of the spill.

▶️ Between June and September, the Zambian government and the Chinese company Sino-Metals, responsible for the spill, replaced the firm conducting the study. Instead of a South African company that had been working on site in the wake of the spill, a new laboratory was hired.

🔴 The South African firm then overtly said it had been fired because it had exposed the real severity of consequences of Sino-Metals’ negligence, which it estimated at 1.5 million tonnes of toxic material released.

Hiring a new laboratory more than 6 months after the accident — when all possible contaminants had already floated downstream — effectively shuts the door on any future chance for local communities to obtain compensation from either the authorities or the Chinese company.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Africa's Ever-Troubled Roads 📺

DRC promises protection to Zambians as unrest threatens cross-border traffic

🌐 Crimes against cargo trucks along the shared border, particularly near the Kasumbalesa crossing, prompted a meeting on January 6 between the Zambian ambassador and the DRC’s Vice Prime Minister for the Interior and Security Jacquemin Shabani, who promised measures to curb illegal activities.

🏹 Zambia’s concerns stem from attacks both by ordinary criminals, who hijack trucks carrying copper products for resale amid high copper prices, and from periodic surges of discontent among the local population.

🔥 The latest unrest in Kolwezi, sparked by restrictions on artisanal copper and cobalt mining, also saw disruptions of the movement of mineral trucks, while some sources reported a deadly accident involving a Zambian truck driver.

↗️ Zambia’s concern is just another symptom of Kinshasa’s detachment from the realities of ordinary people at the far end of the country. As direct mechanisms of democratic signaling between the authorities and the population continue to fail, making the Congolese government listen to its people requires real victims — and an intervention of a foreign ambassador.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Nigeria’s Oil Dossier 📺

Who Profits from the Most Lucrative Sector of the Nigerian Economy

All Nigeria’s oil industry is divided into 3 parts — each with its own heroes and villains: upstream production, oil processing, and the sale of petroleum products, including fuel imports from abroad.

🛢 Production:

⏩ Production is dominated by foreign companies, although in recent years — following the exit of some foreign majors from onshore projects — an ever larger share of the market has been taken over by so-called “indigenous” firms owned by local elites. The most dynamic player among them is Heirs Energies, owned by Tony Elumelu, chairman of United Bank for Africa, who leverages his banking-sector connections to expand the company. Recently, Heirs acquired the largest stake in another local firm, Seplat.

🏭 Refining:

⏩ In refining, the undisputed heavyweight is Aliko Dangote’s Dangote Oil Refinery, which is far ahead of all operating competitors and is, in effect, Nigeria's only refinery in its weight class.

🚩NNPC:

⏩ A significant role at every level is played by the state-owned NNPC, which manages the government’s stakes in upstream projects, owns a share in the Dangote refinery, operates several large refineries of its own, and runs a retail network.

💵 Sale:

⏩ Finally, the import and sales segment features an entire constellation of local and foreign firms, including Oando Plc, owned by Wale Tinubu, a nephew of the sitting president, which is also active in oil production. More recently, Aliko Dangote himself has announced plans to enter the retail market as well.

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