🏹 A Former Warlord Buys American Drones to Hunt for Oil Thieves in Nigeria 🏹

(👆 and it's not the beginning of a funny joke)

🌐 While in northern Nigeria US drones are looking for terrorists (and gathering intelligence in the Sahel), a private security company plans to draw on US experience with unmanned vehicles to track down oil thieves in the Niger Delta.

🚓 The future purchaser of US drones is Tantita Security Services allegedly owned by a former anti-government insurgent and once Nigeria’s most wanted criminal Ekpumupolo (aka Tompolo). His quasi-army turned into a PMC-like security firm when the government, in the early 2010s, offered the former militants amnesty and contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for switching sides and guarding oil assets.

💸 Now the former leader of the struggle against the exploitation of the Niger Delta offers infrastructure protection to half of Nigeria’s oil players — from the state-owned NNPC to the rising local company Seplat to the global giant Chevron—continuing to make money from oil theft, only in a different way.

🚙 For Tompolo, American surveillance drones will be mere toys: according to journalists, since 2012 in his collection he has already had at least 6 armed torpedo boats and one 1700-ton support shop, acquired from the Norwegian military. All to deliver on security contracts.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 When It’s Not Just the Country That’s Collapsing 📺

⚡️ According to local Sudanese media, on Saturday 10 people were killed in a simultaneous collapse of five artisanal gold mine wells in South Kordofan, with dozens more still trapped under the rubble.

↗️ Despite a quite fast arrival of government representatives, rescue efforts are facing extreme difficulty due to the lack of excavators in the mining area and essentially any heavy equipment at all. So the debris has to be cleared by hand, with shovels.

❓ By popular estimates (i.e., rough guesses, since it is impossible to count precisely), around 2 million Sudanese are involved today in artisanal gold mining - like the whole Equatorial Guinea's population, but multiplied by 1.3. As a result, such collapses happen often, and many never receive wide coverage.

At the same time, rescue efforts are even more complicated by the absence of infrastructure and ongoing fighting. South Kordofan is right now a contested area — so while miners risk dying underground, people on the surface may enjoy drones and shells overhead.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

📺 Populism, Gold and Corruption 📺

How to make it to the presidency on obscure river-restoration contracts

🇿🇼 The government of Zimbabwe has restricted by decree the list of companies which may engage in rehabilitation of rivers polluted by gold mining, according to media reports. As if by coincidence, the only item on the list is a pilot project run by the president Mnangagwa’s adviser, mogul Tempter Paul Tungwarara.

⏩ Tungwarara belongs to the breed of Zimbabwean businessmen who enrich on exclusive government contracts. The expertise of his companies, Prevail Group, is the implementation of state populism: Mnangagwa's adviser builds boreholes as part of the presidential vision to drill 35,000 of them countrywide, installs solar panels, and is developing a $500 million “Cyber City” near Harare.

⏩ True, cleaning rivers polluted by illegal mining is not as lucrative as mining itself, but such initiatives make the government look like it really cares about urgent problems, while allowing Tungwarara to get political points by showcasing his for-people projects at rallies he attends across the country.

❗️This may mean a quiet emergence of a new presidential hopeful in Zimbabwe. Although one of Zimbabwe's wealthiest men actively denies having any presidential ambitions, the image of an entrepreneur who brings technological benefits and cleans mercury from rivers may certainly help him climb the political ladder, even if he stops short of going for presidency with Mnangagwa alive.

It is reported that since December the ruling Zanu-PF party has been considering Tungwarara's candidacy for the party's Central Committee.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

🌟 Hesitation is Defeat - Trump

US president has threatened to kept cautious companies out of Venezuelan oil

🌟 At first glance, American companies whose assets Hugo Chávez "took away" in 2007 and Trump, who wants to make money on Venezuelan oil, seem destined to act as a team. But true to his habit of wielding politics with an axe and not a scalpel, Trump has already begun picking fights even with oil producers.

🛢 After ExxonMobile's CEO said the company would need serious guarantees from Washington before returning to Venezuela, Trump responded that he plans to keep Exxon out. Earlier, at a meeting with representatives of major companies on Friday, the US president said that oil giants would be expected to invest around $100 billion in Venezuela.

▶️ So far only trading companies have shown readiness to touch Venezuelan oil, which pushed the US towards introducing a new legislation protecting the potential oil sales revenues from seizure by former creditors or other entities.

🔴 Without any desire to defend oil corporations, it is still worth noting that operating in a country from which the president was brazenly (and so to say illegally) spirited away is not the best idea. Yet Trump appears unwilling to offer his own companies any institutional guarantees for their involvement in Venezuelan oil affairs. He wants oil right away—and for companies to depend directly on his personal will and his continued hold on power.

#Global

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

Benin Reopens the National Treasure

🫂 Ghana, hoping to extended the life of its oil fields to 2040 and thereby remain in the oil producers league, may finally no longer feel alone in West Africa: by the end of the month, Singapore-based Akrake Petroleum wants to relaunch oil production at the 56-year old Sèmè field in Benin.

🦖 Benin’s offshore field is a true dinosaur, keenly sensing weakness among its Ghanaian counterparts, which were discovered in the 2010s and are already threatening to run dry by 2035. The Sèmè field is a contemporary of the Moon landing: it had been discovered in 1969, produced oil since 1982 and was shut down in 1998.

🚢 The Beninese have not obtained their own refinery since then, which is logical. But all the necessary infrastructure for exports by sea is already in place, which is very convenient. All thanks to the pipeline from Niger, through which Benin already exports oil, albeit for now not its own.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

▫️ Post-Truth in the Age of Gold Rush ▫️

Mozambique's remote area shows that facts are no more in the age of digitalization

⚡️This week, in Mozambique’s northern province of Nampula the Migration Service detained 5 Chinese nationals and other foreign nationals for informal gold mining and unlawful stay.

⏩ Officials say the detainees carried fake ID papers and residence documents that didn't correspond state databases — which means there might have been created "a parallel machine to that of the State printing documents for nationals and foreigners". Gold thus attracts paperwork of its own.

🔥 This arrest lands inside a tense moment in Mozambique's remote region of Nampula. Since late December civil society groups and the Government have been engaged in an informational tug of war over what the former call deadly clashes between the police and miners in Mogovolas district on December 29.

🏹 The government claims the police involuntarily killed 7 people that day in the act of counter-insurgency self-defense, while the interpretation of the human rights activists implies that up to 38 illegal gold miners were murdered. The police in this reading of events had allegedly demanded informal payments from miners, which triggered a violent escalation.

Some may see today's endless flow of information as a remedy against clandestine illegal activities or as a tool of bringing unpleasant facts to the spotlight. However, in practice it more and more often helps criminals, governments and interested groups distort the reality in the way they need.

⏮Independent, Honest, Yours - @devilsbelow 🔸

📺 Menu À la Carte 📺

The Congolese people offer yet another gift to the US comrades

🤝 As another step within the framework of the December “Washington Accords,” DRC is officially preparing to send the US a list of mineral projects for American investors to take over.

➡️ After the state-owned Gécamines announced a few days ago plans to supply up to 100,000 tonnes of copper to the American market in 2026, this move may become the penultimate step on the DRC’s path toward fulfilling its mineral obligations to Washington.

Under the US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed in Washington on December 4, Congo committed to create a Strategic Asset Reserve — a special fund for resource assets managed by a joint commission. The fund would include a list of projects involving critical minerals and gold reserved for American investors. The DRC also promised to constantly update the fund adding new assets.

As Donald Trump increasingly shifts his personality from peacemaker to warmonger, Kinshasa’s growing courtship of Trump — beyond its hope of once again drawing his attention to peacemaking in eastern Congo — can also be explained by a desire to push aside Chinese players who directly or indirectly control up to 80% of mineral extraction in the country.

⏮Independent, Honest, Yours - @devilsbelow 🔸

📺 Blood on the Blasting Cable 📺

Mine “revival” keeps finding new ways to cost Copperbelt families

Two Zambian contractor workers died on January 13 at Mopani Copper Mines’ shaft in Kitwe in an explosion during underground work linked to a blasting cable.

ℹ️ This accident stroke during a prolonged reset of the mine. In 2021 the Zambian government bought Mopani for just $1 from its previous Swiss owner Glencore — but as part of this agreement, the mine's production and revenues would be used to repay to Glencore it investments in Mopani, initially acquired by the Swiss trader in the 2000s.

The resulting lack of funds to refresh the infrastructure at the site has already turned Mopani into a frontline-like zone, with fatal accidents linked to technical failures occurring almost on a yearly basis.

⏮Independent, Honest, Yours - @devilsbelow 🔸

ℹ️ What Is the "Presource Curse"?
[ Policy Review ]

🧭 In 2010–2011 major gas discoveries in the Rovuma Basin turned Mozambique into a future LNG giant and politicians began to loudly promise investments in tourism, security, and infrastructure at every corner. Surprisingly, these were not empty words — the local elites did refrain from looting all the gas on the spot.

▶️Instead, they managed to demonstrate their incompetence in a more inventive way, illustrating an exotic concept known as the “presource curse.”

Many have heard of the resource curse: revenues from extraction make the development of the rest of the economy unattractive, resulting in dependence on global prices, freezing the growth of living standards. But there are situations where the mere expectation of high revenues has an already disastrous effect. This is exactly what happened to Mozambique in the early 2010s.

▶️ In Mozambique, anticipating future gas income from Cabo Delgado, a group of officials from the Intelligence and Security Service (SISE) and the Ministry of Defence decided to set up 3 shell companies — the Mozambican Tuna Company (EMATUM), Mozambique Asset Management (MAM), and ProIndicus — which were officially supposed to engage in fishing and coastal security.

🌫 In reality, they existed only on paper and were used for corruption. In 2013–2014, the three companies colluded with representatives of the Swiss bank Credit Suisse and raised around $2 billion under state guarantees. The officials behind these companies thought they could siphon off the money and repay the debts later — once gas from Rovuma made the services of their companies attractive to foreign investors.

Instead, the scheme was exposed far earlier than planned—in 2016—triggering an investor exodus, the suspension of foreign aid, and a rupture in Mozambique’s cooperation with the IMF. Gas production, originally planned for 2019, was postponed because of the inability to secure new financing after the scandal.

🌐 But there is more to the "presource curse" than Mozambique. The same tendency — focusing on the future resource revenues after major discoveries — could also be seen in the 2000s and 2010s in Uganda and Ghana with their promising oil finds, as well as in other countries.

#PolicyReview

Independent, Honest, Yours - @devilsbelow

🏆 No Gold for a Football Club

The government of Zimbabwe is taking back the Inyathi gold mine—but not from a negligent investor, rather from a local football club. Let’s unpack how footballers came to own a gold mine, and why it is now being reclaimed. ⬇️

➡️ The story concerns one of Zimbabwe’s oldest clubs, Highlanders. It may not shine across Africa, but it is seems to be one of the strongest at home. In 2020, ahead of the club’s 95th anniversary, President Mnangagwa decided to support Highlanders, as their revenues were suffering from COVID-19 lockdowns. No better idea emerged than gifting the football club a gold mine.

➡️ It soon turned out that the club, already struggling with declining income, could not find the funds to invest in gold production—and apparently had little desire to dig it out by hand. In 2022 the club received permission to kick off operations, which apparently never started. The return of Inyathi to the state is directly linked to the club’s failure to start mining as well as to express any intention to renew the license.

The first such experiment for Zimbabwe, it can clearly be judged a failure. A populist move on the part of the Zimbabwean President, it had little chance to work out. Still, even though it did not work for Highlanders, maybe it will work for someone else and somewhere else.

Independent, Honest, Yours - @devilsbelow

📺 Who Needs Ancient Covenants? 📺

Contracts with gold companies are no longer Moses’ tablets for Ghana

💸 Alongside a planned increase in gold royalties, the government of Ghana is considering ending stabilization contracts that allow several companies to keep legacy royalty and tax rates as long as they meet their investment commitments.

🔸 Stabilization contracts exist to lure investors: regardless of future policy changes, a company will pay the same taxes and fees as on the day the agreement was signed. For the Ghanaian government this has become an obstacle, as amid record-high gold prices it is planning to raise royalties from 5% to as much as 12%.

🔸 As part of this shift, the practice of extending stabilization covenants will end. This will affect at least three companies — Newmont, AngloGold Ashanti, and Gold Fields — which together produced some 60 tonnes of gold in 2023, roughly half of all gold officially mined in Ghana that year.

If these measures are approved by parliament and implemented, Ghana will be able to jump aboard and capture its share of the high gold prices.

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

🌐 Weekly News Digest [ January 12 – January 18 ]

That was a week full of DRCongo's attempts to indulge its American partners.

💡Here are the key highlights:

🇧🇯 Benin

— Singapore-based company will launch oil production at a 56-year old oil field

🇨🇩 DR Congo

— DRC to Send 100,000 Tonnes of Copper to the US
— DRC is preparing to send the US a list of mineral projects for American investors to take over
— State company Gécamines proposes a deal to obtain a mining company, whose sale it has been blocking

🇬🇭 Ghana

— Ghana is considering ending contracts that allow companies to keep legacy royalty and tax rates

🇲🇱 Mozambique

— The Migration Service detained 5 Chinese and other foreign nationals for informal gold mining and unlawful stay

🇳🇬 Nigeria

— Former Warlord Buys American Drones to Hunt for Oil Thieves in Nigeria

🇸🇩 Sudan

— 10 Killed in a Collapse of Five Gold Mines in South Kordofan

🇿🇲 Zambia

— Two Zambian workers died on January 13 at Mopani Copper Mines’ shaft in Kitwe

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe

— Harare creates a monopoly on rehabilitation of rivers polluted by gold mining
— The government is taking back a gold mine from a local football club

#NewsDigest

➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

💥 Nigeria is Shattered (Again)

Nigerian regions can’t agree on a gold refinery

In politics, you never know which event will trigger the next storm and heated debate. In Nigeria, that trigger turned out to be a remark by Minister of Solid Minerals Dele Alake at a forum in Saudi Arabia, where he boasted about the opening of a gold refinery in Lagos.

🔸 A self-congratulatory comment typical of such gatherings sparked outrage on social media and drew critical statements from several civil groups, including the Northern Elders Forum.

🔸 Voices from the Nigerian North are accusing President Tinubu’s government of favoritism toward Lagos arguing that the refinery should have been located in the North, where a significant share of gold is mined. Their opponents gloatingly remind that the oil riches of the Niger Delta in the South has long been likewise taken away and distributed across the whole country.

🔸 While a single plant would never have solved the North’s industrial problems in any case, the debate highlights the depth of Nigeria’s regional divide. Some Northerners are dissatisfied with the state's efforts to bring their states up to the national average, while people in the South and Southeast view support for the subsidy-dependent North as unfair.

❗️ And although this problem long predates the current leadership, the fact that Nigeria's President Tinubu has assembled a government composed almost exclusively of representatives from the South West — particularly from Lagos — clearly does nothing to help resolve it.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

Senegal Revokes a Dormant Oil License

🛢 Senegal has officially withdrawn the license of Nigerian company Oranto Petroleum for exploration of the offshore Cayar field, citing years of failure to meet its obligations.

🔵The license was issued in 2008, but the company did not drill a single well — effectively the reason it was taken back.

🔵 Notably, the same company in 2025 entered into the oil sector of Liberia with new agreements for four blocks. These deals drew criticism from civil society and politicians who recalled that in Liberia back in 2007—much like in Senegal—the same Oranto got a license at miserable price, waited idle 3 years, and then resold its assets to Chevron at a markup of around 115,000%.

💵 Buying assets cheaply from the government and then reselling them, in whole or in parts, to other companies is one of the most common schemes in the oil sector. In Senegal, however, no new buyer willing to play along with such maneuvers showed up before the government finally acted.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

🔴 Over 300 farmers say their land was stolen by a Chinese mining firm

🌐 In the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Lualaba province, more than 300 farmers from Mutaka 2 village are accusing Dirton Corporation Mining of forcibly taking over their fields. The company has allegedly rolled in with security guards, destroyed crops and blocked roads.

➡️ Across the DRC, mining companies have treated community land like a free-for-all, securing permits through obscure agreements with local officials. In nearby Haut-Katanga entire forests have vanished under mining licenses, while on the opposite side of the country a town is being steadily devoured by Canadian Barrick's Kibali Gold Mine.

With demand for cobalt and copper soaring, companies are racing to dig up every inch of soil, no matter who’s standing on it. Unfortunately, a mining boom has rarely meant prosperity for the people who live on the land.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow