🏆 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

🔴 We Do With Assets Anything We Like 🔴

DRC sends the United States a list of assets for investor review

Rumors circulating since last week that the Congolese government intended to submit to a joint DRC–US commission a list of projects open to American investors have proven true: the day before yesterday it became known that such a list had already been handed over.

Reuters, citing sources, reports that it includes:

⚪️ Kisenge licenses for the extraction of manganese, gold, and cassiterite
⚪️ Gécamines projects for copper and cobalt mining at Mutoshi, as well as a germanium processing facility
⚪️ four Sokimo gold licenses and Cominiere lithium licenses
⚪️ Sakima assets for coltan, gold, and tungsten mining

Although all the entities mentioned in the original report are state-owned, at least two of them — Gécamines and Cominiere — have this year been implicated in the forcible takeover of private assets.

⏩ Gécamines only recently offered to buy the copper-cobalt Mutoshi mine from its current owner, Chemaf, at a knockdown price—after Gécamines itself blocked its sale to a Chinese investor in March 2025. It appears that from that moment on, the asset was being kept in reserve for the Americans.

⏩ Cominiere, for its part, had been doing the opposite: back in 2023 it tried to wrest the Manono lithium deposit from Australia’s AVZ Minerals in order to hand it over to the Chinese company Zijin.

While the government and state corporations shuffle their assets however they please in pursuit of higher rents and political gains, it is not only the owners of some of these assets who suffer. There are also ordinary workers at these enterprises and contractors, left without pay and without jobs while Kinshasa clumsily plays geopolitical chess.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

🔴Window Dressing on the Eve of Oil Drilling🔴

🌐 Nigeria’s Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project (HYPREP) is boasting that it starts training 100 Ogoni youths in mechatronics, preparing them for the “opportunities” of oil extraction return to Nigeria’s Ogoniland.

❗️This is the same region where oil spills have poisoned land and water for decades, and HYPREP is the body that was supposed to do the cleanup after oil companies failed to do it.

⏩ President Tinubu’s government began to push to restart oil production in Ogoniland in 2024, while HYPREP has mostly failed to keep its word and ruined a 2011 rehabilitation plan, proposed by the UN. Now it is pretending that the work has been successfully accomplished and Ogoniland can move towards new well drilling.

With the scent of fresh oil drilling in the air, the shiny new skills program serves as a way to hide the fact of the state’s inability to remediate the environmental disaster originating from the previous era of oil extraction.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

🔴A Universal Scapegoat🔴

Illegal gold miners leave the city of Bulawayo without water supply

❗️ Zimbabwe's second largest city mayor says gold mining in the Umzingwane River catchment is devastating the city’s water supply. According to him, the Umzingwane Dam is now only 30% full, while nearby Mshabezi Dam, with minimal mining activity, is overflowing.

Bulawayo has been facing water supply disruptions for several years, regardless of the climate conditions — whether it's a season of droughts or a rainy period just like now.

However, in Zimbabwe illegal gold mining has become not only a major problem, but also a solution for those in the elite, who want to distract people's attention from the real failures of governance. Zimbabwe has banned riverbed mining, but in the popular view enforcement is a joke — so, why not blame anything on illegal miners?

While illegal mining is a problem, another and seemingly more sound explanation attributes the persistent water supply challenges to the government's inability to match Bulawayo's population growth by building new supply infrastructure.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

🔴 High-Profile Schemer Helps to Acquire Assets🔴

French oil major is selling its oil assets to a brand new Nigerian firm

🌐 TotalEnergies has sold its 10% stake in Nigerian onshore and shallow-water oil assets to Vaaris Resources, a brand new local firm founded by a local industry heavyweight. The deal marks another chapter in the exodus of international oil majors from Nigeria’s oil sector.

🔸Vaaris Resources, itself a consortium of local firms, was reportedly assembled by Austin Avuru, a man of impressive credentials: he was a co-founder and former CEO of another indigenous oil producer Seplat and since April 2025 he serves as a non-executive director of the state oil corporation NNPC.

🔸 The assets Vaaris is taking on—18 licenses in the Niger Delta—produced about 16,000 barrels a day for TotalEnergies in 2025. In 2024 the French giant had already tried to sell the same asset to a Mauritius-based company Chappal Energies, which allegedly failed to muster enough funds for the deal leading to its subsequent cancellation by the Nigerian oil regulator in September. One of the masterminds behind the inception of Chappal Energies back in 2020 was also Austin Avuru.

Having separated from Chappal in 2022, Avuru built up a record of a local industry heavyweight with links to both political and oil elites — which apparently makes it easier for him to gather funds and secure nods of approval from high-profile officials.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

🔴Norway's Not So Well-Oiled Affair in Congo 🔴

Two Norwegians and an oil company are charged with bribing Congo’s president

⚡️ Norwegian prosecutors have charged two citizens and an oil company with paying $25 million in bribes to Congo Republic President Denis Sassou Nguesso and his family in exchange for offshore drilling rights. Norway is often lauded as one of the world’s least corrupt countries, but its own citizens and companies are apparently not against greasing palms in one of Africa’s most resource-rich nations.

The alleged corruption centred on a 2016 oil licence application in which the now accused executives from Hemla Africa Holding AS, a subsidiary of Oslo-listed PetroNor, offered Sassou Nguesso and his relatives a quarter-share of revenues expected from a new oil concession.

Afterwards, a company which was controlled by the president's family, was given a 25% stake in Hemla E&P Congo, and received dividends of close to $25 million between 2018 and 2024.

This case is not new, as PetroNor already became object of an investigation in 2021, but that one was closed due to the lack of evidence. The presidency too has already been accused of taking bribes from other oil producers and traders, including ENI and Gunvor.

👀 Although these Norwegians have not been able to live up to their high moral standards abroad, at least now there's hope that the Norwegian judicial system will do its job properly - which cannot be said about the judicial system of the Congo, where the dubious affairs of the president and his family are consistently ignored.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow