🔴In Casino One Must Know When to Stop🔴

🇨🇦🤝🇨🇳 Canadian company Allied Gold, which owns assets in Mali (the Sadiola mine), Côte d’Ivoire (several mines), and Ethiopia, has decided to sell itself outright to China’s largest mining company, Zijin, for $4 billion. One of the biggest shake-ups in Africa’s mining sector, the deal is the result of a deliberate Canadian strategy to shed risk.

🔸 The sale is about locking in profits amid the continued rise in gold prices. The Canadian company managed to assemble a unique collection of assets—all with large reserves and in operating condition. Some of them, such as the Malian Sadiola deposit, have gone through hell itself—from jihadist attacks (which stopped suspiciously quickly though) to legislative revisions in the state’s favor.

🔸 Now it is time for shareholders to skim the cream: holding on to risky operations no longer makes sense when they can be sold at the highest possible price. In place of Canadian capital will come Chinese capital—more tolerant of risk and able to lean on Beijing’s backing in extreme situations.

This major geopolitical shift, paradoxically, is unlikely to have much impact on local communities, since profits, which have long been flowing off to god knows where, will continue to flow out just the same.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

🔵It’s Not Only Trump Who Wants Minerals🔵

Zambia’s army conducts a military operation to seize gold

🔫 Thoroughly inspired by the spirit of the times and soaring gold prices, Zambia’s army has carried out a full-fledged military operation—seizing the Kikonge gold deposit in the northwest of its own territory. According to reports, the army managed to drive around 1,000 illegal miners off the site.

🏹 Although the operation is being presented simply as the restoration of order and the rule of law, in reality it marks a full-scale paradigm shift for locals. For a long time, Kikonge deliberately had no large companies—only artisanal miners and cooperatives. That, in turn, had already led to an influx of enthusiasts from neighboring countries (Namibia, South Africa, and Tanzania) and clashes with police in July 2025.

❗️ While both episodes of security forces involvement were framed as “clearing” the area, the current intervention is tied not only to security concerns but also to a decision to hand the asset over to a new partner. In December, it was announced that the mine would be transferred to the private company Mining Mineral Resources, which operates in southern DRC and is linked to Congolese businessman of Indian origin Rahim Dhrolia. The state-owned ZMMC will also enter Kikonge alongside Dhrolia's company.

In this way, the Zambian government has decided to solve two problems at once—shifting the burden of guarding the area against foreigners onto a private partner and securing a larger share of the gold profits. Still, something suggests that once the foreigners are expelled and heavy machinery arrives, even legal local artisanal miners will find themselves shut out of access to the gold.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

Did You Know What to Look for When Visiting Space?
[ History ]

🛰 Many believe that the Great Wall of China is visible from space, but in reality, that’s a myth—the wall is way too small. What you can see from orbit, however, are the craters of open-pit mines and the cities that have sprung up around them in southern DRC, in Africa’s Copperbelt.

Three major cities have grown along the mines and pits of this region: Kolwezi, Lubumbashi (DRC), and Ndola (Zambia). The straight-line distance from Kolwezi to Lubumbashi is about 250 km, and another 180 km to Ndola.

🌟 The fact that all of this is clearly visible from space clashes somewhat with another fact: the region’s record as a global open-pit mines construction hub can be traced back to a single Belgian company—one that still exists today.

That company was Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), founded in 1906 to mine copper in Congo. Over the decades, it extracted resources worth $5.5 billion (at mid-20th-century exchange rates), digging pits near Kolwezi, Likasi (Shinkolobwe mine), Kipushi and Lubumbashi (Ruashi, Etoile mines).

There were some positives—like building railways, later abandoned—but the company is best remembered in popular memory for financially backing the secessionist quasi-state of Katanga, which rebelled against Patrice Lumumba’s government in 1960.

Interestingly, the original plan—to support the secessionists and thus avoid nationalization by Lumumba’s leftist government—failed on three levels. First, Katanga lost the war and was dissolved in 1963. Then, its former leader, Moise Tshombe, who became prime minister of the entire Congo, nationalized some company’s shares in 1964.

🔫Finally, on December 31, 1966, General Mobutu, who had seized power, nationalized UMHK entirely.

Since then, UMHK in Congo has become the public company Gécamines, which still manages the state’s shares in mineral assets. Meanwhile, the company’s European office evolved into Umicore, which also deals in minerals—though, of course, it can no longer turn part of another country into a lunar landscape.

#History

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow