Allies: Collateral Damage of American Expansion 🇺🇸

U.S. President’s plans to displace China have unexpectedly materialized in the form of a proposed American consortium purchase of a stake in the DRC’s copper-cobalt mines.

🤨 There’s just one problem: to save supplies from Beijing’s influence, Washington for some reason needs to buy assets from the Swiss company Glencore.

For reference, the deal details:

⏩ Parties: Swiss company Glencore and the American Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, established by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm ADQ.

⏩ Essence: Orion’s acquisition of a 40% stake in Mutanda Mining and Kamoto Copper Company, both in southern DRC, for $9 billion.

⏩ Status: A memorandum of understanding has been signed, meaning there are no legal obligations yet.

In essence, purchasing a significant stake in a Swiss company’s assets will strengthen the US position in the minerals market—but not by displacing China, rather by displacing its own partners, whose supplies were already reliable without spending $9 billion.

❌ The US’s main misstep in this direction is its inability to engage private firms who could open up new assets for Washington. The state-backed Orion can buy someone else’s mines, but the Chinese are unlikely to sell anything, while such a brand-new government-backed investor without experience will suffer to build any new mines or plants.

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What Will They Make from Our Resources?
[ Global ]

🇺🇸 The Trump administration has once again decided to create something new and beautiful—this time, a reserve of critical minerals for civilian industry, poetically named "Project Vault." It’s reported that companies like Clarios (batteries), GE Vernova (green energy infrastructure), Western Digital (computers), and Boeing (aircraft) will have access to this stash.

The project will operate primarily on a $10 billion loan from the government’s Export-Import Bank. The scheme is as follows: these funds will be used to purchase mineral raw materials abroad and bring them to the U.S., where domestic consumers will buy them.

The trader Mercuria has already announced its participation in Project Vault. Recently, authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo promised to sell it 100,000 tons of copper in 2026. So now we know that the Congolese copper won’t be taken away into the unknown—it will end up at very specific Boeing factories.

💰By creating this transit reserve, the US is once again attempting to address China’s dominance in mining and processing. However, it remains unclear whether it may really help make the US competitive compared to China.

At first glance, it looks more like an attempt to profit from trade intermediation.

#Global

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🇬🇭 Ghana's Minister for Finance Ato Forson and GoldBod CEO Sammy Gyamfi attended the ceremony marking the first gold bar production at Gold Coast Refinery Ltd, which bills itself as "West Africa’s largest refinery."

Built all the way back in 2016, the refinery spent the last nine years sitting idle—gold refining isn’t profitable on its own unless there are massive volumes, which is why such plants are often state-owned in many countries.

In Ghana’s case, unfortunately, 85% of the now-operational facility is owned by a private Egyptian company. Still, its state-sponsored launch creates a handful of jobs and, more importantly, gives authorities physical control over the flow of pure gold across the border.

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What Is Finnish Minister Doing in Zambia? 🇫🇮

🗺Finland is known for its harsh climate, skis to escape it, and saunas to hide from it. None of which Zambia needs. So why is the Finnish Minister of Economic Affairs currently visiting Zambia—7,500 kilometers from home?

While the Finns themselves don’t build anything major, companies from the Nordic country are happy to bandwagon, latching onto projects led by bigger players: Finnish equipment suppliers already work with Western gold miners like Barrick, and Finnish railway firms are aggressively lobbying their services, trying to hitch a ride on the US-European Lobito Corridor project.

The choice of Zambia as a key target for expansion is simple—there’s no choice. Finnish companies are prohibited from working with their immediate neighbor — Russia — and seek new, promising markets. Meanwhile, Zambia is far more open and stable than most other African nations, giving minor Finnish tractor suppliers the breathing room they need to grow.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

Nigeria's Fuel Regulator Chief Praises Tinubu’s Success in Cutting Fuel Imports

🇳🇬 According to Saidu Mohammed, head of the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA), Nigeria has saved around 6 trillion naira ($4.4 billion) by reducing fuel imports in the first nine months of 2025 alone.

The official attributes this success to President Tinubu’s reforms, particularly the full deregulation of the sector, foreign exchange harmonization, and the shift to trading oil in the national currency instead of dollars. Clearly, the "savings" refer to reducing the outflow of dollars abroad.

✅ While the reduction in imports is undeniably a success, it’s worth recalling that one of the steps in deregulating the fuel sector was the dismissal of the previous NMDPRA head in December last year — at the behest of Nigerian oil refining magnate Aliko Dangote.

Looking ahead, Saidu Mohammed envisions a future where Nigeria eliminates fuel imports entirely:

🔴The supply chain landscape of the sector has depended significantly on importation, and that is the story we want to change, from 100 per cent importation to zero importation, and then we start climbing towards exportation.

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👀 Trust, But Verify

🔥 While some wage war and others dig the earth with their hands, the most privileged class in the Congo—mining companies—face their own calamity: over the past year, insurance costs for them have skyrocketed tenfold due to the ongoing conflict.

According to Reuters, after the AFC/M23 offensive intensified in early 2025, premiums for political violence insurance paid by mining companies surged 5 to 10 times, even though most of them operate far from the conflict zone and have never faced the threat of a direct attack.

📊 The same sources report that the insurance market stabilized after a year, with prices returning to pre-crisis levels by January 2026.

This spike in insurance costs reveals what no one will admit publicly: a huge crisis of confidence in Kinshasa’s ability to keep the situation in the country under control, which swept over foreign companies in 2025.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

🇫🇷 French Troops Train Ghana to Fight Illegal Gold Miners in the Jungle

🚨 For several weeks, hired French military instructors — veterans of operations in French Guiana (South America) — have been training Ghana Armed Forces troops to fight illegal gold miners in the country’s forests.

Ghanaian wildcat miners have long practiced armed resistance against law enforcement, particularly the NAIMOS (National Anti-Illegal Mining Operations Secretariat) units. The latest clash of this kind occurred on January 20, leaving one NAIMOS soldier wounded.

Illegal miners often use forests as a means to fortify their defenses. In November 2025 the Ghana Institute of Foresters has estimated that 5 forest reserves in the southeastern part of the country were controlled by armed illegal miners.

❗️ Activists have repeatedly called on the government to take decisive action — even declaring a state of emergency — to crack down on illegal alluvial gold mining, which is devastating local rivers.

Yet the effectiveness of even current measures is limited—not just by the soldiers’ ability to fight in their own forests, but also by corruption.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

On Paper and in Reality, the Congo Keeps Handing Over Deposits to the US

🇺🇸 American company Virtus Minerals has signed an agreement to purchase the shares of Chemaf, a copper producer in Africa’s Copperbelt in southern DRC. Put up for sale in 2023, the company received six offers from new investors, but Congolese authorities insisted it be sold to the Americans.

January reports indicated that Chemaf and its Mutoshi mine were on a list of assets Congo offered to American investors — despite the fact that the asset already had and still has current owners from India.

Earlier, Chinese company Norinco had offered to buy Chemaf for $1.4 billion, but Congolese authorities refused to approve the deal and instead proposed to buy the company themselves for $1 million — planning to sell at least 75% of the asset shares to an unspecified partner, supposedly a US one.

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🔵The Weirdest Declaration of Independence🔵

📣 Wearing a funny hat on the edge of the forest—this is how, on February 2, representatives of the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) declared the independence of the oil-rich enclave from Angola. A cruel irony: the international indifference that FLEC complains about in their video followed this declaration as well.

A geographically detached enclave of approximately 7,200 km², sandwiched between Congo (Brazzaville) and the DRC, Cabinda accounts for roughly 60% of Angola’s oil production — and historically, up to 80% of state revenues during peak periods.

This asymmetry has created a paradox: Cabinda is Angola’s most economically strategic region, yet one of the most politically constrained.

❗️ The decolonization advocates in the video are particularly stung by the world’s indifference to their struggle— "and especially Portugal’s." The very independence declaration is also aimed at shifting a dispute from a domestic matter into an international self-determination case.

However, Europeans, Americans, and Chinese have always been too invested in maintaining Angola’s oil exports to support them, and now the U.S. and Europe are also building the Lobito railway corridor through Angola — with the involvement of Portuguese companies.

Above all, this desperate bid for international attention clearly signals that the FLEC lacks both the its own strength and the geopolitical awareness to wage an effective struggle.

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Good morning!

💡 Anytime you've ideas to suggest, interesting topics to share, or feel that some facts are unfairly overlooked — don’t hesitate to drop a comment here or DM the channel.

P.S. People in the video were allegedly digging for water but struck oil instead somewhere in Somalia.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow

"I Survived 21 Hours Buried Alive": DRC Mine Collapse Survivor Speaks

📣 Journalists from Al Jazeera managed to track down and interview one of the survivors of the January 28 landslide at the Rubaya coltan mine in the DRC's AFC/M23-controlled territory.

According to Grace Barata, he and other miners were trapped when they took shelter in the mine from the rain:

🔴 It started raining around 3 PM local time, and we took shelter from the rain in the mine... I heard rocks rubbing together and thought it was just pebbles being washed away by the water. Then I found myself in total darkness.

Ironically, the same rain that softened the soil and triggered the landslide may have saved Barata and his colleagues as they were inside the mine when the collapse happened and weren’t crushed by falling rocks.

After 21 hours underground, rescuers finally pulled Barata from the earth on Thursday at around 1 PM.

🔴 We saw the light from afar and knew we would be rescued. The others died before our eyes, without saying a word.

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🔵They Remember the People: Mining Ministry Reminds Foreign Companies of the Law🔵

🌐 In the wake of Félix Tshisekedi’s US visit and the massive American takeover of Congolese deposits, the Congolese Ministry of Mines (not as a distraction, for sure) has publicly reminded companies that a portion of their shares must belong to local workers.

⏩ The ministry’s generous PR gift for pro-government media is based on its reading of what the ministry call legal requirements that local workers must own up to 5% of mining companies’ shares.

⏩ No one will actually hand out shares to miners, for sure. After all, DRC law doesn’t force companies to give away 5% to workers for free — it only mandates 10% Congolese ownership. So, most likely, the ministry will be ignored—at best, companies with shaky relations with Kinshasa might be pressured to bring in a local contractor or union boss as a token partner.

In the end, everyone stays where they are—because the real point of this announcement is for the government to drown out the endless headlines about handing over assets and mineral rights to the US.

➡️ Stay informed - @devilsbelow