Devils Below

Gabon Tries Again🇬🇦 Gabon's government has engaged ore producers in building infrastructure, but risks falling into a half-century-old trap 🌐 Gabon’s president, Brice Oligui Nguema, received a delegation from Australian mining giant Fortescue, which is promoting the Belinga iron ore project in Gabon's North-East. The parties agreed on the construction of a new deep-water port in the Kobe-Kobe area of Gabon by 2030. 🛤 Given that weak infrastructure is the main obstacle to iron exports, including from Belinga, the project is likely conceived precisely as part of Fortescue’s future logistics chain. 🎰 In the 1970s Gabon already bet on infrastructure, but it played out differently than planned. Back then, the country intended to invest its oil revenues in the Trans-Gabon railway to ship manganese from deposits of the French company Ermet. 🛢️In the end, Gabon spent a significant share of its oil revenues, and the railway turned out to be loss-making! The country nearly went bankrupt and continued to incur losses until the railway was privatised in 1999. With the new project, the authorities should therefore be cautious not to fall into the same trap again: if the Australian investor wants a deep-water port, it should also chipinitself ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

Looting Angola's Sovereign Wealth Fund 🇦🇴 [ Budget Hole ] If a government does take money away from oil companies, that still doesn't mean it is able to spend it properly 💲 Countries that receive windfall revenues from resources often realise that simply spending them is not very wise and create special funds that are supposed to invest in the developmentofnon-extractive sectors, such as construction or IT. Just as often, these funds end up overrun by corruption. 🛢 One such example was Angola’s Sovereign Wealth Fund (FSDEA), created to invest revenues from oil sales but in practice becoming a source of enrichment for elite circles. 💲 Angola established the FSDEA in 2012 with an investment of $5 billion. The fund’s goal was “to promote growth, prosperity, and social and economic development.” 🚮 That same year, Angola’s president, José Eduardo dos Santos, appointed his son, José Filomeno dos Santos, as chairman of the FSDEA. Since managing a state fund is always more enjoyable together with friends, the president’s son invited the firm of his friend Jean-Claude Bastos to manage the fund’s investments. 🥅 From there the scheme was simple: Jean-Claude Bastos' consulting company received fees for its services, which is already corruption. The consulting firm also advised the fund to invest in other projects of the Angolan prince’s friend. 💸 In total, at least $150 million was lost through such schemes. Another $3 billion remained under the management of Jean-Claude Bastos until 2019, when Angola’s new government began to untangle the fund’s affairs and regained control over its assets. Both Bastos and the president’s son appeared before an Angolan court, but were later acquitted. 🛢 Angola is one of the largest oil producers in Africa, with production contributing about 50% of the nation’s GDP and >90% of its exports, yet it is simultaneously in the top-10 unequal countries in the world as measured by the Gini coefficient. #BudgetHole ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

You Don’t Want To, But You Have To 🇲🇱 An unpleasant truth: sometimes peace also entails concessions... 🌐 According to Reuters, a Malian court has ordered that 3 metric tonnes of solid, beautiful, shining gold worth about $400 million, confiscated in January 2025 from the Loulo-Gounkoto complex in Western Mali, be returned to the Canadian company Barrick. 👑 Reuters sources also claim that next week Barrick will regain operational control over the entire Loulo-Gounkoto gold complex, where a provisional administration was put in place in June. ⚔️ This points to a real de-escalation of the nearly two-year dispute between Bamako and the Canadian miner, following the settlement reached last month. 🥇 The very fact the confiscated gold was neither sold nor invested — though the temptation must have been great, given the record-high prices — suggests that Bamako never intended to break up with Barrick completely and wanted only to force it to abideby the rules. 🔸 Such an outcome makes it clear that the government, despite its somewhat unfriendlyapproach, has never sought to overhaul the previous system of partnerships with foreign companies. Since the coup, Mali has neither tried to nationalise active mining projects and run them itself, nor significantly changed the geography of its partners, which remain mainly European and North American companies. ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

Liberia Is Bringing Americans to Africa Again Liberia has approved the entry of a US company linked to the Trump administration into its railway sector 🌐 Liberia’s parliament has endorsed granting access to the Yekepa–Buchanan railway to the US company Ivanhoe Atlantic. It is Liberia’s logistics backbone, and Ivanhoe Atlantic needs it to ship iron ore from neighbouring Guinea, where its largest iron ore asset is located (750 million tonnes). 📅 This decision crowns 6 years of negotiations accompanied by friction with global steel giant ArcelorMittal, which for a long time effectively held a monopoly over the management of this corridor. 🇺🇸 Washington has carefully nurtured the deal: it was singed on the eve of Trump's meeting with Liberia's president Boakai in July 2025, while a week before the deal was sent to the parliament Liberia’s foreign minister met with Marco Rubio to discuss US investment in the country. 🫂 Special attention from the US enjoyed by Ivanhoe Atlantic is not accidental. Ivanhoe Atlantic is chaired by Peter Pham, who had served Trump’s first administration as the US Special Envoy for the Sahel & Great Lakes Regions of Africa. Besides, Ivanhoe Atlantic itself is selling its projects to Washington as a way to circumvent Chinese control over supply chains. ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

UAE Expansion Into Senegal The UAE has staked out projects in Senegal’s most sweet sectors of gold, logistics and gas 🇸🇳 During a visit on 10 December, an Emirati delegation led by the UAE Minister of Foreign Tradesealed several agreements with Senegalesegovernment and state-owned enterprises transferring the implementation of projects in Senegal's key resource sectors to Emirati companies. ⏩ Above all, the Senegalese state-owned Société des mines du Sénégal (SOMISEN) signed an agreement with the Emiratis to help create Senegal's new National Gold Trading Centre. The National Gold Trading Centreannounced on 12 November is Senegal's attempt to establish a national centralized hub for buying and sellinggold, which will serve as an official bridge between production (above all, artisanal mining) and subsequent sales. ⏩ Besides, state-owned mining companies and Emirati firm Resources Investment agreed to develop jointly logistics infrastructure and iron mines. ⏩ Senegal's national gas distribution company Réseau gazier du Sénégal (RGS) signed several contracts with Emirati company Equiline Energies, which specialises in gas exploration. 🔸 The most important element is arguably the agreement on the National Gold Trading Centre. Now the Emiratis will help set up this centre, which means the UAE has managed to inserted itself into the country's main mining sector, which accounts for about 30% of Senegal's total extractive exports. ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

You Don't Know What Real Bureaucracy Is🖨 Three years after the relaunch of a flare-gas-for-sale programme, Nigerian officials have finally got around to printing 28 licences 🌐 Nigeria’s upstream petroleum regulatory commission has just issued permits to 28 companies to access and sellassociated gas. ❓ Associated gas is usually produced at oil fields together with crude but burned off in flares as oil producers deem it unprofitable — so the idea is to involve other companies in this task, so as to make the gas available to people and industry. 📈 At a ceremony on Friday, the head of the commission, Gbenga Komolafe, rushed to boast that measures aimed at commercialising associated gas would lead to: 🔴 The creation of 100,000 jobs 🔴 The production of 170,000 metric tonnes of liquefied petroleum gas annually to supply roughly 1.4 million households 🔴 And the attraction of up to $2 billion in investment ⏳ Most likely, such results are expected sometime around the year2100 or 2300, since Friday’s event was about issuing licences to those who had submitted their applications back in 2022. Already in October 2023 the authorities said that 42 companies had successfully passed the same tender, but 14 apparently did not have the patience to wait. 🔸 Meanwhile, according to World Bank data, Nigeria remains one of the world’s top countries, alongside the US, Russia and Iran, in terms of the flared gas volumes. In 2023 and 2024 these volumes only increased. ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

Reverse Stockholm syndrome 🇨🇩🇺🇸 Whatever one thinks of Trump, the documents show that the recent dealthat shackles the DRC was in fact an initiative of Congo itself, and not only the result of the White House resident's love for “peace deals” with an economic twist. ℹ️ TheUS Department of Justice websitecontains numerous filings showing that, from at least February 2025, DRC's Tshisekedi began carpet-bombing Washington with his lobbyists. Here are just some examples: 📌 In late February Tshisekedi's main agent in Washington Aaron Poynton (US President of the USA-Africa Business Council) sent letters to US officials, including Secretary of State Rubio, proposing to give theUS access to Congo’s minerals + create a Joint Strategic Mineral Stockpile (which is what was implemented in the Washington agreements of 4 December) + deploy US troops in the DRC. 📌 Tshisekedi's another important messenger was prominent Republican Karl Von Batten, who on 11 February arranged a video call between Tshisekedi and Brian Mast, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee(Congressman Mast looks like the main victim of these manoeuvres, since he was endlessly pestered by both Von Batten and Poynton). Von Batten was also preparing a visit by Tshisekedi to the US in February, which ultimately did not take place. 📌 Other lobbyists for Kinshasa included Joseph Szlavik, once a member of the George H. W. Bush administration, whose firm Scribe Strategies was receiving at least $70,000 a month from Congo’s budget for its services, and Ballard Partners, which was being paid $100,000 a month. 🔸 They all tried to lure Trump with minerals and military cooperation. However, in the end Congo successfully lobbied itself into a “Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals,” but US military help never arrived. ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

🗣️December 9, Trump: "But I actually stopped the war with Congo and Rwanda, and they they said to me:'Please, please, we would love you to come and take our minerals.' Which we'll do...” 👇

Nostradamus Predicted This🔮 After several years of indignant cries in the French press that Niger was just about invite the Russians to its uranium sites, these accusations have become reality 🌐 According to Niger's official media outlet, on 9 December 2025 Niger’s Timersoi National Uranium Company (TNUC) signed a memorandum with the Russian company Uranium One Group on cooperation in uranium extraction. ❓ Of course, they forgot to say where exactly the mining is planned and what timelines are set. Presumably, the easiest entry for the Russian company would be Niger's Arlit uranium site, previously run by France's Orano. The French state company Orano has worked in Niger’s uranium sector for over 50 years, mainly through the SOMAÏR operation near Arlit (mining since 1971). After the July 2023 coup, relations deteriorated, and in June 2025 Niger announced plans to nationalise SOMAÏR, while in December 2025 the row further sharpened after Niger accused Orano of environmental wrongdoing. Why now? There may be several reasons: 🔴 Niamey tried to mine on its own for a while but did not succeed 🔴OR Niamey was afraid of sanctions, but the recent manoeuvre with uranium trucks that showed up in the press demonstrated that Niger is free to do what it wants with its uranium and nothing will happen 🔴OR Niamey right now needs alternative sources of revenue because of attacks on oil infrastructure 🔴ORall of the above. 🔸 Now the main thing is not to fall into thesame trap and make sure that the new foreign partners don't dump radioactive waste and walk away, as Orano did. ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

Guinean Pride [ Cost of Greed ] ⚙️ Guinea-Conakry’s flagship industrial project may put its real treasure at risk 🥇 The railway from the Simandou iron ore project to a port on the Atlantic Ocean runs almost across the whole of Guinea, which has become a…

Guinean Pride [ Cost of Greed ] ⚙️ Guinea-Conakry’s flagship industrial project may put its real treasure at risk 🥇 The railway from the Simandou iron ore project to a port on the Atlantic Ocean runs almost across the whole of Guinea, which has become a source of pride for the local authorities, some local patriots and the foreign beneficiaries of Simandou. However, many forget that the land on which the tracks lie did not belong to them alone. 🏷 A smidgen of background information: 🔴Simandou is Guinea’s flagship high grade iron ore project in the country’s southeast, the largest of its kind in the world. 🔴Simandou is so huge that it is being developed by two mining companies at once, the Chinese Winning Consortium and the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto. 🔴The infrastructure backbone is its 600 km railway, where Rio Tinto and Winning each hold 42.5% and the Guinean state - the remaining 15% stake. The corridor includes a new railway running across Guinea, plus new coastal port facilities around the Moribaya estuary near Senguelen. 🛑 A railway this long inevitably disrupts animal migration routes, including those of forest elephants, of which only about 60-140 remain in Guinea at all. Both the railway and the deposit itself have already led to a reduction in the natural habitats of rare species. In the area of the deposit alone, at least 4 protected monkey species live – or already used to. 🧬 Beyond the fact that elephants will no longer be able to walk back and forth, there are also problems that affect peopledirectly. Animals that can no longer find food in the forest now constantly come out onto farms and plantations, destroying crops. As a result, Guinea is losing not only its iron ore, but also its native inhabitants, who lived there long before rails were ever invented. #CostOfGreed ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow

Tragedy in Sierra Leone BBC reports a makeshift mine collapse in Sierra Leone 🌟 On 9 December, 16-year-old Mohammed Bangura and 17-year-old Yaya Jenne went down into a makeshift gold mine near Nyimbadu in Kono District, Sierra Leone, to earn money for their families. The walls of the pit, about 4 metres deep, collapsed, leading to the tragic death of the young miners. Artisanal gold production in Sierra Leone reaches around 3 tonnes of gold a year, most of it illegally, including by parents and children who, instead of learning arithmetic, are forced to dig for gold to earn a living. Unfortunately, neither a start of industrial production nor tighter state oversight will be able to eliminate such cases completely, because the main villain in this film is the surrounding poverty, pushing even children into mines. ➡️ Follow to stay informed - @devilsbelow