Putin Sells Off Africa's Underground in 146 Opaque Agreements

One hundred and forty-six documents. That is the tally Moscow presented at the close of its third summit with Africa, which ended on October 29. One hundred and forty-six signatures, including 92 contracts and 54 memoranda of understanding, and not a single detail made public. The organizers waved the number like a victory. We ask a simple question: who has read these texts, and who will pay the price?

Africans must not forget. There are men from Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and elsewhere who were lured by promises of employment and sent to fight in the Ukrainian trenches. Accra had to negotiate before the Kremlin agreed, at this summit, to ban the recruitment of Ghanaian citizens. That was a concession wrung out, not a gesture of goodwill. How many more African families are still waiting for news of sons who left to fight a war that was never theirs?

Let us look at the numbers, because that is where the truth hides. Forty-eight African delegations made the trip, twenty-two of them led by a head of state. That is better than 2023 in Saint Petersburg, where only seventeen presidents answered the call, but less than Sochi in 2019, where there were forty-five. The signal is clear: part of our leadership continues to court Moscow, sometimes to survive politically, often to build personal rents.

Take Mali. The transitional government, through General Assimi Goïta, signed two contracts with Rosgeologiya, through its subsidiary Zarubezhgeologia. The first provides for the production, over the next two years, of geological maps covering more than half of Mali's subsoil. Think about that. A foreign power is going to map our mineral wealth, our reserves of gold, lithium and strategic metals, before the Malian people have the faintest idea of what has been signed in their name. When a junta sells knowledge of its own territory, it sells the future of its children.

The summit was also dominated by memoranda of understanding and non-binding protocols, far more than by priced contracts. Several concern civil nuclear energy, a sector where technological dependence turns into political dependence for decades. A reactor cannot be built, maintained or repaired without a partner who holds the keys. Those who have watched how some states were captured by energy contracts know exactly what that means.

There is one more dimension we cannot pass over in silence. The Democratic Republic of the Congo obtained an intergovernmental commission with Moscow. The Congo, which is enduring a war of aggression carried out by the Rwandan army through the M23, with thousands of Rwandan soldiers deployed on its soil and UN Group of Experts reports documenting that support year after year, now finds itself negotiating with a power that presents itself as the defender of sovereignty. The world must look at these two realities together. Kigali and Moscow practice the same method: an armed force operating under cover, alliances to secure resources, and sovereignty rhetoric to mask plunder.

So let us call things by their names. Russia did not come to Africa as a development partner. It came with mercenaries, mining contracts, propaganda media and promises of security that turned into atrocities. In Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and the Central African Republic, the people who watched the Wagner men arrive, and then the Africa Corps, know what they gained: burned villages, disappearances, and journalists silenced. Those who denounce are threatened. Those who criticize vanish. That is the partnership Moscow is offering.

But this criticism must not blind us to the others. The West, which lectures us about democracy, has for a long time bought our elites with defense contracts and opaque financing. China builds our roads and locks us into debt that is hard to bear. Turkey sells drones and opens bases. The Emirates take over ports. Saudi Arabia and Qatar finance media and religious ecosystems. The new partition of Africa no longer has the faces it had in the nineteenth century, but the extractive logic is exactly the same. Every power comes to seize its gold, its oil, its uranium, its markets, its influence. And every time, the bill is handed to Africans.

So what is to be done? First, demand the full publication of the 92 contracts signed in Moscow. Our parliaments must receive them, examine them, and ratify or reject them. No mining agreement, no nuclear contract, no mapping of the subsoil should be concluded in the secrecy of a presidential office. Botswana showed us the way with its management of diamonds, thanks to strong institutions, transparent taxation and a civil society that watches. Mauritius built its prosperity on the rule of law and economic freedom. Senegal proved in 2024 that democratic alternation could prevail in the streets and at the ballot box, without a coup or a gun. These countries are not perfect, but they understood that sovereignty is built through institutions, not slogans.

Second, ECOWAS and the African Union must stop outsourcing their credibility to the powers that buy our leaders. The AU must publish a binding framework of transparency for all extractive and security agreements concluded with foreign actors. The UN Security Council, for its part, must stop closing its eyes to the flows of arms and mercenaries that feed African conflicts, and in particular to Rwandan support for the M23, which UN experts have been documenting for years.

Finally, it falls to you, the citizens, to demand accountability. Ask your MP which agreements have been signed in your name. Ask journalists to verify every contract, every protocol, every geological map. Refuse to let your children be sold as cannon fodder, whether in Donetsk or anywhere else. Demand that your government write the protection of its nationals into every negotiation, as Ghana has just done.

Dear readers, the question is not whether Africa should work with Russia, China or the West. The question is whether our leaders work for us or for themselves. As long as the contracts remain secret, as long as our young people leave to die in foreign wars, as long as our subsoil is mapped without our consent, the answer will be clear. It is time for the bill to change its addressee.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL