By Scott Graber
It is Tuesday morning, and we’re in Edenton, N.C. This morning I’m sitting at an iron table — waiting on a breakfast burrito — in a bricked-walled patio at the Inner Banks Inn. It is early, and Susan is sleeping upstairs.
The patio comes with Christmas tree lights wrapped around the branches of a half dozen trees. These festive lights take me back to a small, outdoor bar in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, that had these same lights. That bar also came with beer, Ngok, and with sandaled men selling Malachite jewelry.
It was 1992.
There has always been oil just off Congo’s coast, and in 1992, these bottomless reserves were leased to a French energy company called Elf-Aquitaine. Although Congo had gained its independence from France in 1960, Paris still controlled this oil and Congo’s economy. Pascal Lissouba, then President, wanted to move away from France and open up these reserves to other companies — Occidental Petroleum in particular. All of which brings me to the current problems in Niger.
Niger was also a part of “Francophone Africa”; and like Congo, there is a growing resentment of everything French. Niger does not have significant oil reserves under its barren, largely empty landscape. But there is uranium, and that uranium supplies between 20 and 25 percent of what Europe requires to run its nuclear power plants.
For years Muammar Gaddafi financed the Islamic inspired insurgency in Mali, Sudan, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. For years RPG-toting fanatics blew up hotels and slaughtered herdsmen across the Sahara and down into the Sahel on the edge of this vast desert.
Now al Qaeda — and two other iterations of this Islamic movement — have moved into Niger. Now Niger actually needs the 1,500 sun-burned French troops based in Niger to fight these Eastbound terrorists.
But there is a newly arrived actor in this long-running Saharan tragedy — Russia’s infamous Wagner Group. These camouflage wearing felons are in Mali (next door to Niger) having taken over the “security” portfolio from the departing French. They have arrived with a new, enhanced level of battlefield butchery entirely consistent with the take-no-civilian-prisoners-morality recently seen in the village of Bucha, Ukraine.
Wagner wants to be paid and that payment (by Mali) is alleged to be $10 million dollars a month. Mali, unlike Congo, has no oil reserves and it is likely that Wagner has be been given the government’s gold mining concession to help cover the tab.
Niger is mostly rice, sorghum and cattle and paying Wagner — assuming they are hired by the new regime — may include part of their uranium business.
France has historically controlled Niger’s uranium — and it still owns a 63.4% interest in the company that does the digging — and most of these dirt-poor, rice-raising Nigerians feel exploited in the same way the Congolese feel exploited.
But hold on. Before we get judgmental about our French brothers. Let’s now consider yet another actor in this ongoing drama.
China.
China takes zinc and copper from Eritrea; cobalt from Congo, oil from Angola and titanium from Sierra Leone. China is far and away Africa’s biggest trading partner. But while China removes oil and minerals from Africa — by the millions of barrels and bucketloads — it also lends Africa money. Africa collectively owes the Chinese $73 billion dollars.
The United States has some skin in this game with about 1,000 Special Forces troops deployed in Niger. We’re mostly looking for “stability” and don’t have the history of mineral extraction that burdens the French and makes China’s efforts look suspicious to many Africans.
So let’s also assume that France built and continues to own the infrastructure that extracts the uranium in Niger. Let’s further assume that this uranium is crucial to the operation of the nuclear power plants in Europe.
Under these circumstances one might understand how the current coup could mean a shift in ownership (of the uranium business) if Wagner’s mongols are employed by the new guys and insist on something other than rice or sorghum to pay its bill. One can also understand how a change in ownership might make the European Union unhappy.
The underlying promises and diplomatic understandings are secret and much too complicated for this burrito-eating oldster to parse. But getting a settlement between the Niger, France, Nigeria and ECOWAS is going to be hard. If you throw China, Russia and al Qaeda into the mix it will be harder.
But nothing is easy in Africa.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
