News Analysis
JOHANNESBURG—A few weeks ago, while eyes were focused on the horrors unfolding in the Middle East, a stroke of a pen in a tiny country in West Africa made the world a more dangerous place.
Simon-Pierre Boussim, Burkina Faso’s energy minister, and Nikolay Spasskiy, deputy director-general of the Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, signed a deal to build a nuclear power plant in the landlocked Sahel desert state.
Russia’s national security establishment views civil nuclear power exports as an “important tool for projecting influence overseas while creating revenue streams for sustaining intellectual and technical capabilities and vital programs inside Russia itself,” according to research by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
However, such cooperation is often a double-edged sword.
“On the one hand, costly projects ... typically make little economic sense for the purchasing country, spurring uncomfortable questions about who stands to benefit. On the other hand, heavily subsidized projects pursued mainly for geopolitical reasons risk saddling Russia’s nuclear power monopoly Rosatom with burdens it can ill afford.”
At a ceremony to announce the Burkina Faso deal, Mr. Boussim thanked Moscow for its “willingness to provide Burkina Faso with its future energy needs.”
What will Russia get in exchange for its “philanthropy?”
Here’s a clue: Mr. Boussim is also Burkina Faso’s minister of mines. The country’s main mineral resource is gold. It’s Africa’s fourth-largest producer, and the world’s 14th largest, yielding almost 60 metric tons in 2022, according to state statistics.
The Russian mining company Nordgold owns several of the nation’s major gold mines, along with China.
The U.S. government’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) instituted sanctions against Nordgold and its owner, Alexei Mordashov, in June 2022. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that child labor and forced labor are common in the country’s mines.
Russia has for years used mercenaries from the Wagner Group to seize control of gold mines and oil fields in Central, West, and North Africa. It began increasing its “security” presence significantly in Africa in 2019, shortly after Wagner’s leader at the time, Yevgeny Prigozhin, posted an internal memo that read: “Africa is a region of the world where the interests of all global powers converge.
“A state’s position on the international stage depends directly on its influence on the African continent.”
In December 2022, Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo said Burkina Faso’s junta, which seized power in a coup that September, had hired Wagner to help it fight “armed non-state actors.”
“I believe a mine in southern Burkina has been allocated to them as a form of payment for their services,” he told reporters at the United States–Africa summit.
While Burkina Faso has rejected that claim, the government hasn’t confirmed or denied that it has entered an agreement with Wagner.
If Wagner’s guns-for-hire follow Russian nuclear experts into Burkina Faso, the country of 20 million will present them with a stiffer challenge, according to security analysts.
More than 40 percent of the country is presently controlled by an al-Qaeda offshoot, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), with the help of a local group affiliated with the ISIS terror group, the analysts told The Epoch Times.
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) says more than 6,000 people have died in terrorist violence by September this year. The organization has described the situation as reaching “civil war-like proportions.”
“I don’t think it’s a very good idea to build a high-security nuclear plant in a place where Islamic jihadists are currently running amok,” said Babacar Ndiaye, an independent West African security analyst who’s based in Dakar, Senegal.
Burkina Faso’s military ruler, Capt. Ibrahim Traore, isn’t deterred.
In fact, during the Russia-Africa summit in St Petersburg in July, he made a personal request to Russian President Vladimir Putin for the nuclear project.
After he took power, Capt. Traore made immediate moves to replace France, the nation’s closest Western ally and his country’s former colonial overlord, with Russia.
Burkina Faso’s equally mineral-rich neighbors, Mali and Niger, which are also strengthening ties with Russia particularly on military cooperation, are struggling to contain Islamist insurgencies linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Wagner fighters are present in both Mali and Niger.
The military government in Mali, which is Africa’s third-largest gold producer, on Nov. 23 signed an agreement with Russia that includes a gold refinery project in the capital, Bamako.
Finance Minister Alousseni Sanou said the refinery would process 200 metric tons of gold annually.
On the same day, Burkina Faso’s government began construction of the country’s first gold refinery. Its co-managing company, Marena Gold, expects the production capacity to be about 880 pounds of gold per day.
Mr. Traore said the gold would be under the “full control” of Burkina Faso.
“For some time now, gold has been [Burkina’s] leading export product,“ he stated at the launch ceremony in Ouagadougou. ”But we have no control over gold ... today, we have decided to put a whole network in place.”
China owns a significant chunk of gold mines in Burkina Faso, followed by Australia, Russia, and Canada, according to Mining Technology, a website that monitors global gold production.
Niger, another strong Russian ally, is one of the world’s top producers of uranium.
According to the U.S. government, the metal can be “enriched” at concentrations that can be used as fuel for nuclear power plants or nuclear reactors that run naval ships and submarines. It can also be used in nuclear weapons, and depleted uranium can be used for radiation shielding or as projectiles in armor-piercing weapons.
In a recent address to the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in Washington, Mr. Akufo-Addo suggested that the United States isn’t paying enough attention to an area he called the “Burkina corridor.”
He said the failure of the junta in Ouagadougou to control its territory has created an “open door” for terrorists to move into four countries to the south: Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Togo.
Mr. Ndiaye said the militants had already launched “serious attacks” in Benin and Togo.
In response, the four nations created the Accra Initiative, a cooperative and collaborative security mechanism. It has three pillars, he said: information and intelligence sharing; training of security and intelligence personnel; and conducting joint cross-border military operations to sustain border security.
Mr. Akufo-Addo told the USIP he was in Washington to seek U.S. support for the initiative’s core mission:
“To close the Burkina corridor,” although not with the help of American “boots on the ground.”
“The terrorist groups,” he added, “are evolving by the day as they scramble to control more territories and natural resources following defeats suffered in other parts of the world.”
He said the jihadists have provided coup leaders, in cooperation with Russia, with the “perfect excuse” to seize and hold on to power.
Mr. Akufo-Addo said Wagner mercenaries were helping local militias fight the terrorists—not for peace, but to regain control of mines.
He pointed out that the United States, the UK, and the European Union have provided $188 billion in aid to Ukraine since February 2022, while total security assistance for coastal West Africa for the same period has totaled $29.6 million.
“We are virtually out of time to work together to repair multilateralism,” he added. “If we do not renew our commitments to build, keep, and consolidate peace and democracy all over the world, we will have to brace ourselves to live in a new and more dangerous world.”
Mr. Ndiaye noted that President Joe Biden “made no mention of Africa” in his Oct. 20 Oval Office address, when he announced that he’d ask Congress for $61 billion for Ukraine, $14 billion for Israel, and $2 billion for the Indo-Pacific region.
“When he was in Washington, President Akufo-Addo was making the point that the democracies of West Africa are part of the same global struggle against the evils of terrorism and dictatorship that President Joe Biden speaks about when referring to Israel and Ukraine,” Mr. Ndiaye said.
“Russia is starting to dominate the Sahel region. Whether the entire West Africa falls into the hands of Russia, or the terrorists, or both, it’s equally bad for the whole world because both groups will have control of immense wealth they will use to spread their evil and they will ultimately use that evil against America and its allies.”
Moscow’s move into Burkina Faso isn’t its first attempt to gain a nuclear foothold in Africa and it won’t be the last, Mr. Ndiaye says.
South Africa is currently the only African state that produces nuclear power commercially, but more nations on the continent that are the least electrified globally are moving in the same direction.
In 2017, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Russia’s Mr. Putin signed a deal for Rosatom to build a $30 billion nuclear power plant at El Dabaa, about 280 miles northwest of Cairo. The plant is expected to begin producing electricity in 2026.
The same year, Russia also signed a deal to build several nuclear power stations in Nigeria, but those projects haven’t begun yet.
Kenya also has announced plans to build its first nuclear power plant by 2027 but hasn’t decided on an international partner.
In September, Rwanda—a Western ally in Africa—announced that the Canadian-German company Dual Fluid Energy would build a nuclear reactor in the country by 2028.
“All these nuclear projects in Africa are great for Russia, but there’s one jewel that Putin really wants in his nuclear crown” on the continent, Johannesburg-based energy analyst Chris Yelland said. That would be Africa’s most industrialized and technologically rich country, South Africa, he added.
It isn’t as if the Russian leader hasn’t tried to fill that gap.
In 2014, then-President Jacob Zuma, a former African National Congress (ANC) intelligence chief with wide-ranging Soviet-era contacts, signed a secret deal with Rosatom for the firm to build nuclear reactors in Africa’s second-largest economy.
If it had gone through, the $76 billion agreement would have been the biggest procurement contract ever signed in South Africa, and would have locked the nation into economic and energy dependency on Russia for decades, economists said.
Treasury and Finance Ministry officials, the media, civil society groups, and court rulings from a South African judiciary that remains largely free of political interference, blocked the deal from reaching fruition.
But top ANC members, including Energy and Mines Minister Gwede Mantashe and President Cyril Ramaphosa, remain dedicated to future nuclear projects in South Africa, with Rosatom their partner of choice.
