Malian government helicopters landed unannounced at a Barrick Mining complex on Thursday and carted away gold, escalating a dispute between the parties and highlighting challenges facing miners as African countries assert more control over their natural resources.
The trend spans west and central Africa’s “coup belt” that includes Mali, Niger and Guinea, where military regimes have seized power in recent years, as well as elected governments such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Governments have also been emboldened to act by the global race for critical minerals essential to high-tech and defence industries, as well as the transition to cleaner energy.
The raid on the Loulo-Gounkoto complex — in which the government seized over a tonne of gold — has added to the woes of the Canadian company which had already lost operational rights to the mine, after it closed it in January following another government seizure of the precious metal.
Niger has moved to nationalise a uranium mine jointly operated with French state-owned Orano, while Guinea has revoked scores of licences across its gold, bauxite, diamond, graphite and iron sectors.
DR Congo last month extended a ban of the export of cobalt — a critical battery metal — in an attempt to boost prices, leading to commodity company Glencore declaring a force majeure on some of its contractual obligations.
“Western companies are often still playing by some of the old rules of the game . . . in terms of how to handle a government that’s fundamentally at odds with you,” said Daniel Litvin, chief executive of Resource Resolutions, a mineral conflict resolution company.
“[They] need to make their game more sophisticated” and get a deeper understanding of host governments’ motivations — something Litvin said Chinese companies were better at — rather than taking the “patronising view” of assuming they were acting irrationally.
While some governments have embraced more overt resource nationalism by demanding a greater share of revenues and increasing state participation in joint ventures, others have sought to move up the value chain by exerting control over the processing of raw materials.
Some democracies have sought to extract concessions from foreign miners in the run-up to elections, and wider geopolitical considerations have also played a role as some countries — such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — reduced ties with former colonial rulers and other western nations.
Mali’s military leader Assimi Goïta last month broke ground on a gold refinery project being built with a Russian conglomerate and a Swiss investment company, which he said would assert the nation’s “economic sovereignty”.
Risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft said resource nationalism had become a prominent theme in its engagement with clients in extractive sectors. Other industry figures said mining groups were adopting a “multitrack approach” and sometimes pursued back-channel negotiations even as they pursued legal cases against host governments.
But such deals can carry the risk of being perceived as improper or done under duress. The concerns of anti-corruption advocates were heightened after President Donald Trump instructed his justice department to pause enforcement of a law banning bribery of foreign officials.
Litvin at Resource Resolutions warned that deals won by conducting unethical practises tended to be “short term wins”.
“I think western companies should double down on their commitment to international standards . . . It’s a short term win if companies engage in malpractice,” he said.
Mucahid Durmaz, a Verisk Maplecroft analyst, said companies could improve relations with host governments by promoting broader socio-economic development, such as through investment in infrastructure. It was “no longer viable” to just exploit resources and move on, he added.
They should also consider helping countries that want to capture greater value from their extractive industries, with Ghana, Tanzania and DR Congo all having expressed an interest in taking a bigger share of minerals processing, he said.
Mark Bristow, chief executive of Barrick, said in a letter posted on the company’s website that it was committed to Mali despite the “extraordinary and unprecedented challenges”.
“Our relationship with Mali represents more than a business partnership — it exemplifies the shared value creation that has defined our approach to responsible mining across Africa and around the world,” he said.
François Conradie, a Morocco-based political economist at Oxford Economics, pointed to the Simandou project in Guinea as an example of mining companies investing in infrastructure development. Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto and its partners, including several Chinese firms, are constructing railway and port facilities.
He also warned that companies needed to avoid “sitting” on licenses without exploiting them, depriving cash-strapped governments of much needed flows of taxes and royalties.
Orano delayed production at the Imouraren mine in northern Niger for years as uranium prices collapsed, and was later stripped of the rights to the site as relations between Niger and France collapsed.
“If you come to a country, you have to put money into the state coffers,” Conradie said.
But analysts warned that governments also needed to tread carefully so that they did not deter investment in their industries. Durmaz noted that the risk for investors in Mali and Niger had “shifted” in the wrong direction, while Guinea had “more risk than benefits”.
Andrew Dinning, founder of Sarama Resources, which has begun arbitration proceedings against the government of Burkina Faso, said withdrawal by western investors would create a vacuum that would most likely be filled by Chinese or other non western money.
