BURKINA FASO NATIONALISES FIVE MINING ASSETS

On 27 August 2024, Burkina Faso announced that it would nationalise two gold mines, Boungou and Wahgnion, following a legal dispute between London-listed Endeavour Mining and a local company, Lilium Mining.

On 11 June 2025, the government declared that the nationalisation process was complete. The state-owned Burkina Faso Mining Participation Company (SOPAMIB) officially owns and controls the two mines as well as three mining licenses previously held by Endeavour and Lilium Mining.

Continued……Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traoré has expressed interest in revoking more foreign mining permits and granting the state greater control over the mining sector.

Burkina Faso is a member of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a Pan-African anti-imperialist confederation that was established on 6 July 2024 and includes neighbouring Mali and Niger. All three countries have revised their mining codes. Mali is involved in an ongoing legal battle against Canadian-based company Barrick Gold, and its assertion of resource sovereignty led to the resignation of Terry Holohan, CEO of Australian company Resolute Mining. In 2024, Niger nationalised two major mines, Imouraren and Somaïr, formerly owned by French public company Orano.

Sources

https://africanminingmarket.com/burkina-faso-completes-nationalisation-of-5-gold-mining-assets/22421/

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/burkina-faso-completes-nationalisation-five-gold-mining-assets-2025-06-12/

https://africa.businessinsider.com/local/markets/junta-led-burkina-faso-nationalises-five-gold-mining-assets/mmp89dd

https://www.rml.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/030225-Management-Changes.pdf

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/mali-court-adjourns-hearing-whether-put-barricks-gold-mines-under-provisional-2025-06-02/

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/french-company-orano-loses-control-of-uranium-mine-to-niger-admin/3414093

https://fr.africanews.com/2024/06/21/niger-orano-perd-son-permis-dexploitation-sur-le-site-dimouraren//

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E6uzdGASVM

From the first ships that docked on African shores in the 15th century, the African continent has been the breeding ground for imperialism.

The global capitalist system was built by exploiting our resources and people, with Europeans first seeking out gold in Africa. Europeans then began kidnapping and enslaving Africans, evolving into the systematic looting of land, minerals, and labour through military force to protect their ‘profits.’ Today, this system still operates, but it hides behind the polished language of ‘investment,’ ‘loans,’ and ‘development aid.’

Continued……. Let's be clear: Africa is wealthy. According to the UN Environment Programme, our continent is home to 30 per cent of the world's mineral reserves, 8 per cent of the world's natural gas and 12 per cent of the world's oil reserves. Africa also holds 40 per cent of the world's gold reserves and up to 90 per cent of its chromium and platinum. The largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum and uranium in the world are also in Africa. Plus, Africa is home to 65 per cent of the world’s arable land.

Western-backed financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank impose structural adjustment programmes that gut public services and kill local industries. Our people suffer due to foreign debt that puts our governments’ budgets in the red, causing unemployment and expensive infrastructure projects that don’t benefit us.

Further, comprador African leaders allow multinational corporations to extract raw materials at a fraction of their value.

Every time Africa has tried to break free through Pan-Africanism, socialism or resource nationalisation, the West has blocked us.

But in the past few years, people-backed coups d’état in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have ousted Western-aligned leaders, expelled French troops, and formed the Alliance of Sahel States (AES). This anti-imperialist confederation is working to create a federal, Pan-African state that would eventually lead to a single governance for the whole continent.

Meme credit: @africanlivesmatter1 (IG)

Sources

https://www.unep.org/regions/africa/our-work-africa#:~:text=Africa%20is%20home%20to%20some%2030%20percent,uranium%20in%20the%20world%20are%20in%20Africa.

WHO LET THE GOONS OUT?

Police in Kenya are denying using hired thugs to intimidate protesters. On 17 June, people pitched up in central Nairobi to voice their anger at the latest death in police custody. But the peaceful rally soon turned into a scene of battle after a large group of hooligans turned up and started harassing the crowd. They were armed with sticks and whips, and many were riding motorbikes. A police chief in the city has since outrageously tried to claim that the mob and the protesters were as good as ‘indistinguishable.’ Yet while police used tear gas against the demonstrators who were calling for justice and an end to lethal police brutality, the gang of attackers were largely left alone by the security forces. Some of the protesters say they recognised police officers, while opposition politicians have also raised their suspicions that the state is funding the street violence.

Sources

https://citizen.digital/news/goons-unleashed-working-with-police-as-protests-turn-violent-n364780

ON AMERICA’S ‘HIT LIST’ OF NATIONS

Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, as well as Libya, Sudan and Somalia, were all marked for destabilisation by the US from as early as 2001 - that’s according testimony by former US General Wesley Clark. 24 years later, the US has militarily targeted all of them.

Recent events in Iran are an escalation of years of destabilisation attempts. These included sanctions and the assassination of senior Iranian officials - with Washington now militarily involved in Israel’s war against Tehran after bombing key nuclear sites.

Continued………. Of the seven countries on the alleged hit list, three are African, and all of them are now a pale shadow of what they once were. Libya witnessed the overthrow and murder of pan-African icon Muammar Gaddafi, plunging what was once one of Africa’s wealthiest countries into an open-air slave market and a playground for regional powers such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Somalia saw the rise of the terror group al-Shabaab following an invasion by US-proxy Ethiopia. Sudan, since April 2023, has witnessed a proxy war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces paramilitary. The result has been the displacement of 13 million of the country’s 50-million people and the creation of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis (UN).
Credit: Democracy Now


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https://hornreview.org/2025/05/05/armed-alliances-the-emerging-houthi-al-shabaab-axis-in-the-horn-of-africa/

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/sudan-uae-war-arms-trade-rsf

https://tonyseymour.substack.com/p/whose-plan-was-seven-countries-in

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/11/sudan-scene-of-worlds-worst-humanitarian-crisis-african-union

https://dtm.iom.int/dtm-insights/april-2025-edition/data-update-violence-and-crisis-sudan

https://abcnews.go.com/International/israel-military-action-iran-coming-days-sources/story?id=122776202

Continued……. Sources

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UAE’S AFRICAN LAND GRAB

There’s a new scramble for Africa — but this time, it’s not for minerals or oil. It’s for carbon. As the climate crisis intensifies, wealthy nations are racing to buy up huge swathes of African forests to offset their own emissions and meet green targets. At the centre of this land grab is the United Arab Emirates. The oil-rich Gulf nation, one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel exporters, has quietly become one of the largest buyers of African forest land — acquiring rights over areas roughly the size of Great Britain.

The UAE has pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. But instead of cutting emissions at home, it’s pouring billions into carbon offset schemes across Africa. These deals allow the UAE to keep pumping oil and gas while claiming environmental leadership — including at global climate summits it has hosted. In return, African countries, often desperate for foreign investment, are signing over control of critical ecosystems for decades, sometimes up to a century.

Continued……But behind the glossy promises of “green partnerships” is a harsh reality. According to NGO Fern, millions of people in forested regions are losing access to the land they depend on for food, water, medicine, and livelihoods. Indigenous communities are being evicted or restricted, often with little consultation or compensation. Forests once managed by local people are being turned into commodities — fenced off, monitored by drones, and monetised for carbon credits.

Worse still, the UAE can profit from these forests. Once it controls them, it can sell carbon credits to other polluting countries or companies, effectively becoming a broker in a new green economy — one built on the backs of Africa’s most vulnerable.

This is climate hypocrisy at its most dangerous. While the UAE markets itself as a leader in sustainability, it continues to expand its fossil fuel production and bankrolls carbon colonialism across Africa. As the world rushes to go green, Ahmed Ghoneim investigates how the UAE’s climate strategy is leaving a trail of human and ecological destruction in its wake.

IRAN-CONTRA: HOW THE CIA BIRTHED THE CRACK EPIDEMIC

Join African Stream as we dig into the true story behind one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history — a real-life saga more disturbing than any TV drama. If you thought Snowfall, was based on fictional events. Think again. It was loosely based on the story of the Iran-Contra scandal and the devastating impact the U.S. War on Drugs had — and still has — on Black communities.

Continued……Hosted by Salifu Mack, this piece exposes how covert U.S. operations in the 1980s — involving illegal arms deals, CIA-backed rebels in Nicaragua, and a flood of cocaine into American cities — helped unleash a crisis that tore through Black communities in America. The Reagan administration publicly declared a “War on Drugs,” but behind the scenes, the US government were fuelling the very epidemic it claimed to be fighting.

By the late 1980s, crack cocaine had ravaged inner-city communities. According to the ACLU, by 1989, 1 in 4 Black men aged 20–29 was under some form of criminal justice supervision — probation, parole, or incarceration. Black Americans, though using drugs at similar rates to white Americans, were imprisoned for drug offences at six times the rate. Entire families were shattered. Generations of Black children grew up with parents behind bars, caught in a cycle of poverty, trauma, and mass incarceration.

The long-term consequences remain staggering. Over 80 percent of those incarcerated for federal crack cocaine offenses during the late 1980s and 1990s were Black. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act introduced a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine — a policy that overwhelmingly targeted and punished Black communities. And even today, despite decades of criminal justice reform efforts, Black Americans still make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. prison population, despite representing only 13 percent of the overall population.

WARNING: This video contains violent scenes of the U.S. “war on drugs.”

Let us know what you think in the comments.

With the all-too-familiar sounds of the US empire’s drums of war booming louder, marked by the US and Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, it is a good time as ever to show the interconnectedness of the anti-imperialist struggle and the need for Africans to be in solidarity with other peoples in the Global South. 

Here, we examine the relationship between different Iranian governments and South Africa, from the apartheid era to the post-apartheid era.

Before the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran and apartheid South Africa developed strong ties despite Iran's official anti-apartheid stance. Shared anti-communism and ‘economic complementarity’ drove relations, says Boston University Professor Emeritus of International Relations and History H E Chehabi.

Continued……For example, Iran needed industrial goods and uranium, while South Africa relied heavily on Iranian oil, receiving over 90 per cent of its imports from Iran by 1978. Military and nuclear cooperation also deepened, including a $700 million uranium deal and Iranian naval visits. Despite global pressure, the Shah prioritised ties with South Africa.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution severed formal ties with Pretoria. Iran's new leadership expressed support for the South African liberation struggle and provided financial aid to the African National Congress (ANC). The Iranian revolution served as inspiration for South African Muslims, Chehabi noted.

With the end of apartheid in 1994, Iran and the new democratic South Africa re-established diplomatic relations. Iran's earlier support for the ANC paved the way for the establishment of cordial ties. 

Iran and South Africa have evolved from being cogs in the imperialist machine to demonstrating revolutionary solidarity and, finally, to post-apartheid cooperation driven by changes in government on both sides amidst Western imperialism's aggression against both states.

Sources
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-launches-strikes-iranian-nuclear-facilities-trump-says/

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2016.1201330

WHY IRAN NEEDS NUKES

Iran needs nuclear weapons to deter Israel’s aggression in its quest to topple the government in Tehran.

That was the message from British political commentator George Galloway (@georgegalloway on X) during a heated discussion on UK journalist Piers Morgan’s ‘Piers Morgan Uncensored’ TV programme about US and Israeli warnings that Iran is allegedly on the verge of producing nuclear arms, justifying attacks on Tehran and other Iranian locations. Meanwhile, Israel owns undeclared nuclear capabilities, likely through decades of US military aid, threatening West Asia.

The Costs of War Project at Brown University reports that the United States allocated $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel from October 2023 to September 2024. In December 2023, the Wall Street Journal noted that US arms deliveries to Israel since 7 October 2023 included 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

Continued……. Galloway contends a nuclear-capable Iran would act as a deterrent against such military actions. His remarks also underscore the hypocrisy of the West, which claims arbitrarily that some countries are permitted to have nuclear weapons while others are not.

Galloway says he employs a realist interpretation of geopolitics, where anti-colonial nations like Iran must bolster their defence capabilities to ensure their survival, as imperialist forces target them.

Do you think that being prepared for battle against Western imperialism is a lesson that Africa’s anti-imperialist revolution in the Sahel should take from Iran’s situation?

Video credit: @PiersUncensored

Sources

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/17/politics/israel-iran-nuclear-bomb-us-intelligence-years-away

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/moscow-backs-iran-s-peaceful-nuclear-program-opposes-weaponization-president-putin/3606555

https://time.com/7296553/us-iran-strike-israel-trump/

https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/the-us-hypocrisy-about-israels-nuclear-weapons-must-stop/

https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-has-what-glance

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-military-aid-does-the-us-give-to-israel/

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https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/17/sovereignty-exceptionalism-countries-should-mind-their-own-business/