Africa
Power Play or Partnership? America’s Strategy in Africa [Business Africa]
This Week: U.S. Influence in Africa, EU-Zimbabwe Trade, and Uganda’s Tea Crisis
This week, our guest, historian Amzat Boukari-Yabara, revisits the intensifying American influence in Africa, spanning energy and mining projects. Meanwhile, the European Union seeks to strengthen its trade ties with Zimbabwe, and in Uganda, the tea industry is reeling from a pricing crisis.
Africa and the U.S.’s Multidimensional Strategy
As major powers vie for access to Africa’s strategic resources, the United States is deploying a complex strategy that blends economic investments, security cooperation, and diplomatic mediation. This approach aims not only to secure energy and mineral supplies but also to counter the growing influence of China and Russia on the continent.
Nigeria-Morocco Pipeline: An Energy and Geopolitical Keystone
The Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project (5,660 km, $25 billion) perfectly illustrates this strategy. Actively supported by Washington, this mega-project serves several strategic goals: reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, countering Chinese advances—with the Jingye Group already supplying construction materials—and bolstering American influence. “There has been a reshaping of energy stakes since the war in Ukraine,” explains historian Amzat Boukari-Yabara, noting how the U.S. is exploiting Europe’s new vulnerabilities.
DR Congo: Mining Wealth and Instrumentalized Instability
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, U.S. strategy reveals its contradictions. On one hand, companies like KoBold Metals (backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos) are making major investments in cobalt and copper extraction. On the other, Washington offers conditional military support in the east of the country while positioning itself as a mediator in the conflict with Rwanda. “We are witnessing the monetization of instability,” Boukari-Yabara warns, highlighting “a U.S. ability to exert diplomatic, commercial, and security blackmail.” This approach peaks with opaque negotiations involving Rwanda over Congolese resources, which “tend to perpetuate the crisis in eastern Congo.”
Kenya and Rare Earths: A Strategic Partnership
In Kenya, the U.S. is strengthening partnerships around rare earths, which are essential for the energy transition. This push is part of a global race for critical minerals, where Washington seeks to close the gap with Beijing. It also comes alongside a military repositioning in the region, particularly in the Sahel after France’s withdrawal.
Questionable Tactics
Recent American initiatives raise concerns about respect for African sovereignty. The most striking example is Trump’s proposal to recognize Somaliland in exchange for accepting Palestinian refugees. For Boukari-Yabara, these “deal-making negotiations” reflect a purely transactional view of relations with Africa.
In the face of this aggressive policy, the historian calls for an urgent, unified continental response: “We need to create transnational industries and resolve the CFA franc issue.” His call for unity resonates, as “all these resources directly concern the U.S. in its global vision.” The key question remains whether African countries can turn this new geopolitical rivalry into a genuine opportunity for sovereign development.
Zimbabwe: Toward Strengthened Trade Ties with the EU?
As the United States reduces its aid to many African countries, the European Union is revising its strategy on the continent—particularly in Zimbabwe. Brussels is moving from the role of donor to co-investor, offering duty- and tax-free access to its market. France is supporting local agricultural SMEs, and the Netherlands already imports Zimbabwean fruits and steel.
This renewed European trade push comes amid a tense political climate. The recent NGO law (PVO Bill), deemed repressive by civil organizations, has sparked concern. Nevertheless, the EU hopes Zimbabwean businesses will seize the opportunity.
A report by Keith Baptist.
Uganda: Tea Industry in Peril Amid Price Collapse
Uganda’s tea industry is undergoing an unprecedented crisis. Tea prices have dropped significantly, averaging just $0.79 per kilo—far below the more than $2 fetched by Kenyan and Rwandan teas. This sharp price drop has led many farmers to abandon tea in favor of more profitable crops such as maize and bananas.
Victoria Ashabahebwa, director of Swazi Tea Co. LTD, notes that more than a million Ugandans depend on tea for their livelihood. Declining tea quality, high production costs, and a lack of government support are all contributing factors. Farmers and processors have called on the government to invest in the sector and rescue an industry that was once thriving—but so far, no official response has been given.
A report by Isabel Nakirya.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed a host of economic and bilateral cooperation agreements in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday as he kicked off a four-day Middle East trip with a focus on dealmaking with a key Mideast ally while shared concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and the war in Gaza dragged on in the background.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi de facto ruler, warmly greeted Trump as he stepped off Air Force One at King Khalid International Airport in the Saudi capital. The two leaders then retreated to a grand hall at the Riyadh airport, where Trump and his aides were served traditional Arabic coffee by waiting attendants wearing ceremonial gun belts.
“I really believe we like each other a lot,” Trump said later during a brief appearance with the crown prince at the start of a bilateral meeting.
They later signed more than a dozen agreements to increase cooperation between their governments’ militaries, justice departments and cultural institutions. Additional economic agreements were expected to be inked later Tuesday at a U.S.-Saudi investment conference convened for the occasion.
Prince Mohammed has already committed to some $600 billion in new Saudi investment in the U.S., but Trump teased $1 trillion would be even better.
The quickest way to separate gold from rock, Sadio Camara says, is with a drop of mercury. In Senegal’s Kedougou Region, far from the capital Dakar and near the borders with Guinea and Mali, she and dozens of other women spent the day washing piles of sediment in search of gold. In front of her house a short walk away, she emptied a dime-sized packet of the silvery liquid into a plastic bucket of that sediment.
With bare hands and no mask, she swirls the mixture as her children watch. “I know it’s dangerous, because when we go to exchange the gold and they heat it again, those guys wear masks to avoid the smoke,” she says. But she says since she only processes a little gold at a time, she believes she is safe. But even small-scale exposure can carry serious risks.
Across West Africa, mercury — a potent neurotoxin — remains the dominant method for extracting gold from ore in the region’s booming informal mining sector, much of it illegal and unregulated. In Senegal’s gold-rich Kedougou region, women like Camara use the metal regularly, often without protective gloves and masks, to make a living. Mercury exposure can cause irreversible brain damage, developmental delays, tremors, and loss of vision, hearing and coordination.
Once released, it spreads easily through air, water and soil. Particularly after heavy rains, it contaminates rivers, poisons fish and accumulates up the food chain. “We are doing this because of ignorance and lack of means,” Camara says as her son played at her feet in the courtyard of her family’s home. “If the government know what is good for us, come and show us.” In artisanal mining, mercury is prized for its ability to bind quickly and easily to gold. Inside her kitchen hut not far from the stream, Camara heats a nugget of mercury-laced sediment with a metal spoon over an open flame. The toxic metal evaporates and leaves behind a kernel of gold.
There’s no mask, no gloves – just the raw materials and her bare hands. Her children stand just a few feet away, watching and breathing the fumes. The process is cheap, effective and dangerous. Camara said she doesn’t usually handle the burning herself – that task is typically left to men. But she and other women regularly mix and shape the mercury amalgam with no protection. “If you stabbed yourself with a knife it wounds you, if mercury did the same, people wouldn’t touch it. But with mercury you can go years without feeling the effects.
The consequences come later,” says Doudou Dramé, president of an organization that advocates for safer conditions for gold miners in Kedougou. Women are also particularly vulnerable, says Modou Goumbala, the monitoring and evaluation manager at La Lumiere, an NGO that supports community development in southeastern Senegal. He says the mercury being used to separate the gold from the earth ends up in the region’s waterways, which women interact with a lot more than men in Senegalese society. “Women do the laundry with water, women do the dishes. Women wash the children. And women often use the waterways for this, not having sources of safe drinking water,” he says. That exposure can be especially dangerous for pregnant and nursing women. Mercury can cross the placenta, putting fetuses at risk of developmental delays and birth defects. Infants may also absorb the toxin through contaminated breast milk.
Gold can be extracted from earth without using mercury, using gravity separation, often achieved with machines like shaking tables. In 2020, the Senegalese government promised to build 400 mercury-free gold processing units, but so far only one has been constructed. During a recent visit, the rusting slab of metal sat unused beneath a corrugated roof. The machine is in Bantaco, 15 miles from Camara’s home, and it isn’t practical for most miners to use because of the logistical challenge of transporting ore there and back to where they are from. Goumbala says one machine per village would come closer to solving the problem.
Jen Marraccino is the senior development director at Pure Earth, an NGO that works to fight against mercury and lead poisoning, particularly in artisanal small-scale gold mining. She says that gravitational separation is a technology that can provide miners a way to get gold without endangering their health. “The more that this type of work happens in a particular region, the costs then go down for these technologies such as shaking tables. Building the supply chains to the international market, the costs go down. So, solutions can build and grow within a region,” she says.
AP’s repeated efforts to schedule an interview with Senegal’s director of artisanal and small-scale mining were unsuccessful. The director later said the department had been suspended. He did not provide a reason.
Director General of World Trade Organization Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala met with the Japanese Prime Minister Tuesday during her three-day trip to Japan. “Trade is facing very challenging times right now and it is quite difficult,” she said during the meeting in Tokyo.
The United States and China agreed to roll back most of the tariffs each nation had imposed on the other and declared a 90-day truce in their trade war. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration said it would reduce the 145% duties it had imposed on imports from China to 30%, while China said it would cut its 125% tariffs on U.S. goods to 10%. Some of the U.S. tariffs — 24 percentage points — will be delayed for 90 days, while the rest of have been removed. “I also feel that there are many important opportunities in trade that we need to look forward to.
And we should try to use this crisis as an opportunity to solve the challenges we have and take advantage of the new trends in trade,” Okonjo-Iweala added. Okonjo-Iweala is also expected to meet Japan’s Foreign Minister, Finance Minister and Economy, Trade and Industry Minister.
