After expanding domestic control over mining to pursue economic sovereignty, Burkina Faso has moved up the value chain with its first gold refinery, inaugurated by its president, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, on September 28.

Most of the gold mined in the country was previously exported as unrefined dore to be processed abroad. Now, it will be processed, tested for purity, and certified domestically at the Raffinerie Nationale d’Or du Burkina Faso, built at a cost of USD 19 million on more than 12 acres in the capital, Ouagadougou.​

“From now on, gold … must not only be extracted in Burkina Faso, it must be processed, controlled, valued and certified in Burkina Faso,” Traoré said, inaugurating the new facility.​

Inviting the country’s youth “to learn to master the whole value chain,” he added, “Natural resources belong to the people. They must contribute to improve their living conditions.”​

In the struggle for sovereignty​

Burkina Faso has long been one of Africa’s largest gold producers. However, proceeds from its extraction were historically siphoned out of the country by foreign companies owning its mines. Burkinabe ownership was limited to only one mine, which a former mines minister owned privately.​

The state-owned mining company, Société de Participation Minière du Burkina Faso (SOPAMIB), served only as a dormant holder of 10% stakes in Burkina Faso’s foreign-owned mines.​

Changes began in 2022 with the ouster of then-president Roch Kaboré in a popularly supported military coup amid mass protests against the Burkinabe state’s subjugation to French neocolonialism.​

Subsequently, in 2023, Traoré’s transitional military government (backed by the trade unions, the anti-France protest movement, and wide sections of the civil society) consolidated mass support by expelling French troops from the country, asserting Burkina Faso’s sovereignty.​

Recognizing that control over its own economy and natural resources is a central pillar of sovereignty, his government launched sweeping reforms to the mining sector in mid-2024.

It revived the dormant SOPAMIB and began transferring foreign-owned mines to the state-owned mining company, nationalizing five key gold mining assets within a year.​

Following the nationalization of yet another gold mine later in September 2025, six of the country’s 15 industrial mines, accounting for 40% of the national mining operations, are domestically owned – three by the state, and three by Burkinabe private companies.​​

In the remaining foreign-owned mines, the reforms raised SOPAMIB’s free stake from 10% to 15%. It also enabled the state to buy an additional paid stake of 30%, either entirely through SOPAMIB or in partnership with domestic private investors, potentially raising the Burkinabe stake in foreign companies to 45%.​

Mining revenues finance national development

As state revenues grew from its expanded ownership, the government undertook major infrastructural projects. In 2025, it laid 500 kilometers of low-voltage lines and 165 kilometers of transmission lines, connecting almost 160,000 new households to the national grid and electrifying 131 rural localities.

​Its National Development Plan (NDP) for 2026–2030 is one of the largest economic programs ever rolled out in the Sahel. It is a 64-billion-dollar plan, two-thirds of which is to be funded domestically from state revenues generated and citizen shareholding programs.

​Read more: Burkina Faso launches Five-Year plan

​Further inspiring confidence in the viability of its five-year plan, the government expanded the 2026 annual budget by 7.58% mid-year, having already collected almost 57.5% of the projected annual revenue. This has boosted infrastructural spending without increasing the budget deficit.

​The government has also used its rising revenues to improve its fiscal position. Cashing in on the rally in gold prices in 2025, the government repaid USD 2.13 billion in domestic debt last year. To systematize the use of additional revenue generated from the cyclical movement of mineral prices, it established the Burkina Faso Sovereign Mining Investment Fund (FSMIB) in May 2026.​

Read more: Burkina Faso asserts financial independence from the West with mineral-backed sovereign fund​

Financed by surpluses generated when international mineral prices rise above the state-set benchmark, the FSMIB is not for easing short-term budgetary pressures. It is ring-fenced for long-term strategic infrastructural and industrial projects to reduce the need for external funding, on which such projects have historically depended.​

The mining reforms have not only reorganized the distribution of mining proceeds away from foreign extraction toward national economic development, but have also helped to massively increase production itself.  The 94-ton annual output in 2025 is the highest ever recorded in Burkina Faso – a nearly 47% increase from the 64 tons in 2024.​

Formalization of artisanal mining – a game changer​

Critical for this rise was the formalization of artisanal mining. In the absence of state procurement infrastructure, artisanal miners have historically sold the gold they mined to smugglers who paid the international spot price in cash. Tons of gold were thus extracted from Burkina Faso every year with no paper trail, no taxes, and no yield to the national economy, beyond sustaining the meager livelihoods of the artisanal miners.​​

A meager quarter to less than half a ton of the gold extracted by artisanal mining annually entered the official channels overseen by the National Agency for the Supervision of Artisanal and Semi-Mechanized Mining Operations (ANEEMAS). [See: years].

​In October 2023, the government reorganized ANEEMAS into the National Society of Precious Substances (SONASP), tasking it with developing infrastructure to procure metals from artisanal miners. The annual official artisanal production rose in 2024 to 7.13 tons, a 15-fold growth over the previous year.

​When the annual gold production in 2025 reached a historic high of 94 tons, roughly 42 of those came from artisanal miners. Rising from just over seven a year ago, artisanal production was nearing the industrial mines’ output of about 52 tons by 2025, as SONASP’s procurement infrastructure expanded.

​To further help SONASP expand coverage in a concentrated manner, the government established nine new cooperatives of artisanal miners in the first half of 2026. It also delineated four mining corridors exclusively for artisanal miners, de-escalating the historic conflict between artisanal and industrial miners.

​With this state support structure in place, artisanal miners had already supplied 29 tons to SONASP this year by June 30, exceeding the 26 tons produced by industrial mines in the first half of this year. In this period, the government completed the construction of four new power plants, adding 126.4 megawatts of generating capacity to the national grid.

​Due in part to the improved power supply, the industrial mining output rose in the first half of this year by 7.25% over the first half of 2025. Official artisanal output grew by 45%.

​“We want to master everything to the last detail”​

“Comrades, producing in quantity is no longer enough. Extracting is no longer enough. Exporting our resources is no longer enough,” Mines Minister Yacouba Zabré Gouba said on September 28 at the inauguration of the country’s first gold refinery with an initial annual capacity of 164 tons.​

“The revolution we have engaged in requires that each national resource be used by the nation,” processing it across all stages of the value chain. “Our gold will no longer be used” by foreign companies “to create added value” while “our people remain in need,” he added.

​”We start with gold,” said Traoré. But there are “many other metals … in our subsurface that we want to extract,” including manganese, copper and zinc. “We want to master everything to the last detail.”

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.

The Ugandan army, which had offered to capture Iran’s capital within 72 hours for Israel earlier this year, is now readying a troop deployment to Gaza under US command.

Discussing the deployment, senior Ugandan military officers were at the US-led Civil-Military Coordination Center in Kiryat Gat on August 17. The town on the edge of the Negev desert – barely 25 km from the northern Gaza Strip – was established in 1955 after depopulating the Palestinian villages of al-Faluja and Iraq al-Manshiya during the Nakba.​

Burundi’s military officials were also reportedly present at the meeting here, after which the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) gave them both a tour of the city of Rafa in southern Gaza as part of the “pre-deployment site survey.”

Burundi is yet to confirm the deployment of its troops. However, Uganda’s parliament, practically a rubber stamp with over 70% of the seats held by the ruling party, approved the deployment of its troops on August 6.​

This made it the sixth country to join the International Stabilization Force (ISF) proposed by US President Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace, envisioned as the 20,000-strong force led by US Major General Jasper Jeffers.

The remaining five contributors of troops hold relatively diverse positions on the Israel-Palestine question. Indonesia has been a vocal critic of Israel, backing South Africa’s genocide case against it at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It maintains no diplomatic ties with Israel. The largest contributor has reportedly put its 8,000 troop deployment on hold, although it hasn’t formally withdrawn from the ISF.

Kazakhstan, on the other hand, has maintained deep diplomatic ties with Israel since 1992. Morocco joined the Abraham Accords in 2020. Both have done so while mouthing the two-state solution for an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital as official state policy.

The remaining two European countries are staunchly pro-Israel. Albania has announced plans to open a commercial liaison office in Jerusalem. Kosovo has outdone Albania, following Trump’s lead by moving its Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.​

The sixth country to come on board, Uganda, professes a commitment to Israel that dwarfs that of the European troop-contributors.

Offering to join US-Israeli war on Iran​

“Any talk of … defeating Israel will bring us into the war” against Iran on “the side of Israel,” Uganda’s military chief, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, posted on X in late March. He is the son and heir apparent of Uganda’s 81-year-old president, Yoweri Museveni, ruling the country since 1986.

After 40 years of rule, Museveni was handed a seventh term by the Electoral Commission in January, following an election marred by “widespread repression and intimidation against the political opposition, human rights defenders, [and] journalists,” according to the UN.

Soon after the results, Kainerugaba began hunting down Museveni’s political opponents, forcing his main challenger in the election, Bobi Wine, into exile, bragging about killing 30 of his party’s members, and swearing to “get them all.”

Israeli military technology, from weapons to surveillance equipment, has long enabled Museveni’s domestic crackdown. Recalling that Israel has supported his regime for decades, “Why wouldn’t we defend her now?” asked Kainerugaba. He added in a subsequently deleted post that the Ugandan military had offered to join the US and Israel in their war efforts against Iran, claiming, “We could have captured Tehran in 72 hours.”

Read more: Ugandan military chief announces willingness to join the US-Israeli war on Iran

This bold claim of being able to defeat the world’s 16th largest military power, with a military ranked 107 out of 145 countries, was gently mocked, even in the Israeli media at the time.  

“Gaza, here we come”: Ugandan soldiers post on social media

Nevertheless, barely five months later, Ugandan soldiers began uploading posts on social media, captioned, “Gaza, here we come,” filming themselves loading equipment onto planes – taking off and landing in undisclosed locations.​

These posts by Ugandan soldiers began circulating on social media after the Ugandan parliament approved the troop deployment on August 6.​

Military deployment as a diplomatic strategy

Addressing the parliament ahead of the vote, Maj Gen David Gonyi, parliamentary representative of the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF), explained the rationale of the deployment to the legislators: “Uganda submitted the name of a Ugandan [veteran diplomat, Olara Otunnu] to become Secretary-General of the United Nations. It would be like shooting ourselves in the foot to say that Uganda should not participate in [the] deployment in Gaza.”

Military deployment has long been a central plank of Ugandan diplomacy, currying favor of the Western countries by sending its soldiers to missions in Somalia, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Its Somalia deployment has been especially crucial for the Ugandan army to receive training and support from the US Marine Corps and US Africa Command (AFRICOM).

Last November, Johan Borgstam, the European Union (EU) Special Representative for the Great Lakes Region, met Kainerugaba to propose expanding Ugandan troop deployment in DRC, on behalf of Brussels. Borgstam brought this proposal, despite the UN confirming the validity of the DRC’s accusation that Uganda is supporting the M23 armed group, a proxy of Rwanda which, along with its army, has occupied large swathes of the region in a war for DRC’s minerals.

Presenting this Western demand for Ugandan troops as a diplomatic success, Major General Henry Masiko, another parliamentary representative of the UPDF and the Joint Staff Political Commissar, told the legislators: “The UPDF is viewed as the anchor of stability in a sea of turbulence, regionally and now globally.”

He went on to add in his remarks to the parliament that the “doctrine of the force is that we go out not to dance but to confront threats against society and humanity,” in a thinly veiled reference to Palestinian resistance.

“Some troops will return in coffins,” warns opposition MP

Opposition politicians have raised concerns that deploying troops when the Ugandan government has done little to conceal its neutrality may have consequences. 

“Some [troops will] return in coffins,” warned Jamal Ayagalaki. “We need answers on who will pay the UPDF, what the terms and conditions of service will be, and what support will be available to soldiers and their families.” He further warned that Uganda’s involvement in a conflict “that is not ours” could expose the country itself to new security threats.

A more thorough criticism of the deployment came not from an opposition leader but from retired General David Sejusa, who had served Museveni as a senior presidential adviser and intelligence coordinator from 2005 to 2013.​

The “parliament passed a resolution for peacekeeping, [but] what peace is [there] is Gaza?” he questioned, pointing to the lack of agreement between Israel and Hamas.

Uganda risks complicity in war crimes: former intelligence chief

“The permanent decommissioning of weapons from non-state armed groups” – i.e. the Palestinian resistance – is one of the tasks the International Stabilization Force must carry out in coordination with Israel, according to the resolution adopted by the UN Security Council in November 2025, with abstentions from Russia and China.

Hamas has refused to hand over weapons to Israel or any foreign force. It has called for the creation of a Palestinian national committee, which will hold the weapons collected from Hamas and other resistance groups within Gaza.

This transfer of weapons, however, can only happen after Israel withdraws from Gaza, Hamas insists. Israel, on the other hand, has refused to withdraw from Gaza until the resistance is completely disarmed.​

Therefore, in the absence of any “clear implementable political framework,” Uganda will be deploying troops in an “un-militarized active conflict area … where a belligerent state continues strikes on the occupied population,” Sejusa said. This, he warned, places Ugandan troops at the “risk of complicity in war crimes.”

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.

After a 43-day nationwide strike, nurses in Kenya returned to work on Thursday, September 10. Their union finally secured an agreement from the government on September 9, a day after thousands of nurses and midwives from all of Kenya’s 47 counties converged at the Greenpark in the national capital, Nairobi.​

From there, they marched to Delta House, headquarters of the Council of Governors (CoG), demanding the implementation of an agreement the government signed nearly a decade ago.​

A decade-long struggle​

The nearly five-month-long strike in 2017 had ended with both the national and county governments signing a return-to-work agreement, committing to finalize the draft of the agreed Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) and implement it within a month.​

It was to incorporate measures to address the nurses’ grievances, including, among other things, increases in nursing service allowance, uniform allowance, and risk allowance. The increases were to be staggered annually and completed by 2021.​

The nurses returned to work after this agreement. However, almost nine years later, the commitments contained in the return-to-work agreement remain unfulfilled, while the CBA it was meant to underpin has never been concluded.​

Promised risk allowance withheld even during COVID​

The government refused to increase the risk allowance even when the COVID pandemic was declared in early 2020, by the end of which it had claimed the lives of scores of nurses in Kenya. Those who survived infections in the line of duty had to spend long periods isolated from their families, estranged from their young children and suffering enormous anxiety and stress. But the increased risk allowance promised to them in 2017 remains unfulfilled, even in 2026.​

On July 29, nurses downed tools in protest. The strike has since paralyzed health services countrywide. Nonetheless, even as the strike entered its second month, the county governments did not budge. On August 31, the CoG Chairperson Ahmed Abdullahi deemed the 2017 CBA financially unviable.​

“Signed under duress”​

He dismissed the CBA as one “signed under duress in the run-up to elections in 2017” and “never been implemented,” even as reports raised alarm about rising maternal, neonatal, and perinatal deaths across the country.​

“No gun was pointed at the heads of all the signatories of our return to work agreement in 2017,” retorted KNUNM Deputy Secretary General Maurice Opetu, refuting the claim of duress. “It was signed in a very harmonious meeting out of understanding” by both the “levels of government” – the national and counties.​

It is the county governors who “have made the nurses work under duress without the CBA. And then working under duress pushed us to call a strike after trying all [these] years to resolve the matter,” he insisted.​

Too many nurses to pay?​

The nurses’ struggle for this CBA had begun alongside similar struggles by doctors and clinical officers. The government signed and implemented CBAs for doctors and clinical officers, but refused to do the same for nurses.​

“They are saying doctors are few, and clinical officers are few, but we are many, so they do not have that budget,” explained Collin Ajwang, President of the National Nurses Association of Kenya (NNAK).

“This doesn’t make sense because our large number is exactly what has helped hospitals run effectively. We have reduced maternal mortality; we are the ones making sure theatres are running; we cannot be few. We are at dispensaries where there are no doctors. Let them tell us how few they want us to be so that they can pay us this money.”​

Class priorities laid bare​

On the 33rd day of the nurses’ strike, the aviation workers downed tools on August 30. Flights were delayed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, while operations ground to a halt in at least three other airports. Within two days, the government signed an agreement with the aviation workers’ union, the Daily Nation reported, highlighting the contrast in the government’s handling of the two strike actions.​

The “airport is a portal and exit of all serious businesses,” not only from Kenya but from East Africa and the continent as a whole, remarked the KNUNM Secretary General, Seth Panyako. “These people who are in charge of making decisions do business through the airport.” So, the government, he said, cannot afford the airports to “stop even for a minute​

This business class can afford to “go to private hospitals. There is an alternative for them.” But national and county governments “really don’t care about the common” masses relying on public hospitals for healthcare, and are suffering as a result of the government’s refusal to fulfill the commitments made in the agreement it had signed, he argued.​

Doctors threaten to join strike​

A week later, on September 7, doctors gave the government a seven-day ultimatum, warning that they would also go on strike if it did not resolve the dispute with nurses. “Doctors cannot work without nurses. Doctors are now overburdened. We cannot continue like this,” said Davji Atellah, Secretary-General of the Kenya Medical Practitioners Pharmacists Dentists Union (KMPDU).​

“In the ICU (Intensive Care Unit), in the wards, in the HDU (High Dependency Unit), only the nurses can offer that type of care,” he explained, insisting that “nursing care is very essential in healthcare.”  ​

A day after the doctors’ warning, nurses marched on the CoG in Nairobi. Union leaders remained camped at the CoG’s headquarters.​

Following a day-long closed-door meeting, the government and the union leaders signed a return-to-work agreement on September 9, with the CoG committing to pay Ksh5,000 in uniform allowance and increase the risk allowance from Ksh3,850 to Ksh8,000. The CoG also agreed to implement the pending CBA within 45 days.​

“We have finally called off the 43-day strike following a breakthrough in negotiations with the Council of Governors,” Panyako announced. “We therefore call upon all our members to resume duty within the next 25 hours as we give room for the implementation of the agreements reached.”  ​

Announcing the severing of diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Thursday, September 10, Algeria summoned the Emirati envoy and gave him 48 hours to leave the country.​

“Algeria has exercised a great deal of restraint and a high sense of responsibility,” despite the increasingly “provocative or hostile actions emanating from” the Gulf power, the North African country’s foreign ministry said in a statement.​

“Despite these numerous warnings, the United Arab Emirates continued to persist in these actions, which have reached limits where they can no longer be considered acceptable or tolerable within the framework of relations between two sovereign states, nor remain without a response.”​

Later that day, its defense ministry announced that the UAE’s military and civilian aircraft are banned from using Algerian airspace from Friday. The only exemption is for commercial civilian planes, which can continue to fly over Algeria until the existing contract expires at the end of the year.​

Algeria had already initiated the termination of the air services agreement with the UAE in February, when President Abdelmadjid Tebboune alleged attempted Emirati interference in its elections.​

Multiple Algerian media outlets aligned with the state have reported that the UAE has been supporting the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), a separatist group Algeria designated as a terrorist organization in 2021.​

Algeria and the UAE also find themselves on opposing sides on several fronts of international relations.​

Algeria aids Western Sahara’s liberation struggle; UAE backs Moroccan occupation​

The support for the national liberation struggle of Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco immediately after it won independence from Spanish colonialism, has been a central plank of Algeria’s foreign policy.​

In 2021, Algeria severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, accusing it of supporting the MAK in retaliation for Algerian support to the Polisario Front (PF), which is fighting for Western Sahara’s national liberation. But there is no equivalence between the PF and the MAK.​

The MAK, which has long had close links to Israel, largely operates from Europe and is based in France, Algeria’s former colonizer. The PF, on the other hand, is fighting for Western Sahara’s liberation, with its military operating in its liberated territory adjoining Algeria. The UN recognizes the PF as the sole representative of the people of Western Sahara, a country it lists among the last few pending decolonization.​

Read more: Western Sahara’s decolonization at a crossroads after 50 years of occupation​

Despite funding and arming the Moroccan occupation, the US had not officially recognized Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara until December 2020, when Morocco signed the Abraham Accords to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel.​

The first Trump administration, in turn, proclaimed that the US “recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory” and went on to open a consulate in Dakhla, a major city in the occupied region.

​The UAE was a step ahead, setting a precedent before the American move by opening its consulate on the occupied land in November 2020, a month before Morocco normalized relations with Israel. The UAE had already normalized relations with Israel that September.

​In contrast, Algeria refuses to normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians have secured their statehood. Algerian media often refers to the UAE as an “Israeli vassal”.

​“Wherever they set foot, blood flows”

​Algeria’s diplomatic break was foreseeable since at least July, when President Tebboune said in a thinly veiled reference to the UAE in a televised interview, “Wherever they set foot, blood flows… We want them to stay away, so that blood does not flow in our country.” He gave the example of Mali, Libya and Sudan.

​A month later, in August, the UN confirmed that the USD 50 million transferred to the Al Qaeda-affiliated JNIM in the form of ransom helped fuel its attack across Mali. A Reuters investigation identified the UAE as the source of this payment to JNIM. The group has also attacked its neighbors, Burkina Faso and Niger, both of which have followed in Mali’s footsteps by expelling French troops.

​Read more: Mali fights yet another wave of attacks on multiple cities by terror groups

The UAE’s supply of arms and mercenaries to the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar, who has been fighting Libya’s UN-recognized government, is also well-documented in multiple UN reports since 2017.

Tebboune’s reference to “blood” flowing from Emirati interference is best demonstrated in war-torn Sudan, where the UAE is funding and arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose depopulation campaign in El Fasher had all the “hallmarks of genocide”, according to the UN.

Read more: RSF has burnt and buried tens of thousands of corpses in El Fasher, says Yale report

He added in the July interview that a “diplomatic break” with the UAE “would have happened long ago.” Algeria, he explained, had refrained only to avoid adding to the already existing divisions in the Arabic-speaking world.

When the break finally came on Thursday, the UAE’s foreign ministry said it hoped that it “will be temporary, in a manner that preserves the fraternal ties between the two brotherly peoples.”

In an apparent reference to the absence of explicitly stated reasons in Algeria’s statement, Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic advisor to the UAE’s president, Mohamed bin Zayed, said, “Diplomatic relations are managed through reason, communication, and clarity of interests, not through puzzles and signals that require decoding.”

He went on to preach that “successful diplomacy is built on clarity of positions, sound management of interests and differences.”

Gargash’s statement “is revealing above all for what it carefully conceals. Not a word about the actions of this arsonist, predatory state, which thrives on chaos wherever it sticks its nose in Yemen, Sudan, the DRC, Somaliland, and elsewhere,” retorted former Algerian diplomat, Amar Belani.

Describing the UAE as a “state that has made other nations’ instability its economic model,” Belani concluded his response, saying: “As for the lesson on ‘reason and clarity of interests’, Abu Dhabi would do better to reserve it for its partners in the Abraham Accords, with whom it shares complicity in the face of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed against the Palestinian people.” 

This sentiment against the UAE is not limited to the government or the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN), which led Algeria’s liberation struggle against French colonialism and has ruled since, except for a few years in the 1990s.

Mass protests erupted in 2019 against corruption and increasing economic capture by the military elite, strangling an economy already suffering under neoliberal austerity. This movement, known as the Hirak, forced the then president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a veteran of the FLN, to resign.

But even in these protests against the government and the ruling FLN, “Down with the UAE” and “No to the UAE in the country of martyrs”, were among the popular placards and slogans.

This content is for members only. Visit the site and log in/register to read.