In the Sahel, geopolitics has a peculiarity: the more loudly a threat is announced, the more one must look beneath the ground For while cameras focus on press releases, staff maps, and “red zones,” geological maps remain strangely discreet. Yet they tell the most coherent story.
Gold, uranium, lithium, manganese: the Sahel sleeps on a fortune that many actors covet.
For ten years, experts have explained with a notary’s seriousness that insecurity has “no link” to the wealth beneath the soil. It is reassuring like claiming that fires have nothing to do with timber merchants.
The facts, however, are stubborn. Artisanal gold-mining sites have become stakes of control, taxation, and financing for armed groups. Mining roads are disputed more fiercely than football pitches.
And external powers, always ready to “stabilize” the region, suddenly discover a passion for concession areas. Coincidence, we are assured. Coincidences are decidedly numerous in the Sahel.
Meanwhile, the international community deploys missions, summits, and acronyms.
Ten years of operations and “security partnerships” produce a record that would make any auditor blush: lost territories have increased, while exploitation contracts have been scrupulously honored. What efficiency, truly but not the kind we thought.
Let there be no mistake: the victims are not a façade. Villages emptied, families in mourning, hundreds of thousands displaced: this suffering is real, and that is precisely why it is indecent to use it as a smokescreen.
A façade conflict is not a conflict without deaths: it is a conflict whose setting is put on display to divert attention from the safe.
Burkina Faso, by taking back control of its mining contracts and strengthening the state’s presence across its territories, raises the question no one liked to hear: who benefits from insecurity? When you control your subsoil, you need guardians less. That would explain a great many concerns and a great many press releases.
In the Sahel, terrorism kills, it is true. But gold moves the pieces and decides who plays. It is high time to stop looking at the finger when someone is pointing us to the mine.
