Economic & Market Exposure

The junta squeezed the mining sector for revenue — the 2023 mining code, the Barrick dispute settled in early 2026 for roughly US$430m and a stake in future production — while the fuel blockade taxes the whole economy from the other side. Sanctions-era isolation pushed finance toward regional banks, gold sales and non-Western partners.

Rearmament — aircraft, drones, vehicles — has been financed against mining revenue and Russian credit arrangements whose terms are not public. The army is both the state’s largest expense and, through the war, its largest constraint on revenue.

Production reached a record of roughly 94 tonnes in 2025 and real GDP grew 5.0%, with the IMF attributing the acceleration principally to gold — including an artisanal supply response to higher prices that outweighed contractions elsewhere. The state has moved hard to capture more of it: a revised mining code in 2024 created SOPAMIB as the vehicle for state participation, artisanal gold export permits were suspended in February 2024 to curb smuggling, and a fully state-owned mine opened at Yako on 9 July 2026. The divergence is the point: the economy is growing on one commodity while the territory the state administers is shrinking.

Burkina Faso imports 98% of its merchandise by sea and moves it inland by road through four corridors — Lomé, Abidjan, Cotonou and Tema. The Ouagadougou–Lomé axis carries about 40% of all cargo entering the country; Abidjan–Ouagadougou runs 1,150 km with SITARAIL moving roughly 900,000 tonnes a year. Hydrocarbon import and storage are a state monopoly under SONABHY, but the transit storage itself sits outside the national territory — in Lomé, Cotonou, Tema, Bolgatanga and Côte d'Ivoire. A landlocked state's fuel reserve is held on someone else's ground, which is the structural fact behind every corridor negotiation it enters.

Burkina Faso's formalisation drive, Mali's confrontation with Barrick and Niger's nationalisation of its uranium are the same resource-sovereignty strategy applied to three different commodities and three different foreign operators. This module treats it as one regional mechanism with three national expressions rather than three national stories.

Niger is the world's fourth-largest uranium producer, around 6.9% of global output. SOMAÏR, which operates the Arlit mine, is 63.4% owned by the French company Orano and 36.6% by the state's SOPAMIN. Orano halted output at Arlit in October 2024 amid financial strain; the mine passed to Nigerien operational control in December 2024; and in June 2025 the government announced nationalisation, stating that Orano had taken 86.3% of production between 1971 and 2024 — the state's own figure. An ICSID tribunal has ordered Niger not to sell or transfer the stockpiled uranium pending Orano's claims, and Niger has announced on state television that it intends to sell it anyway, asserting a legitimate right to dispose of national resources. Orano has condemned a reported shipment as illegal. The dispute is unresolved and is being conducted in public.

Between 70% and 80% of Niger's imports passed through the Port of Cotonou before 2023, and Nigerien cargo was around 80% of that port's transit volume — a mutual dependence. The closure of the Malanville–Gaya bridge in July 2023, followed by Benin's suspension of transit from August to December, collapsed the route; traffic redirected to Lomé, Abidjan, Dakar and Nouakchott at higher cost, and Lomé handled 2.06 million TEU in 2024 with 92% of its transit traffic bound for AES states. Niger is reported to have lost 117 billion CFA francs in public revenue. The Niger–Benin oil pipeline to the Sème-Kpodji terminal still operates intermittently, because neither side has gained by dismantling it — the clearest illustration that the rupture is political and the dependence is not.

Niger's uranium nationalisation and Mali's confrontation with Barrick are structurally the same dispute — a state, a foreign operator, an international arbitration, a seized asset — and so far they have gone opposite ways. Mali settled in November 2025 and production resumed; Niger is defying the tribunal and marketing the stock. How the two end is the best available test of what resource sovereignty in this region actually buys.

Investigative and UN panel reporting has linked the Russian presence to gold-sector arrangements; details remain opaque and disputed. What is clear is the structure: security support flows in, resource-linked value flows out, and neither side publishes the price.

The 2025–2026 fuel blockade converts corridor geography into leverage: several hundred tankers reported destroyed, Bamako’s power and fuel visibly disrupted, and the state’s customs and growth squeezed without a single city taken. Where it dominates rural areas, reported taxation of trade, cattle markets and artisanal mining funds the organisation.

The north it claims is poor in state revenue but rich in routes: whoever holds Kidal and the border taxes movement. Unlike JNIM it has no national economic-warfare arm — its economics are subsistence for a fighting movement, which is one reason the alliance holds.

UN panel and research reporting describes raid-and-tax financing in the tri-border economy — livestock above all. Its violence against markets it cannot control makes it, unlike JNIM, an economy-destroyer more than an economy-parasite.

The frontier zone runs on informal trade — fuel, food, goods — that sustains communities on both sides and, incidentally, the movements operating there. The reopened airspace revives talk of the trans-Saharan corridor linking Mali to Algerian ports, a project whose viability depends on the security of exactly the areas neither state controls.

Leaving ECOWAS traded institutional membership for policy sovereignty — but not, so far, market access: ECOWAS has kept the free trade zone in place "until further notice" and citizens of the three states retain visa-free movement, residence and establishment across the bloc. What was surrendered is a vote on the rules and the dispute machinery behind them. A 0.5% AES import levy now funds the confederation. Members share dependence on gold and imported fuel — exactly the exposure JNIM’s blockade exploits — and exploratory ties to Russia, Türkiye, China and Gulf financiers are courted where sourced, not assumed.

French firms have largely exited or been squeezed out since 2022. The West African CFA franc — French-backed, and a standing AES grievance — remains Mali’s currency; leaving it is discussed far more than it is planned, because the alternative is a currency no one outside the bloc would want.

MINUSMA employed, contracted and bought locally at a scale nothing in northern Mali matched. Its withdrawal removed both a security presence and a payroll from Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal at once — a compounding factor in the northern economy’s decline that is easy to overlook next to the fighting.

Landlocked Mali imports nearly all its fuel through Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. Leaving ECOWAS changed the politics of those corridors, not the geography — and the AES import levy adds friction to trade that still has to cross them. This is the central economic fact of the blockade war.

Turkish firms have expanded across the Sahel — defence above all, but also construction and consumer goods — as European commercial presence receded. The relationship is transactional in both directions, which is its stability and its ceiling.

Where Russia's Sahel relationship comes with payments, mining access and a logistics chain that can be priced, Ukraine's comes with none of it. There is no contract to cancel, no concession to lose and no trade to interrupt. That is why the relationship as reported is cheap for Kyiv to run and also why it buys so little: an actor with no economic stake has nothing to offer a government, which is one reason the reported partnership is with a movement rather than a state.

Ukraine's African outreach that can be documented is agricultural and diplomatic — the Grain from Ukraine programme and four new embassies elsewhere on the continent since 2024 — and it does not touch this module, because the three governments here will not receive it. The expertise described in the security groups above is therefore the only Ukrainian export that has reached the Sahel at all, and it reached it through a non-state party.