Bamako
Mali's capital pays Russian mercenaries $10M/month from gold concessions while jihadists blockade its fuel — parasitism disguised as security mutualism.
Mali pays Russian mercenaries an estimated $10 million per month for security services, funded largely by gold mining concessions — a transaction that replaced one patron with another without solving the underlying threat. Bamako, Mali's capital of 4.2 million people on the Niger River, sits at the administrative centre of a country fracturing along multiple fault lines simultaneously. Two military coups in 2020 and 2021 installed Colonel Assimi Goïta as transitional president; in 2024, the junta's parliament granted him a five-year term renewable 'as many times as necessary' until pacification is achieved.
What appears as political instability is better understood as a complete substitution of security providers. France's Operation Barkhane withdrew after a decade of counterterrorism operations. Russia's Wagner Group, now reorganised as the Africa Corps under Moscow's Defence Ministry, filled the vacuum, seizing Mali's largest artisanal gold mine near Intahaka in February 2024. The new Mining Code passed in 2023 allows the state to acquire up to 20% of any mining project, up from 10% — but the question is which state.
The new Mining Code passed in 2023 allows the state to acquire up to 20% of any mining project, up from 10% — but the question is which state.
Russia has extracted over $2.5 billion from African gold trade since 2022. The security return on this investment has been poor: 84 Wagner soldiers and 47 Malian troops died in a failed operation at Tinzaouatene in July 2024, and September 2024 brought the first terrorist attacks inside Bamako since 2015. Al-Qaeda's Sahelian branch JNIM now blockades the capital's fuel supplies. Military spending tripled between 2010 and 2020, then rose another 38% by 2024, yet the territory under government control has contracted.
Mali's population doubles roughly every 18 years, with a fertility rate of 6 children per woman — the third highest globally. This is parasitism in the ecological sense: Wagner extracts mineral resources while providing a security service that demonstrably fails to protect the host. The cuckoo lays its eggs in another bird's nest, and the host expends energy raising offspring that provide no reciprocal benefit.
Mali's junta feeds a security apparatus that consumes gold revenue while jihadist territory expands.