Orano mining spent decades exploiting Niger's natural resources until the new government revoked its license in 2024.
The Alliance of Sahel States has already begun to change the conditions of the people in the region for the better. Bold actions, including the expulsion of exploitative mining contracts, put these nations in a better position to achieve and protect their national sovereignty.
“Neo-colonialism is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.” — Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah
In the shadow of the Aïr Mountains, along the southern edge of the Sahara, a Nigerien town has been poisoned. The lands around the town of Arlit, home to 200,000 Nigeriens, is scarred by an enormous open-pit uranium mine run by a French company known as Orano.
Following the 1960's independence struggle in Niger, Orano, a French state-owned enterprise, entered into a number of joint ventures with the neocolonial government of Niger as well as those of Spain, and Japan. These ventures (known as SOMAÏR and COMINAK) have since extracted over 145,000 tons of uranium from the mines around Arlit. Prospecting at the nearby town of Imouraren has also revealed a deposit of another 174,000 tons, which they had planned to extract when the price of uranium improved.
At uranium’s current (Oct 2024) price of $83.50/lbs, this 319,000 tons of uranium would be worth $53.27 billion USD.
Orano’s half-century of mining efforts across the region have been enormously profitable. Orano reported a revenue of $4.63 billion in 2023 and $5.25 billion in 2024. It is said that one-in-three lightbulbs in France is powered by uranium stolen from Niger. Since the terms of the agreements between the Nigerien government and Orano are private, it is difficult to determine how this relationship has benefited the Nigerien state, much less the Nigerien people. However, tax and duties exemptions and the supplication of Niger’s puppet leaders to western interests have allowed this violent extraction of Niger’s mineral wealth to continue for decades.
Niger’s reputation as one of the least developed countries on the planet, where more than 60% of its people survive on less than a few dollars a day, is in part a result of this extraction. Residents in Arlit are regularly without power, despite living within walking distance of one of the largest uranium mines in the world.
Uranium mining is also incredibly harmful to human health. In particular, the radioactive waste that is left behind has a tendency to spread into the air and water, and increase the likelihood of long-term health effects like lung cancer, hypertension, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases. Orano thoughtfully left 14 million tons of these waste products, which are especially dangerous when airborne, in an open-air pit only a few miles from Arlit.
“The open storage of such quantities of radioactive waste is a scandal,” the French NGO, Commission for Independent Research and Information on Radioactivity (CRIIRAD) said in a statement, “They constantly produce a radioactive gas, radon, and the powerful desert winds disperse the fine dust containing radioactive heavy metals, some of which are very radiotoxic by inhalation.”
A 2005 study by CRIIRAD similarly found that the water in Arlit had uranium levels 10 to 100 times higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended safety standards.
If you look at a map of Arlit, lying just southwest of the mine, hanging off it like a parasite, is the outline of a U.S. drone base just barely visible in the desert sand. This drone base, one of three recently constructed by the U.S. military in Niger, is part of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, headquartered in Germany, that is responsible for carrying out western imperial interests across the African continent.
The U.S. military claims that these drone bases and their (at least) 29 other bases on the continent are for “countering transnational threats and malign actors”. What they predictably neglect to mention is that the presence of these actors in the Sahel is a direct result of the U.S./NATO bombing and destabilization of Libya. The U.S. and its imperialist allies are in actuality interested in obtaining Sahelian mineral resources, namely uranium and oil, at any cost to the Africans in the region. These resources in turn enrich western governments and corporations and provide a degree of luxury and comfort to their people. These provisions are accompanied by a subsequent collective amnesia for the means of their production, and allow for the continuation of the myths of capitalism and white supremacy. As W.E.B. DuBois observes in The World and Africa,
“Widespread insensibility to cruelty and suffering spread in the white world, and to guard against too much emotional sympathy with the distressed, every effort was made to keep women and children and the more sensitive men deceived as to what was going on, not only in the slums of white countries, but also all over Asia, Africa, and the islands of the sea. Elaborate writing, disguised as interpretations and the testimony of so-called “experts,” made it impossible for charming people in Europe to realize what their comforts and luxuries cost in sweat, blood, death and despair, not only in the remoter parts of the world, but even on their own doorsteps.”
This shakedown of the Nigerien people was all going according to plan prior to the arrival of the Alliance of Sahelian States (L’Alliance des États du Sahel; AES) and the Nigerien military’s ousting of President Mohamed Bazoum in 2023. The coup unsurprisingly has the support of many Nigerien people who have opposed Bazoum’s dealings with the west and raised valid questions about where these billions in mining profits have gone. As a result of the coup, the French and U.S. military have been forced out of the country, leaving behind hundreds of millions in infrastructure, equipment and lost profits.
In June 2024, the Nigerien government announced the withdrawal of Orano’s mining license and rights to the 174kt uranium deposit at Imouraren. This forced Orano and the uranium-dependent French government into a precarious position. In July, Orano shared that its 2024 operating income (i.e. revenue minus expenses) had decreased from $289 million in the first half of 2023 to $13 million in the first half of 2024. This equates to a loss of 80% of their operating income compared to 2023. While publicly they have attempted to save face, Orano losing their primary supply of uranium has forced them to attempt to revive old mines near the end of their life-cycle in Canada and negotiate new deals with Kazakhstan, a country that they had been avoiding due to their relationship with Russia.
This has lead France to engage in its predictable, violent neocolonial playbook of attempting to arm counter-revolutionary forces in neighboring Burkina Faso, pressuring ECOWAS into applying sanctions on Niger and the AES, and attempting to mobilize the European Union into a proxy-war against the AES. These efforts at destabilization are being summarily thwarted by the vigilance and dedication of the people.
In the mining town of Arlit, generations of Africans have been stolen from and poisoned by French capitalists, a reality not unfamiliar to Africans everywhere. Now, the Nigerien people have stood up to defend themselves against the west’s war on Africa. The AES and its people are succeeding in putting an end to Europe’s over 600 years of pillaging, genocide and underdevelopment of the African continent.
The AES’s development of roads, hospitals, health programs, agricultural programs, factories, reforestation programs, safety and security initiatives, women’s unions, and more have been deliberately ignored by western media. They do not fit the white supremacist narrative that Africans are backwards and incapable of self-governance, an illusion that must be maintained to allow the continued genocidal war of the U.S. and its NATO allies against Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. The U.S.’s violent colonization of Haiti has served the same role: when Africans (and other colonized people) understand their collective power and are organized against imperialism, the façade of western invincibility collapses.
Organizers in the AES are calling on Africans to defend the people of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso who are taking bold action to build a future on their own terms. The importance of the AES project cannot be overstated. The west’s climate catastrophe depends upon the extraction of critical minerals to fuel capitalist production and distribution of weapons and other pointless and unsustainable colonial trinkets. Africans in the Sahel have refused to allow their government to continue to invest in their own extinction. For those of us in the diaspora, we are left with the question of whether we will be bystanders or participants in this process.
Kodjovi Kpachavi is an organizer with the Black Alliance for Peace and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, a journalist, artist, and researcher. His work focuses on people’s struggles in Africa and in the diaspora.
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