Tag: africa

DR Congo Offers Trump Minerals in Exchange for Help with Rebels

Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) President Felix Tshisekedi wrote a letter to President Donald Trump in which he offered extensive mineral rights to the U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund in exchange for military assistance against the Rwanda-backed insurgent group M23.

The February 8 letter, which has not officially been disclosed to the public, was allegedly reviewed by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Wednesday.

“Your election has ushered in the golden age for America,” Tshisekedi told Trump. “Our partnership would provide the U.S. with a strategic advantage by securing critical minerals such as cobalt, lithium, copper and tantalum from the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Tshisekedi asked Trump for unspecified military assistance and a “formal security pact” to push back M23, which has been advancing from the eastern reaches of the DRC to capture key cities and threaten the capital of Kinshasa.

A spokeswoman for Tshisekedi’s office confirmed the authenticity of the letter and said negotiations with U.S. officials over the DRC’s natural resources are already underway. A source told the WSJ that the White House National Security Council (NSC) requested a briefing on Tshisekedi’s proposal.

“The DRC is interested in partnering with the Trump administration to end the conflict and stop the flow of blood minerals via Rwanda,” Tshisekedi’s spokeswoman said.

The White House, on the other hand, refused to comment on the letter, which it described as “private correspondence to the president.”

The WSJ noted that the DRC has been separately attempting to work out a deal for securing its mining operations with former Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince. Blackwater is long gone, having been sold off in 2010, but Prince is involved with other private security operations and he is an outspoken supporter of President Trump.

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Key Coca-Cola & Pepsi Ingredient ‘Controlled By RSF Paramilitary In Sudan’

Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) is currently controlling access to a vital ingredient used in Coca-Cola and Pepsi across vast swathes of the country, according to a new report.

Gum arabic, an organic emulsifier derived from the sap of the acacia trees, is a major ingredient in a range of products, including the gigantic soft drink brands as well as soap, medicine, sweets and cosmetics. Around 70 percent of the world’s supply comes from Sudan, where the trees grow in a 200,000 square mile belt across the south of the country that is largely controlled by the RSF, according to Bloomberg.

Hisham Salih Yagoub, whose company Afritec is one of Sudan’s biggest international suppliers, told the news outlet that he regularly pays the RSF $2,500 per truck to allow transport of the product to the country’s ports.

“They stop the trucks and you have to pay for the trucks to move,” he said. “They either steal some of it or they make you pay.”

Since April 2023, Sudan has been embroiled in a brutal civil war between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). The country has fallen into a humanitarian crisis, with 12.5 million Sudanese displaced from their homes, according to UNHCR. Thousands are estimated to have been killed.

The RSF has been accused of widespread sexual assault, looting, torture and the summary execution of civilians, while the SAF has also been censured for indiscriminate bombing campaigns.

According to documents acquired by Bloomberg, the SAF has also introduced a range of fees that amount to roughly $155 per 100kg of gum arabic being sent out of Port Sudan, meaning any transportation of gum arabic out of the country likely involves payment to groups accused of war crimes.

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US & Israel Ask East African Countries To Resettle Palestinians

The United States and Israel have asked three East African governments to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians from Gaza, according to US and Israeli officials who spoke to The Associated Press (AP).

On Friday, AP reported that the US and Israel began discussing the forced displacement of Palestinians last month with the governments of Sudan, Somalia and its breakaway region Somaliland.

This comes after US President Donald Trump suggested in February that the US could “take over” the Gaza Strip and expel Palestinians. His declaration prompted Egypt to draft an alternative plan for Gaza’s reconstruction, which has since been adopted by Arab leaders.

The $53bn Egyptian plan rejects the displacement of Palestinians and instead focuses on redeveloping the enclave without depopulating it. 

Earlier this week, Trump appeared to signal a retreat from the proposed mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. When asked about it during a meeting in the White House with Irish leader Micheal Martin, he said: “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians from Gaza.”

However, AP’s report suggests that the US may have responded to the rejection of its displacement plan by Arab governments last month by looking further afield.

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Humans in Africa’s wet tropical forests 150 thousand years ago

Humans emerged across Africa shortly before 300 thousand years ago (ka)1,2,3. Although this pan-African evolutionary process implicates diverse environments in the human story, the role of tropical forests remains poorly understood. Here we report a clear association between late Middle Pleistocene material culture and a wet tropical forest in southern Côte d’Ivoire, a region of present-day rainforest. Twinned optically stimulated luminescence and electron spin resonance dating methods constrain the onset of human occupations at Bété I to around 150 ka, linking them with Homo sapiens. Plant wax biomarker, stable isotope, phytolith and pollen analyses of associated sediments all point to a wet forest environment. The results represent the oldest yet known clear association between humans and this habitat type. The secure attribution of stone tool assemblages with the wet forest environment demonstrates that Africa’s forests were not a major ecological barrier for H. sapiens as early as around 150 ka.

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A Tale of Two Continental Tyrannies

It will soon be 5 years since the initial Covid 2020 Lockdowns. This article builds on what was written by Dr Ramesh Thakur’s article “Pandemic in Africa: Lessons and Strategies” and Jeffrey Tucker’s article “The Mass Betrayal of Trust” by giving an on-the-ground-perspective comparison of the social interactions and costs that happened in response to all the Covid mandates in Europe and Africa.

When the lockdowns hit in 2020, I was in Europe having built a life there as an immigrant engineer with minimal knowledge of geopolitics and Public Health (My little knowledge of Public Health revolved around the free exercise classes and stress ball some public health officials came to give in my Church – I thought they were just harmless doves—common, who doesn’t love a free stress ball?). Imagine my shock in 2020, when this same group of “nice guys” suddenly began to yell at us to sit at home, else you are a selfish grandma killer. My second shock was the next-to-nothing pushback from Institutions that were supposed to/designed to push back against Government tyranny. Jeffrey Tucker details it all in his article “The Mass Betrayal of Trust”.

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Tech Titan Microsoft Partnered Extensively with USAID on Third World Internet Projects

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) became the most visible symbol of government waste and ideological partisanship after DOGE exposed the vast sums it spent around the world promoting a variety of leftist causes including online censorship. What is less well-known is the now-shuttered agency’s work with big tech companies, notably Microsoft.

In 2023, Microsoft partnered with Internews, a USAID-funded global slush fund for journalists, to create the Media Viability Accelerator (MVA). The MVA sought to combine Microsoft’s tech resources with Internews’ global network of ideologically aligned journalists, allowing newsrooms to access market insights, data aggregation, analysis and visualization from Microsoft to support their efforts.

Microsoft and USAID also partnered on the progressive cause of women’s empowerment. A program called the Women’s Digital Inclusion Partnership saw Microsoft working with USAID to increase internet coverage for women in the third world. The program aimed to increase internet connectivity for women in rural areas of Columbia, Ghana, Guatemala, India and Kenya.

It’s unclear if this USAID-backed program was any more successful that the U.S. government’s domestic rural internet program, which according to analysts resulted in $42.5 billion in expenditure while connecting zero citizens.

Another USAID-Microsoft partnership on internet connectivity was the Airband Initiative, which aims to expand internet access around the world. The partnership brought together local coalitions of government agencies, nonprofits, and private sector companies to build digital infrastructure and provide “digital skills” training. The program aimed to expand internet access to 250 million people by the end of 2025, including 100 million people in Africa.

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Violence, Minerals, and the Inevitable in Central Africa

In January, the rebel group M23 captured Goma, the largest city in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The ethnic Tutsi militants, who have been intermittently fighting the DRC government for years, restarted their rebellion in 2021 and have rapidly captured territory since the beginning of 2025. Since taking Goma, they have moved to the south and also captured the large city Bukavu, giving them control over an area that is home to millions of people. 

M23 is widely believed to be backed by Rwanda and its long-time President Paul Kagame, a charge that Kagame has always denied. This troubled region remains racked by brutal inter-ethnic and multinational conflict featuring countless armed factions. Perhaps more importantly, it contains some of the world’s largest deposits of key minerals, such as cobalt, which is necessary for the manufacture of electronics. Across a nearly impassable rainforest from the capital of Kinshasa, eastern Congo has proven impossible for the central government to rule, but the African Union and United Nations remain devoted to maintaining historic borders no matter how impractical. There is little the United States can or should do to help stabilize the situation, but it is long past time to consider accepting the breakup of the DRC.

The current troubles in in the eastern Congo date back to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a story that is widely known but poorly understood. Western experts, in an extension of popular academic theories, have found it convenient to claim that the division of Hutus and Tustis was made up by Europeans as a method of colonial control. Although it was used that way, and their legal classification system was arbitrary and based on physical characteristics, this division within the society of this region dated back hundreds of years prior to the arrival of colonialism. The most simple way to understand the division is that the Tutsis were a noble class who kept cattle, while the Hutus were agriculturalist serfs. The colonialists ruled through the Tutsi monarchy, and Hutus overthrew both in the 1959 Rwandan Revolution.

In 1990, the Rwanda Patriotic Front, made up of Tutsi refugees based in Uganda, started a civil war trying to take back control of Rwanda, and in response in 1994 Hutu extremists began a genocide against the country’s Tutsi population. Ultimately, the RPF were able to chase the Hutu militants out of the country and won the civil war. In a dark historical irony, though the world had stood mostly silently during the genocide, or in France’s case sided with the government, once the genocidaires were exiled in the eastern DRC, their well-being became a major international concern. The Hutus who committed genocide received more assistance than the original victims; granted, the humanitarian needs were genuine, as they were facing famine and retributive violence.

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USAID accused of funding Boko Haram’s REIGN OF TERROR against Nigerian Christians

In a shocking revelation that has sent ripples across international borders, Nigerian politician Adamu Garba has accused the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) of funding Islamic terrorist groups, including Boko Haram and ISIS, in Nigeria. Garba, a prominent member of Nigeria’s All Progressives Congress, claims that USAID funds have been used to purchase weapons for these groups, which have waged a brutal campaign of violence against Christians in the region.

Boko Haram, often operating under the guise of Fulani herdsmen, has terrorized northeastern Nigeria for years. Their tactics include burning homes, killing men, and kidnapping and raping women and girls. A 2018 report by Voice of the Martyrs documented the displacement of over 300,000 people and the deaths of more than 500 individuals in that year alone. Garba’s allegations suggest that these atrocities were bankrolled, at least in part, by U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Garba’s claims align with recent statements by U.S. Congressman Scott Perry, who during a February 12 hearing titled “The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud,” accused USAID of misdirecting 697 million to terrorist organizations. Perry highlighted a specific example in which 136 million intended for the construction of 120 schools in Pakistan vanished without a trace.

“I mentioned this before that Boko Haram, ISWAP, and most of these terrorists, the weapons they get are actually funded by some clandestine foreign operators,” Garba stated in a video posted on his X page. “The exposé about USAID has confirmed that Boko Haram and all these terrorists are getting their weapons through the funding from USAID.”

Garba questioned the whereabouts of $824 million in USAID funding allocated to Nigeria last year, which was ostensibly intended for child mortality and education programs. “When did the money come in, where did it go to?” he asked. “These monies go to the funding of Boko Haram and kidnappers that are used to kill and destroy our land.”

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The Congo Enters Chaos Spiral As Rwanda Backed Insurgents Invade

After years of relative quiet, conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo and its much smaller neighbor Rwanda struck yet again in 2021 while the world was distracted by the global covid pandemic. Fighting has continued to escalate as an insurgent group called “M23”, which is backed by the government of Rwanda, continues cross-border raids and has expanded into the neighboring province of South Kivu.  They now claim to have encircled and taken the key city of Goma.

Though Rwanda’s total population is 14 million compared to the DRC’s 102 million, Rwanda has been purchasing advanced weaponry from China since at least 2018, including man-portable anti-tank missiles, ground to air missiles, anti-ship missiles, armored vehicles and artillery.  Congo rebels like the M23 group have been caught transporting such weapons and moving back and forth over the Rwandan border.  

Though there are a host of ethnic and political grievances between the various tribes of the Congo region (the Rwandan genocide of 1994 still reverberates to this day), the current conflict appears to lean more towards control of resources.  The Congo exports 40% of the global Coltan supply and is also suspected to have the world’s largest lithium deposits.  Coltan is a Rare Earth metal vital in the production of high end electronics and weapons systems.

International interests including the UN assert that Rwanda is using the M23 rebels as a proxy to obtain mineral rich territory in the DRC.  They estimate that between 3,000 and 4,000 Rwandan army troops are on the ground in DR Congo in support of M23 – based on authenticated photographs, drone footage, video recordings, testimonies and intelligence.

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Sen. Banks Asks Secretary of State Rubio to Investigate Reports Biden Administration Tried to Force Radical Abortion on Foreign Country In Exchange for Aid

Senator Jim Banks (R-IN) has asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to investigate reports that the Biden administration tried to pressure a foreign nation into adopting radical pro-abortion legislation in exchange for aid.

A December 2024 report from The Daily Signal showed that the Biden administration was pressuring Sierra Leone to pass a pro-abortion bill, deceptively named the ‘Safe Motherhood Act,’ in order to receive aid for affordable electricity through the  Sierra Leone Compact.

The so-called Safe Motherhood Act would legalize abortion up to 14 weeks for any reason and up to birth to protect the “mental health of the woman.” Abortion to save a woman’s life is already legal in Sierra Leone.

Per The Daily Signal:

The letter cites The Daily Signal’s Dec. 16 report that the Biden administration was pressuring Sierra Leone to pass an unpopular pro-abortion bill before Donald Trump took office.

It is common knowledge among nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, in Sierra Leone that a U.S. foreign aid agency called the Millennium Challenge Corporation is threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from a U.S. agreement with Sierra Leone unless the West African country’s parliament passes the bill decriminalizing abortion, a former senior U.S. government official who has worked in the West African region told The Daily Signal. Millennium Challenge Corporation denies this.

In his letter to Secretary Rubio, Banks requested Rubio look into the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).

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