africa Briefs

A Thousand Kilometers of Oil and Tension: China’s Growing Footprint in the Sahel

On a dust-swept road near Mounstéka in southeastern Niger, the silence was broken only by the distant hum of drones and the clink of boots on gravel. Three days earlier, on January 11, 2025, the pipeline that runs like a steel vein from Agadem to the Beninese coast was hit again—another sabotage, another retreat into the scrublands near the Nigerian border.

This was no isolated incident. In the past seven months, the Niger-Benin pipeline has been under siege—an artery of oil and ambition, pumping crude through a region increasingly defined by suspicion, resistance, and geopolitical posturing. And now, as of January 14, 2025, it is protected—at least on paper—by a new security pact between Niger’s ruling junta and its most powerful ally: China.

No one knows exactly what was signed. The deal’s contents remain classified, but officials confirmed that it includes surveillance measures along the nearly 2,000 kilometers of pipeline infrastructure. China, it is said, proposed the use of drones—quiet guardians in the sky—to monitor the flow of oil and perhaps something more. What is certain is that the West African Oil Pipeline Company, the Chinese state firm operating the pipeline, is no longer relying solely on local forces. This is a project Beijing cannot afford to lose.

The pipeline’s story—its ruptures and repairs—reads like a ledger of the region’s instability.

In June 2024, an armed group stormed a section of pipeline in Zinder, Niger. Their demand was blunt: bring back Mohamed Bazoum, the deposed president. Six months later, in December, three Beninese soldiers were ambushed and killed near Malanville. By then, cross-border cooperation had frayed beyond repair.

Though the crude still flows, it does so through a corridor riddled with fault lines. Each kilometer carries not just oil, but anxiety.

Along the route, tankers pass checkpoints where soldiers scan the horizon with tired eyes. The men here are not just guarding infrastructure—they’re guarding sovereignty, real or imagined. For Niger’s military-led government, the pipeline represents more than revenue. It’s a symbol of legitimacy in the face of growing international isolation. For China, it is both a commercial asset and a geopolitical tether—one that tightens with every patrol, every surveillance flight, every concession signed in a closed room.

But oil, like water, finds the cracks. And the region has plenty.

Even before the January sabotage, relations between Niger and Benin had curdled. On paper, the pipeline was a shared project, a partnership between neighbors. In practice, it has become a wedge. Nigerien officials continue to claim successful exports through Benin’s port of Sèmè-Kpodji, even as they accuse the Beninese government of harboring terrorists and sowing instability. Benin denies the charges, but the Nigerien side of the border remains firmly shut—no trade, no travel, just tension.

In villages near the pipeline, residents speak with a kind of weary pragmatism. They’ve lived through coups, counter-coups, promises of prosperity and droughts of delivery. They know that foreign agreements rarely reach the ground intact. The drone in the sky might deter a saboteur, but it won’t build a school or fix a well.

And yet, for some, this is the cost of development in the 21st century: long pipelines guarded by silent aircraft, financed by distant powers, and drawn across maps still shaped by colonial borders and post-colonial scars.

The pipeline from Agadem to Sèmè-Kpodji is more than just metal and crude—it’s a corridor of influence. And in this stretch of the Sahel, influence often arrives cloaked in security contracts and backed by surveillance.

China’s bet is clear: stability through infrastructure, control through cooperation. But as the attackers near Mounstéka reminded the world last week, not everyone along the pipeline sees it that way.

 

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