At last, the secrecy and official deniability that shrouded the activities of the Wagner group in Africa is over. Following the June drama (we really don’t know what it is yet) where the Wagner mercenaries purported to march on Moscow, Putin has ended the secrecy. He stated quite clearly that the Wagner (headed by his former chef, Yevgeny Prigozhin) was funded exclusively by the Russian state, to the tune of nearly $1 billion in the last year alone.
The group has been active in Africa – Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan, and Libya – for some time now and Russia has maintained, until now, that it was a private military group unrelated to the Russian state. In 2021, Mali expelled the French military from its territory with great fanfare and struck a deal with Wagner to help it in its fight against Salafi-jihadist groups in the north of the country.
With the Wagner revolt in Russia and its unclear status presently, the Kremlin is signalling that African states must decide what to do with the group. The Central African Republic, where Wagner has been the most active and where it has been accused of a raft of war crimes and crimes against humanity, shot back at the Kremlin that it signed “a defence deal with Russia and not Wagner” and expects the pact to be honoured by Russia regardless of what happens to Wagner.
As President Faustin-Archange Touadera’s hold on power becomes tenuous, he has come to rely on the Wagner group for security and protection, especially in fighting a constellation of rebel groups. Consequently, the group has tightened its grip on the country’s security architecture and economic resources, constructing a vast transnational Gold-mining network” stretching from Madagascar, Cameroon, and Sudan all the way back to Moscow.”
It didn’t take long for a deal to be struck, however. According to Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s chief diplomat, at the request of Mali and CAR, the designation of Wagner groups in both countries has now changed to “military instructors”. Their work, meanwhile, “will continue”. Finito!
Christopher Akor