Here is a video interview with a South African hostage...

Here is a video interview with a South African hostage negotiator in regard to the recent hostage taking incident in Burkina Faso.

https://www.enca.com/news/sa-man-kidnapped-burkina-faso

It is unclear who is involved in this incident but the guy thinks it could be tribes, so not terrorist related. ie a local tribe has taken these people to negotiate some benefit for themselves.

When I was in Ghana the same thing happened to a SA expat driller and another expat mechanic. The driller and mechanic were each taken at knife point in seperate incidents by illegal miners to the house of the local paramount chief and later released. The kidnaping had to do with the competition between the illegal miners and the company over the same ground. Although the illegal miners have no mining rights they usually have large numbers and until a mining project gets to a mining stage it’s often very difficult to keep the illegal miners off the land and this sometimes becomes a source of a lot of tension between the communities and the companies. You can get soldiers to push them away from one area where you are working but they just reappear somewhere else, so it’s a situation of constant patrols but because Africa is so corrupt you often find that the people employed to patrol the land will take money from the company they work for and also corrupt payments from the illegal miners, who in the case of Ghana are often sponsored by Chinese overlords who provide payments and equipment to sponsor the illegal mining in the first place. I can’t speak for the situation in BF as I’ve never been there. It sounds like Sanbrado is in a relatively lowly populated area so this is a big advantage.

I don’t know if this is what this kidnap incident is about but I suspect it could be, as the people kidnaped are reported as having been working for a gold mining company. That fact that some police who went to investigate are reported as having been killed might however point to more sinister motivations in this case.

It really highlights the difficulties and dangers of working in Africa. Investors here in Australia are viewing the work these companies do through a distorted lense. They only see share prices and sanitised announcements. Behind the scenes it’s often a pretty hard slog that is all part of the prize of gaining access to world class resources which are much harder to come across nowadays in more stable jurisdictions.

If you don’t have the stomach for African investing don’t do it. It won’t always be pretty. Esh