An image from a Barrick Gold post on X. Credit: Barrick Gold/X

Written by: Owen Schalk

On December 2, 2024, Mali’s popular anti-imperialist government issued an arrest warrant for Canadian mining company Barrick Gold’s CEO, Mark Bristow, a South African national who fought for the apartheid army in the 1970s. Mali has charged Bristow with money laundering and violating Mali’s financial regulations between 2019 and 2023. Mali’s government also issued a warrant for Abbas Coulibaly, general manager of Mali’s Loulo-Gounkoto gold mines, of which Barrick owns 80 per cent.

Mali is one of Africa’s largest gold exporters. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world. For decades after formal independence, it was politically subjugated to France, including through the imposition of the CFA Franc currency, which allows the French treasury to effectively control the monetary policy of Mali and seven other West African states. French policies have restricted the sovereignty of these states, hampered regional integration efforts, stifled economic and industrial development, and undermined attempts at poverty alleviation. Meanwhile foreign companies (including Canadian ones) drain these nations of their immense resource wealth – in the case of Mali, the value stemming from its enormous gold deposits.

Since coming to power in a military coup in 2021, Malian leader Assimi Goïta has taken efforts to reclaim national sovereignty, increase state revenues from gold mines, and integrate with neighbouring African countries, namely fellow Alliance of Sahel States (AES) members Burkina Faso and Niger. Mali has expelled French troops, reduced the power of foreign mining companies through a new mining code, and formed a confederation with Burkina Faso and Niger based on mutual defence, complementary industrialization, and the goal of a common currency and shared market. The AES’ defence of African sovereignty, and its plans to federalize into a single state, have led many Africans to tout the alliance as a resurgence of pan-Africanist values on the continent.

Barrick Gold is not happy. After the passage of the August 2023 mining code, which allows the Malian state to take 35 per cent ownership in foreign-owned mines, a Barrick spokesperson noted that a “difference of opinion” had opened between Mali and the Canadian company. Following the code’s approval, Mali audited existing mining contracts with the aim of collecting hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign companies. Barrick rejected the audit, describing it as “legally and factually flawed and without merit.” Amid the dispute, Bristow described Malians as “not particularly competent” and warned them, “Be careful you don’t compromise the benefits to Mali by taking too much.”

Currently, Barrick Gold refuses to cough up $500 million in unpaid taxes and dividends to Mali’s government. In response to Barrick’s intransigence, Mali arrested four company employees in late September. The employees were soon released – Barrick, however, didn’t get the message and continued to reject Mali’s demands. As a result, Mali arrested the employees once more on November 26.

At the same time, a parallel dispute played out between the Malian government and Australian company Resolute Mining, which also owed Mali millions in unpaid taxes. In November, Mali detained Resolute CEO Terence Holohan and four company employees – shortly thereafter, Resolute agreed to pay $160 million to the Malian state.

For its part, Barrick Gold continues to withhold unpaid debts from the Malian government. An October 28 article from The Africa Report warns of “deadlock,” asserting “Assimi Goïta and Mark Bristow face off over mining code agreement.”

The contrast between Goïta and Bristow is stark: the former is a popular anti-imperialist leader who pays homage to African liberation fighters like Mali’s own Modibo Keita, while the latter is a veteran of South Africa’s apartheid army, a killer of endangered wildlife, and a multimillionaire with four houses who ridicules Africans for their supposed laziness.

To put it lightly, Bristow has a chequered history on the African continent. As a young man, he fought against African liberation movements in Namibia (illegally occupied by South Africa from 1915 to 1990) and Angola (invaded by South Africa in 1975) as a conscript. The Globe and Mail, without showing proof, included the claim that he “was a supporter of political reforms in South Africa during his university days when anti-apartheid protests were escalating.”

After the overthrow of apartheid in 1994, Bristow entered the mining industry, forming Randgold Resources in 1995. Randgold benefitted from Western pressures on the ruling African National Congress aimed at preventing the radical restructuring of South Africa’s brutally unequal economy. Canada played a notable role in the pressure campaign:

“Canadian embassy officials participated in the drafting of the [post-apartheid] mining law. A Canadian diplomat in Johannesburg stated that ‘the changes in the mining legislation have been a long time in coming and I do know that there has been substantial Canadian input.’ In 2002, the South African magazine Mining Weekly revealed that, during the drafting of the bill, ‘Canadian enterprises were probably the foreign mining companies most consulted by the South African government… The South African government received a lot of input from the whole spectrum of the Canadian mining industry, from prospecting companies through mining houses all the way to analysts at the Toronto Stock Exchange’… By the time the mining law was passed, its redistributive aspects had been watered down significantly.”

As head of Randgold, Bristow admitted that workers regularly died at his mines. “Running those deep South African gold mines,” he said, “you kill people all the time.” But despite getting away with murder, Bristow complained that the South African government “has never got to a formula where everyone feels part of the business. It is always them and us.” He added, “There is still a nationalization debate…the whole South African issue is still looking at distribution and redistribution rather than looking at the hard business of building value and profitability.”

Bristow left South Africa and found a soft spot for France’s neo-empire in West Africa. He built up a profitable investment portfolio in the region, including in Mali. His company grew rich from exploiting Africa’s natural resources – even so, he demeaned Africans’ work ethic and dismissed the catastrophic legacy of colonialism on the continent. In May 2011, Bristow told The Guardian, “Africa lives a lie, it sometimes doesn’t realise you have to get up in the morning and do a day's work. The days of blaming colonialism or apartheid are a thing of the past.”

It should also be noted that Bristow used to sit on the board of a “big cat conservation organization,” but he resigned in 2018 after killing endangered African animals and posing with their corpses – elephants, antelope, gazelle, a hippo, lion, buffalo, zebra, and a leopard. A year later, Barrick purchased Randgold, and Bristow was named CEO of the Canadian mining giant.

In addition to insulting Africans and killing endangered animals, Bristow belittled a human rights activist who confronted him about Barrick’s actions in South Asia. When a separatist activist calling for a ‘Balochistan’ state (whose desired territory is located in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan), seeking asylum in Canada, questioned him about Barrick’s closeness with Pakistan’s coup government, Bristow told them, “You should go back to Balochistan.”

Furthermore, the Barrick CEO has a history of warning African governments against increasing state revenues from natural resources. When the Congolese government announced plans to increase mining taxes in 2018, Bristow claimed the action “seems to be based on the entirely irrational premise that the state is somehow entitled to the entire cash flow from the mines.” He described the tax hike as an “abuse of the partnership concept,” and an effort to “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.” He threatened international arbitration against Congo.

Now Bristow, a rich jetsetter known to travel the world, is afraid to set foot in Mali, lest he be detained like Resolute CEO Holohan. As mining analyst John Ing stated, “Obviously, Mr. Bristow is not going to go to Mali. And sending a negotiator, I don’t know who wants to go…”

Like Mali, their fellow AES countries, Burkina Faso and Niger, have reclaimed their sovereignty from Western imperialism by kicking out French and US troops and asserting state control over their resources. Earlier this year, Burkina Faso nationalized two UK-owned gold mines and the country’s leader Ibrahim Traoré announced plans to withdraw some mining permits from foreign companies. For its part, Niger has nationalized its water and uranium, once owned by French companies.

All these actions represent a threat to Canadian mining companies. Such threats appear to be piling up around the world. Three years ago, Kyrgyzstan nationalized the Canadian-owned Kumtor gold mine, leading Ottawa to threaten “far-reaching consequences on foreign direct investment in the Kyrgyz Republic.” More recently, a public referendum in Ecuador rejected a return to investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), a provision that would allow Canadian companies to sue Ecuador’s government for alleged violations of trade agreements. Meanwhile, Mexico’s progressive Morena government has increased the role of the Mexican state in mining and sidelined Canadian companies, leading to aggressive legal challenges from Ottawa and Washington.

If the dispute between Mali and Barrick Gold continues, one should expect the local Canadian embassy to get involved. It would be far from the first time that Ottawa has intervened in the sovereign affairs of an African nation at the behest of the mining sector. In 2012, the Congolese government withdrew a mining contract from Vancouver-based First Quantum Minerals, leading the Harper government to pressure the DRC into returning the mine. In 2017, meanwhile, the Trudeau government implied that it would cut aid to Tanzania unless it lifted an export ban that was impacting Barrick’s profits.

Canada’s government is certainly keeping an eye on events in Mali and the wider AES, but these countries have weathered many storms – sanctions from neighbours, coup attempts, invasion threats, French interference, attacks from foreign-backed Wahhabi insurgencies. By comparison, those from Mark Bristow and Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, are of little strength.

Owen Schalk is a writer from rural Manitoba. He is the author of Canada in Afghanistan: A story of military, diplomatic, political and media failure, 2003-2023 and the co-author of Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy with Yves Engler.

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