On September 22, 2026, Russia’s Africa Corps fired a Ukraine-war-model Molniya kamikaze drone at al-Qaeda-linked fighters besieging its position near Dioura, in Mali’s Mopti region, the latest skirmish in a campaign that has already cost 13 Russian and Malian lives this month alone. It is the kind of story that gets covered: mercenaries, drones, jihadists, a garrison state. The quieter story sits in a dataset Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center published in January: Chinese loan commitments to Africa, $28.8 billion at their 2016 peak, hit just $2.1 billion in 2024, while African governments have now paid Beijing $22.1 billion more than they received over the past five years. Both stories are real, and both are usually told as one story, a Chinese creditor stepping back while a Russian garrison steps in. They are not, mostly, about the same countries.
The Context
China’s lending boom peaked in 2016, driven partly by a one-off $10 billion Angola refinancing, and has since contracted almost every year, falling to six projects across five countries in 2024: Angola, Kenya, DR Congo, Senegal and Egypt. Fossil-fuel, power-generation and telecoms lending have essentially stopped; what remains concentrates in transport, energy transmission, water and finance, in countries China already knows well. Debt service to China now exceeds new borrowing across the continent, a reversal from the 2015-2019 period when Africa received a net $30 billion. Separately, Russia’s Wagner Group, folded into the state-controlled Africa Corps after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 mutiny, has expanded from Mali into Burkina Faso, Niger, the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan and smaller deployments elsewhere, paid mostly in mining concessions rather than cash. The two trends are usually narrated together, as a single handoff from a departing Chinese creditor to an arriving Russian garrison. The countries involved suggest otherwise.
The Argument
Stay ahead of the geopolitical week.
MD Briefing delivers expert analysis across five global fronts — the Indo-Pacific, energy, geoeconomics, European security, and the Middle East — every Monday morning. Free.
Start with who actually owes China money. The ten largest sovereign debtors, per Africa-focused debt trackers, are Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Zambia, South Africa, Cameroon, Angola and Uganda. Now list where Africa Corps operates: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan, Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Togo, Republic of the Congo. There is no overlap on either list. That is not a coincidence. China’s lending, even at its most expansive, chased states with exportable resources and functioning enough institutions to plausibly service debt: oil in Angola and South Africa, copper in Zambia, established economies in Kenya and Egypt. The Sahel coup belt where Russia now operates was never a serious Chinese lending market, because the credit risk never justified it. Russia is not stepping into a hole China dug. It is filling a hole France and, more broadly, Western counter-terrorism missions left when they withdrew, and it is being paid not in sovereign debt but in gold and mining equity, a fundamentally different transaction than a Belt and Road loan.
So the interesting question is not who replaces China in Mali, because China was barely there. It is who replaces China in Angola, Zambia, Kenya and the DRC, the actual core of its old African portfolio. The answer, increasingly, is Gulf capital and multilateral lenders, not Moscow. The UAE’s International Resources Holding took a 56% stake in DR Congo’s Bisie tin mine and 51% of Zambia’s Mopani copper operation in 2025. AD Ports Group signed a $250-380 million, 20-year concession for Angola’s Luanda port, which handles 76% of the country’s cargo. Saudi Arabia’s Manara Minerals, backed by the Public Investment Fund, has talked about deploying up to $15 billion across African critical minerals and was in discussions for a stake in First Quantum’s Zambian copper and nickel assets. Meanwhile multilateral institutions, the IMF, World Bank and African Development Bank among them, increased net financing 124% over the past decade and now supply 56% of Africa’s net development flows, roughly $379 billion between 2020 and 2024. None of that is Russian, and almost none of it touches the states where Africa Corps is expanding.
The honest complication is Sudan, where China built a real oil-lending relationship and Wagner, then Africa Corps, has fought over gold access amid the civil war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces. Sudan is the one place where a departing-creditor and an arriving-garrison story can plausibly describe the same country at once. It is also, not coincidentally, the one Africa Corps deployment happening inside a genuine state collapse rather than an orderly coup consolidation, which should caution against treating it as a template for where the other Sahel deployments are headed. Angola is the other complication worth naming: it was 2024’s single largest Chinese borrower at $1.45 billion, its port and grid concessions now split with Emirati capital too, which means Beijing has not left the continent so much as narrowed to a handful of bets it still believes will pay it back, and is content to share even those with Gulf money.
The Scenarios
Base case (55%) — two tracks, running in parallel
China keeps lending selectively to Angola, Kenya, Egypt and a handful of others it judges creditworthy, while Gulf capital and multilateral institutions absorb most of the financing gap in those same markets. Africa Corps deepens its Sahel footprint, trading security for mining rights in states that remain financially marginal to everyone except Moscow. The two stories keep running in parallel without merging into the single “great power handoff” narrative both Washington and Beijing find convenient to tell.
Downside case — a debt-and-security shock in the same state
A debt crisis hits a state that is both a significant Chinese debtor and vulnerable to a security vacuum, most plausibly Zambia, still working through the aftermath of its 2020 default, or an oil producer where falling revenue collides with jihadist expansion from the Sahel. If Gulf capital and multilateral lenders cannot absorb a shock in a country that size, and a coup follows, Africa Corps would be operating for the first time in a market China actually cared about losing, testing whether Moscow’s gold-for-security model can scale to a state with real sovereign debt exposure.
Upside case — more accountable actors fill both gaps
Gulf sovereign funds and multilateral lenders successfully substitute for China across its former core markets, while a reconstituted regional security architecture, whether African Union-led, a revived ECOWAS security mechanism, or a more accountable successor to French counter-terrorism missions, offers Sahel states an alternative to Russian garrisons paid in gold. Africa Corps’s mineral-for-security deals, dependent on opaque production and juntas with no fixed exit, prove less durable than sovereign lending ever was, and both vacuums end up filled by more diversified, more accountable actors than either Beijing or Moscow.
The Takeaway
The handoff framing flatters both great powers by implying a single, continent-wide contest for influence. The real picture is narrower and, for African governments, more precarious: two separate vacuums, opening in two different sets of countries, filled so far by Gulf capital and multilateral lenders in one and by Moscow alone in the other, with almost no actor offering both financing and security to the same state at once. Watch Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center’s next Chinese Loans to Africa update, typically released around year-end: if 2025 commitments fall below Angola’s 2024 total on its own, that confirms Beijing’s African lending book is now a handful of bets, not a strategy, and the vacuum in its old core markets will keep going to whoever shows up with capital rather than credentials.
