In April 2025, Namibian President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yury Trutnev sat down in Windhoek to deepen a nuclear-energy partnership between Africa’s largest uranium producer and one of the world’s foremost nuclear powers. Months before, Tanzania had already taken its seat at Moscow’s table: The Russia–Tanzania Intergovernmental Commission, established in 2022, has now convened twice — in Dar es Salaam and St. Petersburg — with Arusha pencilled in for 2026.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s recent visit to Moscow has, by her own ministers’ account, breathed new life into Rosatom’s long-dormant Mkuju River uranium project in the Ruvuma Region.
On paper, the arithmetic is seductive. Namibia and Tanzania sit on enormous uranium reserves; Russia carries decades of nuclear know-how. Pair the two, the script runs, and you get value addition, energy independence, jobs and industrial lift-off. Yet before Windhoek and Dodoma sign on the dotted line, a question more basic than sovereignty or security deserves an honest answer: is Russia an economically reliable partner at all, or is its much-advertised African footprint largely a mirage?
The numbers are unkind to the romance. In 2024, total trade between Russia and the entire African continent came to roughly $24.5 billion — a rounding error beside Africa’s $355 billion in trade with the European Union. More telling is the shape of that trade: Russian exports dwarf what Moscow buys from Africa by a factor of seven, and more than 70 per cent of the whole relationship is concentrated in just four countries — Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and South Africa. Russian foreign direct investment accounts for less than 1% of all capital flowing into the continent.
At the inaugural Russia–Africa summit in 2019, President Vladimir Putin vowed to double trade within five years. He missed the target comfortably.
This is the business model Namibia and Tanzania are being invited to trust. At its core, it is extractive and lopsided — grains, arms, fuel and yellowcake flowing one way, with little of the patient, job-creating capital that builds an economy. The reason is structural, not incidental. Russia has no equivalent of China’s EXIM Bank or America’s development finance arm; it lacks the credit lines, concessionary loans and capital guarantees that bankroll the kind of capital-intensive nuclear plant now being dangled before Windhoek. And Moscow is making these promises while sanctioned, cash-strapped, and pouring its treasure into a war in Ukraine that shows no sign of ending.
Tanzania, of all places, should read its own file. Rosatom acquired Mkuju River more than a decade ago, then quietly walked away when uranium prices collapsed after Fukushima. The project sat dormant for over ten years. It has stirred back to life now only because uranium prices have recovered — not because Moscow rediscovered a devotion to Tanzanian development. The pilot plant launched in 2025 yields a token five tonnes a year, and commissioning of the main complex has already slipped to 2029. A partner that abandons a flagship project the moment the market turns, and reappears only when the numbers again suit Moscow, is telling you precisely what your “long-term” partnership is worth.
For the clearest preview of the model, look north to the Sahel. It is there — in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, now welded together in the Alliance of Sahel States — that Russia’s footprint runs deepest. As the Pan-African researcher Oumarou Sanou warns, partnerships anchored primarily in security cooperation without parallel institutional reform risk deepening political stagnation.
The Sahelian bargain has been resources and access in exchange for guns and regime protection, not value chains or industry. The results are damning: these states now record among the highest terrorism-related casualties on earth, insecurity has worsened rather than eased, and the contagion spills steadily toward coastal West Africa, Nigeria included. Where Russia’s economic presence grows, press freedom shrinks, and accountability evaporates — Moscow has even taken to publicly attacking African journalists for critical reporting. That is not the conduct of a partner invested in a nation’s prosperity.
None of this means Africa should bolt the door against Moscow, or anyone else. Every nation may court whom it pleases. But courtship is not marriage, and a glossy communiqué is not a development plan. Namibia’s own president put it bluntly to Trutnev: the trade figures, she noted, do not match the warmth of the political talk. That gap — between announcement and delivery, between promise and capital — is the whole story of Russia’s economic engagement in Africa.
So Windhoek and Dodoma must do what too few have done: read the fine print, demand transparent terms, insist on genuine value addition and real financing, and weigh Russian overtures honestly against what Western firms, regional African initiatives and multilateral frameworks can credibly deliver. Uranium is a blessing only if it is mined on terms that enrich Namibians and Tanzanians — not Moscow’s balance sheet, and certainly not its war and geostrategic interests.
Both presidents are gambling. The least they owe their citizens is to know the true odds before the dice leave their hands.
-Amajama, a social and policy commentator, writes from Abuja, and can be reached via [email protected]
(The Whistler)
