That’s a perspective I can understand. I was pretty disappointed to see Wagner given a mine in Burkina Faso, for sure.

I think, though, that unfortunately, it is an inevitable consequence of western reaction to the coups and their history of suppressing African sovereignty.

Fighting off jihadis(which is what Wagner is being contracted to do in Burkina Faso) is a global problem, and can’t be tackled by any one nation, especially not a poor, landlocked one like Burkina Faso. However, the wests actions in fighting Islamic extremism in Africa has been so heavily fraught with abuse of Africans among other issues that I don’t think we’ll ever see the return of trust between West Africa and the West, and so, when paired with the global Wests refusal to work with the coup governments, and tendency to issue sanctions which even further damage civilian populations while leaving governmental structures nearly untouched (and not to mention that sanctions have been definitively proven to increase support for a regime), the newly free African nations have no choice but to look to alternative economic blocs for support, and in our current world, that alternative block is essentially just Russia.