PMSCs: How Western powers exploit Africa by proxy

By Staff reporter

Africa's tryst with Western mercenaries or private military and security companies (PMSCs) dates back to the time of anti-slave trade expeditions and colonial-era military incursions.

In some ways, the motivations of modern, corporate-driven private military firms mirror the machinations of private colonial companies unleashed on the continent by the West.

In 2002, the British Parliament's Select Committee on Foreign Affairs released a Green Paper on regulating private military companies. The paper acknowledged that Western mercenaries in Africa were anything but propitious to the continent.

Citing the acts of notorious mercenaries like the Irishman Mad Mike Hoare, Frenchman Bob Denard, and Belgian Jean Schramme in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, the paper called out the West's attempt to "retain control of a mineral-rich region" as akin to "colonialists attempting to retain power".

An ambiguous ecosystem

In the modern international security framework, PMSCs are firms legally registered "to provide security, advisory and military training to the armed forces and police of legitimate governments".

Mainly operating in a regulatory vacuum, their personnel are sometimes called soldiers of fortune or mercenaries, as they often cross the line to get involved in military combat and illegitimate or unscrupulous political, economic, or financial activities in the country where they are deployed.

The 1960s and 1970s were the so-called golden age of mercenaries in Africa, evidenced by the six-criteria definition of a mercenary in Article 47 of the 1977 additional protocols to the Geneva Conventions.

In an article published in July 2023 in The Standard — "How London became home to some of the world's largest private security firms" — Sophie Wilkinson cites UK's Aegis and G4S among the world's top five private security groups.

Aegis is also mentioned as "the second largest private employer in the world behind Walmart, with a presence in 125 countries". Globally, the combined revenues of these companies are reportedly expected to reach £231 billion (US $297 billion) in 2026.

European caucus

Other British defence service companies in Africa include Aegis and G4S. More recently, Russia's Wagner Group has featured prominently in active African conflict zones.

Among France's foremost private military firms, Agemira is involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Corpguard in Ivory Coast. Secopex is deployed in the Central African Republic, Somalia, and Libya, where its founder, Pierre Marziali, was killed during the 2011 revolution.

With a money-spinning contract in the DRC, Agemira brings Romanian and Serbian military advisors to the table. "The group hates being termed 'mercenaries', insisting they are military instructors," Congolese journalist Jaffar Sabity tells TRT Afrika.

Sabity believes that both Congo and Agemira are wary of UN sanctions, updated in February this year to target "political and military leaders of foreign armed groups operating in the DRC."

He also mentions that many local analysts are convinced that Agemira is actively involved in fighting Congolese rebel outfits like the M23. "No wonder they have the DRC flag on their uniform," he explains.

Questionable genesis

At the onset of Western imperialism, multiple colonial private entities helped conquer African lands for the imperial crowns to whom they owed allegiance.

During the shadowy post-WWII decolonisation period in Africa, private military and security companies instigated a series of coups d’état and suppressed freedom fighters from Zambia to Burkina Faso.

The 2004 coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea, led by mercenaries funded by businessman Sir Mark Thatcher, the son of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, marked a new phase of Western military companies’ jugular-hold on resource-rich African countries.

In the present day, Western neocolonial PMSCs are accused of siding with large corporations and shadowy foreign interests out to steal African resources, run arms rackets, and train rebels and insurgents to foment conflict and unrest that undermine states' sovereignty.

More recently, vulnerable African governments hit by a Western arms embargo and financial sanctions have invited PMSCs from other global powers like Russia, China, and Türkiye to help them with security contingencies.

"Private military companies pose a lot of dangers — it is colonisation by other means," Nigerian lawyer Idris Bawa, who works as a peacebuilding consultant, tells TRT Afrika.

"They create problems within our ranks and then advise us to get mercenaries to help resolve the issue they created for us."

Bawa should know, having been part of a training programme designed by the British military advisory firm BMATT for Nigerian paramilitary forces.

"Beyond the obvious, there is more to what brings foreign military trainers to Africa," he explains.

Mercenary legacy

Any history of PMSC operations in Africa must begin with the European imperial mercenaries — British, French, German, Portuguese, etc — alongside the colonial chartered companies.

Through conquests and duplicitous deals with African native chiefs, colonial mercenary companies preluded the exploitation, annexation, and partition of African lands under the guise of countering slave trafficking, and later for exploitation of African resources and missionary activities.

Zimbabwe and Zambia are two examples of African countries that rose from the ashes of British mercenary companies, otherwise called royal charter companies, commissioned to seize, administer, and claim overseas colonies in Africa on behalf of the British crown.

The two southern African countries were once called The Rhodesias, a name that brazenly bore the hallmark of Cecil Rhodes, the infamous British imperial mercenary and conqueror of southern Africa.

Following Rhodes' 1889 acquisition of a Royal Commission granting him powers to exploit the mineral wealth of defunct Zambesia, he established the British South Africa Company, thus laying the foundations of a new imperial province that would later bear his name.

This was documented in Stephen Alexander Massie's The Imperialism of Cecil John Rhodes, which chronicles the history of naming the territories astride the Zambezi River as "Northern Rhodesia" and "Southern Rhodesia". They eventually became independent — Zambia in 1964 and Zimbabwe in 1980, respectively.

In his book, The Trial of Cecil John Rhodes, the Nigerian novelist Adekeye Adebajo writes, "It was often said during the imperial era that trade followed the flag. Rhodes, in fact, inverted this, with the British government following his lead and lending political, economic, and military support to his mercenary and mercantilist adventures."

In 1898, the British imperial administration officially endorsed the occupation and name of Rhodesia, which the settlers had informally adopted since 1890.

Knight of infamy

Despite his elevation to knighthood, the prefix "mercenary" has been inseparable from the second-most famous British colonialist in Africa, Baron Frederick Lugard. The former soldier and unabashed mercenary served as a colonial administrator in various East and West African regions.

After serving in British India, Captain Lugard led a caravan of private military and traders dispatched to Africa. He eventually became involved in a dozen countries, from Sudan to Nigeria and Tanzania to Malawi.

In his widely-cited dissertation about the moral reconsideration of British colonial policies in eastern Africa, the Norwegian historian Jonas Fossli Gjersø writes about how Lugard was instrumental in using chartered companies powered by mercenary arrowheads as colonisation tools.

One such example is the treaty signed by Lugard's Imperial British East Africa Company in December 1890 with Kabaka (King) Mwanga II of Buganda, which placed the kingdom under the company's protection.

From 1894 onward, Lugard was involved with other British colonial companies, such as the Royal Niger Company in Nigeria, the British West Charterland Company in Botswana, and African Lakes Corporation in Malawi and Mozambique.

Post-WWII reincarnation

Wilkinson's article describes how "smaller wars in the global south were piggybacked by a boom of British private military companies" in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mercenary armies and shadowy accomplices to colonial powers played pivotal roles in "suppressing rebellions and fomenting unrest".

According to the UK Foreign Office report, the end of the Cold War brought a surplus of ex-military legions recruited by companies like Sandline and Executive Outcomes, who fought rebel forces in Sierra Leone and Angola.

As Sabity mentions, foreign militaries have long interfered in the affairs of Central African nations — in DRC's case, since the Belgian mercenary Schramme's presence in Mobutu Sese Seko's erstwhile Zaire.

The journalist also cites allegations of English, Australian, and Israeli mercenaries still working in the M23 rebel zone.

During Nigeria's Civil War of the 1960s, French and Israeli mercenaries were blamed for contributing towards elongating the war, which lasted 30 months.

Neocolonial orbit

The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s ushered in a new chapter for PMSCs, as millions of demobilised soldiers sought private engagement, while Africa was beset with long-running regional conflicts.

African conflicts from the 1990s to the 2020s included those in Sudan, Libya, Mali, Chad, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Eritrea, Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon, Central Africa Republic, Congo DR, Angola, Somalia, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, etc.

In 1989, Eeben Barlow, a retired colonel of the apartheid-era South African Defence Force, founded Executive Outcomes, which fought in Sierra Leone's civil war.

Dyck Advisory Group, founded in 2012 by the white Zimbabwean military veteran Colonel Lionel Dyck, fought Al-Shabaab in Mozambique in 2020.

Many modern PMSCs in active service — including Osprey, Blackhawk, MPRI, CACI International, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, AdvanFort, Xeless, and Asgaard — operate individually in all African regions, from Egypt to Mauritania.

Bawa partly blames African states for signing military pacts that provide Western private military actors direct access to visit and audit government military facilities, exposing state secrets and enabling the continuous spread of PMSCs on the continent.

A thriving conflict economy exists around African trouble spots and is tightly linked to the region's broader global political economy at work. Western neocolonial interests and agendas are deeply embedded in these conflicts.

It is no longer a case of Western arms dealers seeking lucrative weapons supplies and military contracts from African governments. Neocolonial boots will remain on the ground as long as fragile states remain insecure, unstable, and ready to concede their sovereignty.