Burkina Faso's military leader, Captain Ibrahim Traore, inaugurated the country's first gold refinery in Ouagadougou, a $19 million state and private-sector project with an annual capacity of 164 tonnes. The government says it will let the country, Africa's third-largest gold producer, refine its own metal and keep more of the value chain at home, and it hopes to curb smuggling in an informal mining sector plagued by jihadist violence. The move fits Traore's wider drive, since seizing power in a 2022 coup, to assert economic sovereignty through nationalised mines and expanded domestic industry.