This year Patrick Pouyanné, chief executive of TotalEnergies, was on route to Mozambique when he stopped off in the tiny central African nation of Rwanda.
Rwanda has no oil and gas reserves and a small domestic market of 13mn people. Yet Pouyanné and Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame signed a co-operation agreement anyway, agreeing to explore opportunities to develop renewable energy projects.
The proposal was of little commercial value to the French oil major. But in the preceding months Rwanda had made itself invaluable to Total by deploying 1,000 troops to Mozambique to quell an Islamist insurgency that had halted the company’s plans for a mammoth gas project.
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