https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/08/01/why-the-nightmare-in-niger-is-the-worlds-problem
"Jihadism is a symptom of social and economic collapse as much as a cause. In the case of the Sahel the drumbeat of population increases and climate change have created a zero-sum competition for land and other resources as well as destabilising internal migration. Corrupt and incompetent governments intensify these problems, creating predatory bureaucracies and brutal armies that stoke jihad by aggravating sectarian tensions and abusing ethnic minorities. "
There is now a band of military coups extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. All have reported Wagner mercenary forces, and that bloc includes half the countries Putin is donating grain to. The total donation is a small fraction of the grain he has prevented Ukraine from exporting, and he complains nonstop that he does not have the mechanisms to get paid for those token shipments so the giveaway is transactional for "other considerations".
The pattern is: countries desperate for food, especially since the Ukraine War drove up grain prices; strategic mineral resources; and/or routes to seaports.
Wagner goes wherever the regimes need elite forces, and where organized smuggling form mines to industrial economies has a high profit margin, therefore, their profit comes from oppressing, impoverishing and starving millions of people. Further, they are agents of Putin's global criminal empire.