Mali said on Sunday that trucks and buses, joined by Burkinabè coaches, were still carrying people who left Guinea's gold-mining areas towards Burkina Faso, as Prime Minister Abdoulaye Maïga visited the Malian border town of Kourémalé to hand over food, medicines and an equipped health post. The crisis-coordination centre's communiqué, relayed by Malijet, gives the transport figures; Aconews dates the visit to Sunday 8 November.
The centre, known by its French acronym CECOGEC, says that on Saturday 63 Malian trucks and 39 buses carried about 14,000 people towards Burkina Faso. On Sunday, it says, 54 Malian trucks, 24 buses and 38 Burkinabè coaches "resumed the road". The Sunday figures count vehicles, not passengers, and the communiqué gives no total of people who have completed the journey. The available tallies do not establish a reconciled total of completed arrivals.
The pressure behind the operation is large. By Saturday, Mali's crisis centre had counted about 160,000 people who had left Guinea, roughly 100,000 in the Bamako district and nearly 60,000 at Kourémalé, with six deaths at the border town, according to the official account it announced that day. That is an official count announced on Saturday, not a verified census. The movement followed Guinea's ban on artisanal gold mining in several north-eastern zones, which Conakry justified by environmental damage and enforced with security forces. Mali's health ministry says most of those pushed out are Burkinabè, with others from Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Togo and Benin.
The government's central decision is how to handle that crowd. After an extraordinary crisis meeting on Saturday, the prime minister's office said returnees should be kept at the Kourémalé frontier so that evacuations could be organised "without creating difficult situations in the capital", and ordered the crisis centre to publish a daily bulletin. Maliweb had reported that the reception site on Bamako's outskirts paralysed traffic on one main road on Friday. Holding people at the border makes onward transport the heart of the plan: vehicles must move people onward while reception sites provide for those still waiting. On Sunday, according to Aconews, Maïga asked truck owners to contribute vehicles to take people to their home countries and localities, which indicates that additional transport was still being sought.
The prime minister's Sunday handover included rice, pasta, sugar, oil and four cattle, medicines worth CFA 7 million (about €10,700) and an equipped advanced health post, Aconews reports. That is the government's description of what it delivered, not an independent account of care. The crisis centre also reports 760 consultations in Bamako's health facilities.
Onward transport does not restore the income that took many of these workers to Guinea’s gold fields. Burkina Faso's family and solidarity minister, welcoming the first convoy to Bobo-Dioulasso on Friday, set out plans for schooling, training and reintegration of returnees. How those plans reach people who have lost their work will matter more over time than how many buses leave Kourémalé each day.