The lions of Niamey are going up in the world. The cramped cats may not know it, but when they move to their spacious new enclosure at the zoo in the capital of landlocked Niger, they will be the latest beneficiaries of a latter-day scramble for Africa.

Their $60,000 (￡42,000, €49,000) pen is the merest nicety compared with the rest of the largesse that Beijing and companies acting on its behalf are lavishing on an arid west African nation of 15m people more accustomed to hunger and penury.

Following the same bargain it has struck across the continent – swapping infrastructure and cash for resources to sustain its breakneck growth – China has secured access not only to another source of African oil but also to what is perhaps the single commodity considered more sensitive than crude: uranium. It has also turned Niger into a bellwether for those who fear that the struggle to secure the continent's resources risks re-creating the ruinous brinkmanship of the cold war.