I’ve found several articles similar to this, but transfer of management of a TLD from one registrar to another generally shouldn’t result in breakage of registered domains. And nothing in that article (nor any of the others I’ve found) suggest that Mali plans not to honor existing registrations (which all expire eventually anyway, so they have an orderly way to reclaim things by refusing renewal if they wish).

There’s more going on here that hasn’t been reported (or that I haven’t found) yet.