East African Mining News Unearthing Mining Opportunities in East Africa
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There is a pattern that has defined Africa’s relationship with its own natural wealth for centuries of digging it up, ship it out and watch the value get created somewhere else. As the global economy pivots from fossil fuels to clean energy and as demand for the critical minerals that underpin that transition surges across battery factories, solar panel manufacturers, and electric vehicle assembly lines, the question Africa’s leaders are asking with renewed urgency is whether the green energy revolution will repeat that pattern or finally break it.
Kenyan President William Ruto used the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, co-hosted with France on 12 May to make his position unambiguous. “We cannot accept a future in which Africa simply exports raw green minerals while industrial value addition, advanced manufacturing and technological innovation take place elsewhere. That model belongs to the past,” stated Ruto. The words carry weight precisely because they arrive at a moment when the pressure to accept exactly that model, dressed in the language of partnership and climate urgency, is intensifying from multiple directions simultaneously.
Africa holds more than 30% of the world’s critical minerals including cobalt, lithium, manganese and rare earth elements essential for batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. The Democratic Republic of Congo alone accounts for approximately 70% of global cobalt production and holds an estimated $24 trillion in untapped mineral deposits. The African Union projects that demand for these minerals will double by 2040. The continent is not short of what the world needs. What it has historically been short of is the power to determine the terms on which the world gets it.
Ruto’s call for green industrialisation, not just green extraction, is the clearest articulation yet of what those new terms should look like. He noted, “Green industrialisation presents our continent with an opportunity not only to contribute meaningfully to global climate solutions but also to create jobs, expand manufacturing capacity, strengthen exports, deepen regional value chains and accelerate structural economic transformation.” The ambition is not to supply the materials for the energy transition but to become an industrial participant in it by processing, refining, manufacturing and innovating on African soil rather than receiving the residual value at the bottom of a supply chain designed elsewhere.
Civil society organisations are watching this moment with both hope and scepticism. The Congolese Civil Society Coalition Le Congo n’est pas à vendre’s Spokesperson Jean-Claude Mputu, has been blunt about the risk that new partnerships reproduce old patterns. “This is a race for minerals at any cost. In this race, African states and all countries that have minerals are the big losers because no promises have been made on human rights. None. Human rights, justice and environmental protection are the biggest blind spots in these agreements,” said Mputu. His warning echoes a body of research documenting how the rush for clean-energy minerals in Zimbabwe, the DRC, Namibia and elsewhere, has in several cases reproduced the same extractive logic that has impoverished African communities for generations, including biodiversity loss, community displacement and new forms of resource-related illegality.
The European posture on this is shifting, at least rhetorically. French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking ahead of the Nairobi summit, argued that Europe can no longer be characterised by its colonial extractive history. “The paradox is that we are not the predators of this century. Europeans may once have been. But they are not now,” states Macron. He further acknowledged that African countries want to process their own resources domestically and that France understands that expectation. Whether that understanding translates into commercial and policy arrangements that genuinely support African industrialisation, rather than simply providing a more palatable framing for the same underlying dynamic, is the test that the coming decade will adjudicate.
The regulatory environment is responding to the pressure. Ghana has revised its mining laws. Madagascar, Mali, the DRC and Tanzania have introduced changes to their critical minerals policies. Multiple African countries have imposed or signalled export restrictions on unprocessed minerals. The direction of travel is clear. What remains contested is the pace, the governance quality and whether the domestic processing capacity, energy infrastructure and institutional frameworks required to make industrial value addition a reality can be assembled quickly enough to capitalise on a demand window that will not wait indefinitely.
Ruto’s vision is the right one. “Africa has a historic opportunity not merely to participate in the global energy transition but to help lead it. Africa must become a globally competitive industrial hub powered by clean energy, modern infrastructure, innovation and strategic investment partnerships,” concluded Ruto. The opportunity is real so Africa needs to convert it into something more durable than the extractive arrangements it is trying to replace dependent on decisions being made right now in mining codes, investment agreements, infrastructure budgets and in the political will of governments to hold the line when the pressure to simply say yes to the next deal becomes overwhelming.
