Yinka’s view
Africa’s biggest advantage in the critical minerals race may not be its minerals. It is the world’s growing determination to rely less on China.
As governments and manufacturers scramble to diversify supply chains, African producers possess something they’ve long lacked: bargaining power. The instinct has been to convert that leverage into export bans; the real challenge is converting it into industry.
The International Energy Agency’s latest Global Critical Minerals Outlook helps explain why. While mining has gradually diversified geographically, refining remains overwhelmingly concentrated. China controls roughly 72% of processing capacity across key energy minerals globally, giving it far greater leverage than countries that simply produce the ore. That reality has prompted a wave of resource nationalism across Africa as governments try to move up the value chain. DR Congo, the world’s largest producer of cobalt, has restricted exports. Zimbabwe has tightened controls on lithium, Mozambique now requires more graphite to be processed domestically, and Gabon plans to halt raw manganese exports later this decade. The objective — to force more value addition to happen at home — is understandable. The constraint here is not simply a shortage of local refineries, it is the wider industrial ecosystem that makes refining commercially viable: reliable electricity, affordable chemical inputs, transport infrastructure, and engineering expertise. The IEA estimates that building refining capacity outside today’s dominant suppliers costs between 20% and over 150% more than in established hubs, while operating costs are roughly 50% higher.
Paradoxically, those higher costs mean governments in North America, Europe, and Asia are increasingly willing to pay a premium to diversify supply chains, while manufacturers are searching for secure, non-Chinese sources of processed minerals. That is leverage African governments have rarely enjoyed. But it may not always be available to them.
The mistake would be to treat export bans as the industrial policy itself. The bans allow a negotiating position. Their value lies in using today’s geopolitical scramble to secure investment. The goal should be bigger than producing today’s battery materials: It is building industries that create the skilled jobs and manufacturing base Africa will need long after this critical minerals boom has passed.
Notable
- Many of Africa’s critical minerals are found in countries struggling with conflict and instability: Mining models that focus only on the final stages of extraction and transport have been found to exacerbate these problems, the Africa Center for Strategic Studies found.