Africa’s Critical Minerals: Leverage or Another Extraction Cycle?
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Johan van der Merwe | Africa Fellow
Governments around the world are intensifying efforts to secure critical mineral (CM) supplies, given their significance to clean energy technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), national security, and modern electronics. To achieve net zero emissions, mineral demand from clean energy technologies is projected to almost triple by 2030, and to quadruple by 2040. Africa is an unavoidable focus, given the continent’s leading CM production and rare earth potential. This offers real opportunity, but it also risks a familiar outcome in which African states export raw materials, while wealth, technology, and pricing power accumulate elsewhere through offshore processing and manufacturing. If African states pursue uncoordinated, country-by-country deals, they will forfeit collective bargaining power and repeat a damaging historical pattern.
Africa at the Centre of Critical Mineral Demand
Critical minerals are essential to economic and security priorities but are vulnerable to supply disruption. They are fundamental to the sustainable energy transition, powering wind turbines and solar panels, as well as electric vehicle batteries and motors. These minerals are equally essential to advanced military technologies, appearing in aircraft and missiles, and enabling key capabilities such as advanced radar, sonar, and communications systems. No longer just commodities, CM are shaping global security, industrial policy and military readiness.
The African continent is uniquely positioned to play a central role in the global energy transition and to meet the surging demand. Africa holds 30 per cent of the world’s reserves of minerals essential for low-carbon technologies and digital infrastructure. Furthermore, the continent holds roughly 80 per cent of the world’s known platinum group metal reserves and 55 per cent of the world’s known cobalt reserves, a key input for rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.
Africa’s Strategic Pivot
Africa’s geological wealth and abundance of natural resources have paradoxically led to economic stagnation and political instability. This phenomenon is known as the ‘resource curse’. This curse is rooted in colonial-era economic structures which were designed to exploit resources with disregard to local development. Today, a small number of private companies capture the gains from resource extraction, while public revenues are mismanaged by corrupt political elites and local communities see little of the benefit. The ever-increasing global demand for CM presents African countries with an opportunity to change this reality, moving beyond the role of raw material suppliers to build industrial capacity and secure fairer returns. In order to derive more value across the full mineral chain, African countries need to prioritise local beneficiation and manufacturing. That pivot will not only ensure the export of higher value products but also develop local industry, improve employment, infrastructure and political stability.
This is, of course, far easier said than done. It is also not a new insight. Beneficiation has been declared an objective for well over a decade, appearing in a multitude of frameworks such as the African Union’s (AU) Africa Mining Vision (2009) and South Africa’s Beneficiation Strategy (2011). Nevertheless, policy ambition has repeatedly outrun implementation. According to the United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 83 per cent of African countries are commodity dependent and raw materials make up over 60 per cent of their merchandise exports. Worryingly, more than a dozen manganese smelters have shut down in South Africa in recent years and platinum beneficiation fell sharply, with local processing volumes dropping by more than 55 per cent. This occurs because of a number of interlocking constraints. Beneficiation requires reliable power, coherent land use planning, timely environmental approvals, secure water licences, and efficient road, rail, and port access. Successful beneficiation and mining investment therefore depends on public infrastructure, regulatory certainty, and effective government service delivery. The path ahead is clear, but it is uphill and strewn with loose stones.
Strength in Unity: Collective Leverage
African countries need to establish mutually beneficial trade agreements, in order to effectively leverage these geopolitical assets. The African Policy Research Institute illuminates a landscape of close to 100 mineral agreements, largely bilateral or small multilateral deals struck between individual African states and external partners, rather than continental solidarity. This needs to change. A co-ordinated response such as a producer arrangement that sets a reference price band and enforces it through agreed supply discipline would ensure no state is tempted to undercut its neighbour for short term gain. Uncoordinated national responses to the CM demand will reduce bargaining power over foreign investors and undermine collective interests as it will lead to weaker terms on which minerals are sold.
Ensuring fair terms would allow for reinvestment into local industrial capacity. Noting the above difficulties of beneficiation, intra-African collaboration is again required. Through the harmonisation of policies, coordination of value chains and pooling infrastructure, African countries can master the entire mining to manufacturing continuum together. Regional blocs such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and the East African Community (EAC), offer existing platforms through which African states can align policy on shared infrastructure, bargain with greater collective leverage, and resist being played off against one another.
Africa does not lack strategy papers, nor does it lack mineral endowment. What has too often been absent is the capacity to convert geology into leverage, leverage into industry, and industry into broadly shared gains. If the continent continues to negotiate in fragments, industrialise independently, and mismanage government revenues, it will be paid in promises and leave the real value to be realised elsewhere.
Johan van der Merwe is in his final year at the University of Sydney, completing a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Arts with a major in Economics.
Born in Australia to South African parents, Johan has always had an interest in Africa’s intricate socio-political landscapes, liberation movements, and economic challenges. This fascination deepened during his years at Hilton College, a boarding school in South Africa. His connection to the continent endures today as a director of De Aap Private Nature Reserve.
Johan has studied in Scotland and the Netherlands and undertook research at the European Commission in Brussels, which shaped his passion for international policy. Johan also brings legal expertise from his time at Norton White and his current role at K&L Gates LLP.
His intellectual interests lie at the intersection of law, religion and development economics, underpinned by a passion for political philosophy and individual liberty.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. AI tools were used by this author for limited editorial assistance, including grammar checks, phrasing suggestions and structural refinement but all content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.