Strategic Minerals: Africa Wants to Exploit Its Own Wealth
More cooperation, less exploitation. African countries no longer want to serve as a source of enrichment for Western or Chinese companies eager for their mineral resources. The Wall Street Journal details the strategies being deployed: taxes, nationalization, and pressure to build processing plants locally.
In Africa, governments are increasingly reluctant to export raw minerals, preferring to rely on processing them domestically, which they hope will allow them to maintain more jobs and revenue streams at home. Senior Trump administration officials seeking deals on key minerals in Africa are likely to learn this the hard way.
According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), nearly half of Africa's 54 countries (from Angola to Zimbabwe) have restricted or banned the export of raw materials in the past two years. For example, Zimbabwe, long Africa's leading lithium producer (before being overtaken in December by Mali), has indicated that it plans to ban raw exports of this key component of electric vehicle batteries in 2027.
The Zimbabwean government has been pressuring mining companies for some time to build refineries, which would create 5,000 new jobs and further increase revenues from ore exports, which were $600 million [€524 million] in 2023, compared to $70 million in 2024.
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