Control Without Capture: Africa's Critical Minerals Bargain
Without improved processing infrastructure, resource nationalism and export bans do not offer longterm solutions.
All views expressed in the Welternährung are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view or policies of the editorial board or of Welthungerhilfe.
Africa's leverage over critical minerals is real, but historically, it has been poorly converted into revenue, control, or citizen benefit. The continent’s resource endowment is undeniable: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone accounts for roughly 70 percent of the world’s known reserves of cobalt. Zambia's Copperbelt and Guinea's bauxite deposits carry comparable weight in their respective markets. That mineral wealth is now the subject of active bidding among the United States, China, the European Union, and other geopolitical actors, all racing to secure battery and defense supply chains. The US, Japan, and EU are looking at ways to quickly reduce their dependence on China for critical minerals, especially rare earth elements.
For African countries, however, resource abundance has not yet translated into commensurate control, fair pricing, or broad-based benefit. The barriers to this are immense—and it is not simply a question of financing—and will require a focus on reduced corruption, increased institutional capacity, workforce training, and the push for a level playing field.
The Control Question
African countries largely benefit from raw mineral extraction through concession agreements with mining companies; this dynamic has changed little since the days of colonial control. The processing of these minerals, however, is largely outside of African control. China refines more than 70 percent of the world's cobalt and dominates midstream capacity in lithium, rare earths, and battery-grade nickel. The DRC exports raw and semi-refined material and imports back the batteries and magnets that material becomes.
This is the "how" versus "how much" distinction that defines the sector: African governments have negotiated harder over royalty rates and equity stakes, but few have built the smelting, refining, and cathode-manufacturing capacity that would let them capture value beyond the mine gate. This would require significant commitment of foreign capital that in turn requires an improved investment climate and, just as binding, reliable sources of power. Smelting and refining are electricity-intensive, and both the DRC and Zambia already run generation and transmission deficits, which means midstream ambitions are inseparable from power investment on a longer timeline than the minerals window itself.
The Trump administration has moved to aggressively increase US access to critical minerals through a series of agreements and initiatives with many focused on Africa. The U.S.-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed in Washington on December 4, 2025 alongside the Rwanda-DRC peace accord, grants the United States preferential access to Congolese copper and cobalt and established a Strategic Asset Reserve of state-owned mining assets earmarked for American investment. Gecamines, the DRC's state mining company, has begun shipping copper to U.S.-backed buyers, and a small American firm, Virtus Minerals, secured rights to the Mutoshi deposit, capable of producing up to 5 percent of world cobalt supply. Congolese lawyers and human rights defenders filed a constitutional challenge to the agreement in January 2026, arguing it was negotiated without adequate parliamentary oversight. The pattern echoes an older one: the 2008 Sicomines arrangement, under which the DRC granted mining rights to a Chinese consortium in exchange for infrastructure financing, drew persistent criticism from the International Monetary Fund over undervaluation of the minerals pledged as collateral.
Infrastructure investment offers a partial counterweight, if done properly. The Lobito Corridor, a rail link from Angola's Atlantic port through the DRC to Zambia's Copperbelt, has drawn committed financing from the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), the African Development Bank, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), and the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), including a $753 million DFC-led financing package closed in mid-2026. The corridor is projected to cut transport costs for copper and cobalt by up to 30 percent and compress transit time from sixteen days to seven. Such a route could be used for more than just exporting raw minerals to overseas markets but also to build up processing and end use manufacturing. That would require further commitments from the US and the other Lobito partners.
The Rise of Resource Nationalism
Resource nationalism has become an important force in African mineral policy, and it could escalate. The DRC has moved from taxing production to restricting it, capping cobalt hydroxide exports at roughly 96,000 tons for the year through an export quota introduced in late 2025. The quota holds spot cobalt near $25 per pound, but price defense is the byproduct rather than the point: the objective is leverage over who processes the material and where. It marks a sharp break from the DRC's earlier, purely fiscal approach.
Export bans have become an instrument of resource nationalism across producing states. Indonesia set the template: a 2020 export ban on unprocessed nickel ore drew nearly $14 billion into domestic smelter capacity, nickel pig iron output nearly quadrupled by 2024, and Indonesia became structurally embedded in global battery supply chains. Indonesia’s ban is also a cautionary tale: yes, the country built significant nickel processing, but China dominated these investments. Zimbabwe and the DRC are trying to run variants of the same strategy. Zimbabwe suspended all raw mineral and lithium concentrate exports in February 2026, intercepting cargo already in transit toward port, ahead of a January 2027 deadline for a full ban.
Moves like this tightened supply and lifted prices, which were the intended result. That said, an export ban forces downstream investment only where buyers have no substitute sourced. Whether Africa's export-ban wave builds refining capacity at home or simply relocates the bottleneck will determine whether resource nationalism converts into industrial capacity or stays a pricing tactic.
That earlier approach was fiscal rather than physical. The 2018 Mining Code in the DRC raised the baseline royalty on non-ferrous metals from 2 percent to 3.5 percent and created a new 10 percent royalty on minerals designated "strategic," a category that now includes cobalt, coltan, and germanium. The code also introduced a 50 percent windfall tax on profits generated when prices rise more than 25 percent above feasibility-study assumptions, and it mandated a non-dilutable 10 percent government equity stake in new licenses.
Mining companies warned the changes would deter investment. Investment did not collapse; cobalt output grew regardless, driven by demand rather than fiscal terms. The lesson was generalized, and it explains why the nationalist turn is accelerating: African governments have more leverage at the royalty and export-policy level than the investment community typically concedes, provided the underlying commodity is genuinely scarce.
The binding constraint on resource nationalism is domestic, not diplomatic. Revenue distribution inside the DRC remains the unresolved half of the bargain. The 2018 code allocates 50 percent of royalty revenue to the central government, 25 percent to the province where mining occurs, 15 percent to the local mining area, and 10 percent to a fund for future generations. Provincial and local disbursement has been inconsistent, and Gecamines has in practice become a gatekeeper that licenses exploitation rights to joint-venture partners rather than a direct operator. A higher royalty rate does not guarantee that revenue reaches the communities nearest the mine. Assertive resource nationalism without distributional reform simply moves the point at which revenue leaks away from mining communities — from the foreign operator to the domestic gatekeeper, which is where the transparency question begins.
The Transparency Problem
In 2001, following sustained pressure from the advocacy group Global Witness, BP became the first oil major operating in Angola to commit to publishing payments made to Sonangol, the state oil company, and to the Angolan government. The disclosure was narrow: production by block, aggregate payments under production-sharing terms, and signature bonuses. Even that limited step drew resistance from Angolan authorities, and subsequent years produced repeated disputes over undisclosed social-fund payments, including a $32 billion discrepancy in Sonangol's accounts identified by the International Monetary Fund in 2011.
The pattern is structural and not company-specific. Revenue transparency without enforcement mechanisms produces disclosure without accountability. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), founded in 2003 partly in response to the Angola case, now counts more than 50 implementing countries, including 28 in Africa, and requires disclosure of licensing, production, revenue, and beneficial ownership data. Publish What You Pay, the coalition that grew out of the same campaign, has pushed mandatory disclosure rules in the United States and European Union that go beyond EITI's voluntary framework. Both initiatives share the same limitation: they generate data. They do not compel spending choices, and a government that publishes complete revenue figures still faces no binding requirement to direct that revenue toward the communities nearest extraction. The distinction between transparency and accountability is precisely the concession the current transactional turn in mineral diplomacy tends to skip.
What Follows
Three shifts would narrow the gap between resource control and revenue capture.
First, high-income governments financing corridor and processing infrastructure must condition that financing on local beneficiation targets, not only on export volume. The Lobito Corridor's backers should look to build measurable domestic refining capacity, as well as looking at how they can support end use manufacturing along the corridor. Because refining and processing is power-hungry, that financing also has to cover generation and transmission alongside rail. This would take advantage of the infrastructure investment, and it would help to blunt the rising tide of bans and controls on the volume of minerals exported in DRC and elsewhere.
Second, African governments should pair royalty and export-quota tools, which the DRC has demonstrated can move prices, with earmarked, auditable transfers to subnational governments. Fiscal leverage over multinational operators is necessary but not sufficient; it must be matched by domestic distribution mechanisms with independent audit trails.
Third, the United States and the European Union should support revenue-transparency and human-rights conditions to strategic partnership agreements, including the DRC arrangement, rather than treating mineral access as separable from governance outcomes. China does not require these types of conditions, but leaders in the region have made it clear that they want a diversity of investment. This presents an opportunity to bring greater transparency and improve conditions to mining. The 2025 Strategic Partnership Agreement signed with DRC offers Washington genuine leverage to require EITI-standard disclosure and community consultation as conditions of the Strategic Asset Reserve designations, leverage that remains unused as written. The question is, however, whether the current US-administration wants to support this type of transparency or whether it is content with preferential access to DRC’s resources.
Africa's critical minerals moment will not repeat. Demand for cobalt, copper, and lithium will not disappear; the window in which supply is tight enough to give producers in Africa real bargaining power will. Batteries that use less cobalt, recycled supply, and new mines outside Africa all erode that leverage, and the window is measured in less time than many suspect. Governments and financiers that treat this period as one more commodity cycle, rather than a narrow opportunity to convert mineral wealth into refining capacity and durable public revenue, will have chosen transactional -shortterm- gains over transformational ones, and African citizens will bear the cost of that choice long after the prices have moved on.
Conor M. Savoy is the executive director of Filterlabs.org and is a strategic advisor working at the intersection of Foreign Policy, Global Development, & International Economics. Until July 2026 he was Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington.
