Fluorspar mining in Elgeyo-Marakwet County.
We live in revolutionary times. On December 6, 2024, as I made my way to N’Djamena airport, hundreds of people were marching through the streets of the Chadian Capital. “Chad for us, France out!”, they chanted. Earlier, on November 28, President Mahamat Déby (40) had ended a 64-year-old military pact with Paris.
The N’Djamena protests symbolise the African struggle for economic autonomy across the Sahel belt, which has seen French troops expelled from Mali, Niger, Burkina-Faso and now Chad. They are part of two inter-locking revolutions shaping Africa’s destiny in the 21st century.
One is the ‘economic revolution,’ touted by scholars as the ‘third Liberation’. The other is the ‘clean energy revolution’ to avert a global climate catastrophe. The two revolutions converge in the energy transition minerals. As home to over 40% of critical minerals and metals now driving climate-friendly technologies, Africa is at the epicentre of the twin revolutions. The million-dollar question is whether the new energy transition mineral boom will be a boon or bane for Africa.
It is the search for the answer to this question that brought me to Chad — a country fabulously rich in minerals such gas, petroleum, gold, uranium, titanium, and bauxite — as the co-convener of the “2024 China-Africa Think Tanks Energy Forum.” The hallmark of the forum, which was jointly organized by Africa Policy Institute (API) and the Economic and Technological Research Institute (ETRI), the think tank of the Chinese energy giant, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), was the launch of a new book, The Power of Minerals: How Africa Can Benefit from the Green Energy Revolution co-authored by Professor Qian Xingkun and myself.
Green energy revolution
The forum and the book shed light on how Africa can turn the so-called “resource curse” into blessing for its people. Thrusting Africa to the centre stage of the green energy revolution is the rise of new climate-friendly low-carbon energy technologies for making batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and electricity networks. This has raised demand for critical minerals and metals needed for energy generation (rare earth elements), energy transmission (aluminum, copper and iron ore) and energy storage (lithium, nickel, and cobalt, manganese). Africa produces approximately 50 per cent of manganese, two-thirds of cobalt, and significant amounts of aluminium, copper, lithium, and iron ore. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), demand for energy transition minerals is projected to increase six-fold by 2050. The Consumer demand for these critical minerals is projected to increase by 300 per cent by 2050.
For centuries, a ‘pit-to-port’ mining model turned Africa into an exporter of under-priced raw materials and impoverished its people. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which doubles as the richest country in (mineral) resources and also one of the five poorest countries in the world, is a clear victim of this colonial-style model. If unreversed, the pit-to-port’ system will continue to destroy the environment and enriched mining companies and interests and haemorrhage the continent, preventing it from reaping the benefits of the clean energy boom.
African must rethink old partnerships and forge new strategic ones that advances its interests. Africa is in the vortex of a new scramble for its resources. After decades of writing off Africa as a ‘hopeless continent’, powerful Western players are now rushing to secure transition minerals. The European Union and other powerful economies from the OECD block are using the US-led “Mineral Security Partnership” to get toe-holds in Africa’s resource-rich countries. Inversely, Africa is trapped at the bottom of the value chain. Activities of mining companies have led to emission of greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity, pollution, damage on cultures and abuses of right of local communities and indigenous people and fuelling of tensions.
Africa’s best guarantee for benefiting from its resources is the development and enforcement of policies and legal frameworks to govern its mineral space, reduce negative impacts of the production and processing of these energy minerals and build resilient communities, towns, cities and landscapes.
Africa Mineral Vision
Laudably, in 2009 the African Union adopted the Africa Mineral Vision (AMV) followed by the African Minerals Governance Framework (AMGF) of 2018 and buttressed by Africa’s Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to ensure sustainable access to minerals, responsible mining, reduction of the impacts of mining on the people and biodiversity, building of renewable infrastructure and ensuring economic justice for the producer countries and local communities in mining areas. Regional Economic Communities have also adopted protocols and other legal and policy frameworks to harmonise the mining laws of member countries.
Facing the future, Africa has to work with its partners like China to increase investment in value-addition of minerals within the continent.
For Africa to go up the global value chain, it has to fast-track innovations in climate-friendly technologies to make production cheaper, more efficient and aligned to local and international markets. African governments and mining companies should maintain high environmental and governance standards including giving incentives for superior environmental and social responses and performance.
Africa should work with partners in the global South such as China to access recycling technologies while enacting laws and policies deal with rapid growth of waste in the production and processing of minerals and create incentives for recycling of wastes such as batteries. African think tanks and civil society actors should push for increased market access, transparency and supply chain resilience.
Finally, Africa must strengthen South-South collaboration frameworks such as the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the BRICS with the aim of promoting industrialisation to ensure maximum benefits from critical minerals and clean energy technologies. Africa, it must be said, must industrialise or perish, remaining the hewer of wood and drawer of water in the new global energy order.
Prof Peter Kagwanja is Chief Executive at the Africa Policy Institute (API) and Co-author of The Power of Minerals: How Africa Can Benefit from the Green Energy Revolution ((Tafiti House Publishers, 2025).
