Building Africa from the Ground

Over the last few years, one African country after another has announced the discovery of one or other mineral resource within its territory. Every announcement has been a source of joy and pride - further evidence of Africa's great endowment of mineral resources. Every announcement has also made me afraid, afraid of how the discoveries will set off new scrambles for the continent's resources. I believe there is a better approach that countries can take to use these resource endowments to build their countries and economies and avoid the pitfalls others have fallen into. I'll go as far as saying that when we see the usual suspects deviating from some of the principles and approaches put forward here, their intent is not to build but to dig another hole for the country to fall into.

Every few months now there's another one. Lithium in Zimbabwe, Mali and Nigeria. Rare earths in Malawi. Oil off the coasts of Namibia and Senegal. New gold mines in Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire. Graphite in Mozambique and Tanzania. Countries nobody used to call mining economies are finding out what lies under them, and the announcements have become so regular that they barely make the news outside the country concerned.

I read every one of them, and my first reaction is always joy. I'm happy for them. I'm excited in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who doesn't understand the powerful potential that mining and minerals have to transform the economy of a country and the realities of its people. Each announcement affirms my belief that Africa's three great endowments, its land, its resources and its capable people, will help realise the continent's full potential.

Mixed in with the joy, though, is a sense of fear and dread. I'm fearful because I know, and have seen, what tends to happen to countries, especially African countries, that discover mineral resources. The lengths to which global powers and large mining conglomerates will go to control those resources are now well documented, and we know how things usually play out when a country holds what they need. The DRC is probably the best-known African example: a country so rich in resources, trapped in a vicious cycle of sponsored violence and corruption, while its minerals keep coming out of the ground and finding their way into the phones, laptops and cars the whole world celebrates.

Africa is the world's greatest treasure

The size of it is easy to miss, because we usually look at African countries one at a time. South Africa holds most of the world's platinum. The DRC holds half of its cobalt. Morocco sits on about 70% of the world's phosphate rock, and Guinea on its largest bauxite deposits. Those facts are fairly well known. What struck me, when I combined the reserves of Africa's countries and looked at the continent's position as a whole, was how much of the world's mineral wealth sits in African ground.

Choose a country to see what is in its ground. If the map does not load, open it in its own page.

Mineral	World reserves	Africa's reserves	Africa's share of world reserves	Africa's share of identified resources	Africa's combined rank	Leading African country
Platinum-group metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium and three others)¹	more than 76,000 tonnes	64,300 tonnes	up to 84.6%	about 73%	1st	South Africa
Phosphate rock	72 billion tonnes	58.1 billion tonnes	80.7%	about 60%	1st	Morocco
Cobalt	12 million tonnes	6.1 million tonnes	50.8%	about 51%	1st	DRC
Diamonds²	1,700 million carats	about 703 million carats	about 41%	–	2nd	Botswana
Chromium	540 million tonnes	188 million tonnes	34.8%	most, with Kazakhstan⁸	1st	South Africa
Manganese	1.8 billion tonnes	624 million tonnes	34.7%	about 66%	1st	South Africa
Bauxite (aluminium ore)	29 billion tonnes	7.4 billion tonnes	25.5%	about 56%	1st	Guinea
Natural graphite	310 million tonnes	70 million tonnes, plus about 20 million tonnes measured in Malawi⁹	22.6%	about 57%	3rd	Madagascar
Uranium³	5.93 million tonnes	1.30 million tonnes	not reported as reserves	21.9%	2nd	Namibia
Rutile (titanium)	more than 49 million tonnes	about 9.8 million tonnes, plus about 20 million tonnes measured in Malawi⁹	up to 20%; about 28% including Malawi's declared reserve⁹	about 68%, all heavy mineral sands together	2nd	South Africa; Malawi if its deposit is counted
Zircon	more than 70 million tonnes	about 12.4 million tonnes	up to 17.7%	about 68%, all heavy mineral sands together	2nd	South Africa
Fluorspar	330 million tonnes	41 million tonnes	12.4%	–	3rd	South Africa
Ilmenite (titanium)⁴	about 494 million tonnes	at least 58 million tonnes, plus about 41 million tonnes of ilmenite in Mozambique⁹	at least 11.7%	about 68%, all heavy mineral sands together	3rd–4th	Madagascar, South Africa
Copper	980 million tonnes	101 million tonnes	10.3%	about 8%	2nd	DRC
Gold	66,000 tonnes	6,000 tonnes	9.1%	about 18%	3rd	South Africa, Ghana
Iron ore	200 billion tonnes	11.2 billion tonnes, plus more than 3 billion tonnes in Guinea⁹	5.6%	about 16%	5th	Mauritania
Vanadium	21 million tonnes	520,000 tonnes	2.5%	–	4th	South Africa
Lithium	37 million tonnes	870,000 tonnes, plus about 6 million tonnes measured in the DRC⁹	2.4%	about 4%	7th	Zimbabwe
Rare earths	more than 75 million tonnes	1.75 million tonnes, plus about 5.6 million tonnes measured in Malawi⁹	up to 2.3%	about 9%	7th	Tanzania
Tin	more than 6 million tonnes	91,000 tonnes	up to 1.5%	about 7%	9th	DRC
Vermiculite⁵	not published	14 million tonnes	about 30% of listed reserves	–	–	South Africa
Tantalum⁶	not published	not published	–	about 75%, on one estimate⁶	–	DRC
Niobium	more than 21 million tonnes	not published	–	–	–	DRC
Nickel⁷	140 million tonnes	not separated out; about 1.7 million tonnes measured at one deposit in Tanzania⁹	–	about 10%	–	South Africa
Zinc⁷	190 million tonnes	not separated out (about 8.9 million tonnes on a World Bank estimate, or 5–7%)	–	about 6%	–	South Africa

Sources: US Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 (2025 edition for vermiculite's national reserves); OECD-NEA/IAEA Red Book 2024 for uranium; World Bank, Mineral Resources of Africa (Guj, Schodde, Bocoum and Cust, 2025) for the identified-resources column, except uranium, chromium and tantalum; Melcher and others, SGA News (2008), for tantalum resources; Johnson Matthey PGM Market Report (2026). Africa's figures count only the countries named individually in those sources, so they are minimums. "Up to" means the world total is published as a minimum.

Notes. 1. Reserves are published only as one combined figure for all six platinum-group metals, so there is no separate number for platinum, palladium or rhodium. South Africa alone holds about 63,000 tonnes. It also supplies about 81% of the world's rhodium. 2. One reserve figure covers gem and industrial diamonds together. Africa's five listed countries (Botswana, Angola, DRC, South Africa and Zimbabwe) are second only to Russia. 3. Uranium is reported internationally as identified resources, not reserves, so its world and Africa figures are on that basis. 4. Mozambique, the world's second-largest ilmenite producer, and Senegal have no reserve figure recorded, so Africa's real share is well above this. 5. No world total is published. South Africa is the world's largest vermiculite producer, with about 35% of output. 6. No world total is published, and every African producer's reserves are recorded as "not available". A 2008 estimate by a team of geologists put Africa at about three-quarters of the world's tantalum resources. The USGS says most identified resources are in Australia, Brazil, Canada and China. See below. 7. African nickel and zinc reserves are pooled inside an "other countries" line, together with countries such as Cuba, Colombia and Guatemala. 8. A reserve is the part of a deposit that has been drilled, studied and shown to be mineable at a profit today. An identified resource is the broader measure of what is known to be in the ground, whether or not it pays to mine it yet. Resource shares are shown only where a sourced figure exists. For chromium, about 95% of the world's resources are in southern Africa and Kazakhstan, and no split is published. 9. The official tables list only countries that are already mining a mineral, so large deposits that have been drilled and measured but are not yet in production are left out. The "plus" figures are the companies' own published estimates and are not included in Africa's share or rank. Most are resources, not reserves. Malawi's rutile deposit is described by its owner as the largest known in the world. The one exception is the second rutile percentage: the Malawi deposit has a declared ore reserve of about 5.1 million tonnes of rutile, and adding that to both Africa's total and the world's gives about 28%. Africa would still rank second, behind Australia. Sources: Sovereign Metals (March 2026), AVZ Minerals (January 2024), Lindian Resources (2024), Rio Tinto and Winning Consortium Simandou, Kenmare Resources (December 2025), Lifezone Metals (December 2024).

For most of the minerals at the top of that table, Africa's combined reserves are larger than those of any other country. Some of them, like platinum, cobalt, manganese and graphite, are exactly what the world needs for batteries, clean energy and modern industry. Phosphate is the raw material of fertiliser, and so of the world's food.

Minerals are only part of what the continent was given. Add energy and land, and the picture fills out.

Resource	Africa's position	Leading African countries
Crude oil (proven reserves)	about 119 billion barrels, 7.6% of the world total; 6th when combined	Libya, Nigeria, Algeria
Natural gas (proven reserves)	about 18 trillion cubic metres, 8.2% of the world total; 4th when combined	Nigeria, Algeria, Mozambique
Coal (proven reserves)	a little over 1% of the world total	South Africa
Uranium (identified resources)	about 22% of the world total; 2nd when combined	Namibia, Niger, South Africa
Solar	about 60% of the world's best solar sites, and under 1% of its installed solar capacity	across the continent
Hydropower	more than 600 gigawatts of potential, of which only about 11% has been developed	DRC, Ethiopia, Zambia, Mozambique
Fresh water	about 9% of the world's renewable fresh water, and about a quarter of its unfrozen surface fresh water, held in the Great Lakes	DRC, the Great Lakes countries
Forest	about 16% of the world's forest, including the second-largest rainforest on earth	DRC, Gabon, Republic of Congo
Farmland	about half of the world's remaining uncultivated land that is suitable for crops	Sudan, DRC, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, Angola

Sources: OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2026 (oil and gas, end-2025; national figures are self-reported); Energy Institute and EIA (coal); OECD-NEA/IAEA Red Book 2024 (uranium); IEA and IRENA 2026 (solar); International Hydropower Association, World Hydropower Outlook 2025; FAO AQUASTAT and Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025; World Bank (Deininger and others, 2011) for farmland.

Oil and gas are worth a second look, because they tell a different story from the minerals. Africa holds 85% of the world's platinum, but less than 8% of its oil. And yet oil is the African resource the world knows best, and the one that has shaped the fate of whole countries. Nigeria alone holds about 37 billion barrels, the second-largest oil reserves on the continent after Libya, and the largest gas reserves in Africa. I'll come back to Nigeria.

What interests me almost as much is a pattern that runs right through that table. Again and again, African countries that are already producing a mineral, or where a significant deposit has been found, are not properly quoted, counted or accounted for. Mozambique is the world's second-largest producer of ilmenite, and its reserves are recorded as "not available". Malawi's rutile, the largest known deposit in the world, isn't in the official count at all. Africa's nickel and zinc aren't shown separately. They are folded into a line called "other countries". And then there is tantalum.

Tantalum is the metal inside the tiny capacitors in almost every phone, laptop and car. Africa mines at least two-thirds of the world's supply, mostly in the DRC and Rwanda, and closer to 85% once Nigeria and the smaller producers are counted. Yet in the world's standard reference on mineral reserves, the entry for every African tantalum producer reads "not available", and there is no world total at all. Reserves are listed for China, Australia, Brazil and Russia, which between them mine about 14% of it. One team of geologists has estimated that Africa holds about three-quarters of the world's tantalum. The official reference says most of the world's identified tantalum is in Australia, Brazil, Canada and China, which is another way of saying that Africa's has never been measured. On paper, most of the world's tantalum comes from nowhere. It turns up in the phone in your hand without ever having officially existed in the ground.

This is what I meant earlier about the DRC: a country trapped in violence while its minerals keep turning up in the world's most celebrated technologies. Tantalum is that story in a single metal.

Africa mines about 85% of the world's tantalum. Officially, none of it is in the ground. Source for the figures: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026.

There's no mystery about why. Much of it is dug by hand by artisanal miners, in a region where armed groups tax the trade and where the ore crosses a border before anyone counts it. Nobody has drilled it, measured it and written it into a reserve statement, because nobody who profits from it has needed to. It is the clearest picture I know of how the continent's wealth can be used by the whole world and still not be on the books.

And then there's the much-quoted issue of African countries exporting rock and not participating in basic beneficiation. Africa mines three-quarters of the world's cobalt and refines less than 2% of it. It mines a third of the world's bauxite and produces about 0.2% of the world's alumina, the next step towards aluminium. Tonne for tonne, aluminium tends to sell for thirty to fifty times the price of bauxite. Even allowing for the four or five tonnes of bauxite it takes to make one tonne of aluminium, the metal is worth several times the ore that went into it. Most of what comes out of those reserves leaves the continent at its cheapest point.

So the joy is justified. The fear is too. Are countries going to do the right thing with their new discoveries? Will they structure it properly, or sign it away in a hurry? Will they let foreign interests walk in and take it over, the way it has happened so many times before?

Two recent cases suggest that African countries are still falling into the same trap.

Nigeria has just opened the door

In September, Nigeria signed a framework for American investment in Nigerian mineral resources. The government puts their value at an estimated $700 billion. The framework covers geological data and exploration, mineral development and processing, infrastructure and technical capacity, and the reports mention lithium, gold, tin, iron ore, phosphate and gemstones.

Nigeria's Minister of Solid Minerals Development, who signed the agreement, said all the right things. "Nigeria cannot remain a source of raw materials while others capture most of the value," he said, and he spoke about local processing, skills and jobs.

What I don't understand is why a minister would be signing framework agreements before his ministry and the executive have set out, in public, the rules of the game. Those rules are the foundation that would make sure Nigeria and Nigerians benefit from the enormous opportunity a $700 billion industry could create. Surely you settle that first, before you start setting up frameworks with third parties. And this third party isn't even a company. It's a country. It's not just any country. It's the US, which is not a leading light when it comes to such matters.

Then there's this funny sequence of events. Late last year the US starts talking about violence against Christians in Nigeria. Suddenly Nigeria is in a security partnership with the US. The next thing you know, a mining framework rolls out. All of it in the space of less than a year. Coincidences like these, this close together, raise eyebrows, because we know what the US is about, and its playbook is no secret.

The DRC shows how these deals get written

In December 2025, at a time when M23 rebels were advancing, the DRC and the United States entered into a Strategic Partnership Agreement. Broadly, the DRC offered access to its minerals in exchange for help with security.

The text of the agreement is public, and it is worth reading. The DRC commits to set aside a Strategic Asset Reserve of critical-mineral assets, gold assets and unlicensed exploration areas, and to give American companies the right of first offer on those projects, ahead of everyone else. It commits to give American buyers first offer on the minerals exported from them, on terms that guarantee they go to the US market. It commits to change its tax law within twelve months, and to undertake "any legislative and constitutional reforms" needed to bring its legal framework into line with the agreement, including a renewable guarantee of tax stability for an initial ten years. A joint steering committee of five American and five DRC officials oversees it and decides by consensus, so decisions under the agreement need American consent. And if either side wants out, termination only takes effect five years after notice is given.

In exchange, the language changes. The United States "intends to" provide technical assistance. It "intends to" facilitate internships and job-shadowing with American mining companies. It "intends to" mobilise financing. It "shall consider the feasibility of" supporting projects. Security, the thing the DRC needed most, appears only as an aim to "strengthen opportunities for cooperation".

Put plainly, the US and its companies get everything that can be measured: first pick of the sites, first call on the minerals, the tax terms, a seat at the table and a deadline for the law to change. The DRC gets a statement of intent. Nothing on its side of the agreement can be measured, enforced or banked.

That this should happen to the DRC, arguably the richest country on earth, is the part I find hardest to accept. Its wealth is far more than its minerals. It has the Congo River, which could drive the largest hydropower site in the world. It has most of the second-largest rainforest on the planet, and vast stretches of farmland. And it has fallen prey, once again, to the machinations of the United States.

These recent developments in Nigeria and the DRC make the same point. African countries are still falling into this trap. Their leaders are entering these agreements and giving away far more than they get. They are not taking the time, first, to define the local frameworks, the rules and the way things should work, so that the maximum benefit accrues to the country. Only then should they start thinking about what must go out and which third parties must benefit.

There is a way to think about this

Seeing how many African countries are still falling into this trap, I'd like to put forward a framework for how a country can use its mineral wealth, and its other resources, in a way that maximises the benefit to its own economy and its people.

It isn't rocket science. Much of it seems intuitive. And yet, for some reason, we keep seeing countries do the opposite, and people allowing their leaders to get away with poor decisions and the consequences that follow.

The framework starts with understanding the role a mining industry can play in an economy. I think of an economy in three layers, an idea the economists Allan Fisher and Colin Clark introduced in the 1930s and 40s. The primary sectors, such as mining and agriculture, take what the land provides. The secondary sectors, mostly manufacturing, make things from it. The tertiary sectors are the services. A country can build its economy with the primary sectors as the foundation and the other two on top.

A mining industry builds a value chain around itself. By a value chain I mean every step a mineral passes through, from the suppliers who serve the mine to the industries that use what it produces. At its most basic, mining is digging things out of the ground. But a mine needs equipment, explosives, fuel, power, engineers, transport and finance. Each of those needs can become a business, and enough of those businesses become a sector in their own right.

The same thing then happens again at the next level. What the mine digs up has to be processed, and a processing plant needs its own power, transport, engineers and funders. What the plant produces can go into manufacturing, and a factory needs all of those again, along with people to market and sell what it makes. Even inside mining itself, some of the equipment and supplies the mines buy can be manufactured close by. Every level needs finance, skills and services of its own, so every level draws more industries in around it. That is how a primary sector spins off secondary and tertiary ones. Mining builds from the ground up, and it compounds on itself at every level.

Every level draws new industries in around it.

That is what the title of this piece means. The ground is mining, the primary sector. The building is the secondary and tertiary sectors that go up on top of it.

None of that happens by itself, and this is where the benefit to a country and its people is won or lost. A mine on its own directly touches fewer people than most of us assume. There is a limit to how many it can employ, and even when you count its direct suppliers, there is a limit to how many people that one part of the value chain can include. The sectors that grow up around it change that. They create more jobs, and they reach far more people in other ways too, because local businesses, small and medium-sized, universities, technical colleges and other parts of the economy can all be drawn into the value chain. The framework looks across the whole value chain, and at the industries next to it, and asks who can be brought in, what can be scaled up and what can be supported. I see four parts to it.

Local participation. A large mine, and the big companies around it, spend heavily every year on fuel, engineering, maintenance, catering and transport. That spending is the quickest route from a mine into the local economy. The state's job is to find the opportunities local businesses can take up and ring-fence them, to set targets for local supply, measure them and publish the results, and to help local firms finance their way into the work. Namibia's Chamber of Mines publishes how much its members buy from local suppliers, 65% of their procurement spending last year. A green-iron pilot at Oshivela, in the same country, already draws on more than 60 local small businesses.

Skills. The mine will never employ everyone, but every job in it is a way in, and the sectors that grow up around it need far more people. So a country has to work out early what skills those opportunities will call for, and train people before they are needed. A mine that will need plant managers in 2032 needs them in lecture halls now. The established companies should carry part of the cost: bursaries and scholarships paid for by the mining companies, their contractors and their suppliers, and university places, technical colleges and apprenticeships funded as a condition of operating. Local people are employed, trained on the job and developed into supervisors, engineers, managers and eventually owners.

Keep that up for twenty or thirty years and you get generations of people who understand the sector from the inside: the geology, the metallurgy, the contracts, the economics. They can own it, run it and sit across the table from anyone as an equal. The geology matters most. A country whose own people understand what is in its ground knows what it has before it sits down to negotiate. They won't all stay in mining, and that's the point. What someone learns running a processing plant turns up later in food manufacturing, water, energy, finance or a business of their own. Norway made the transfer of know-how a condition of its oil licences. Of the three endowments, land and resources can only be sold once. People compound.

Research and development. By this I mean pushing the frontier: finding better ways to mine, to process and to make things, and coming up with methods nobody had before. It usually starts with a need. A problem in the mine or the plant has no answer yet, so someone has to find one. A country that backs that work, through its universities, its state institutions and the companies themselves, gets better at what it does, and it ends up with knowledge and skills the rest of the world wants to buy. Universities do best when they attach themselves to operating mines rather than to ministries. Chile spent decades pairing its copper mines with local suppliers and universities to solve the mines' real engineering problems, and now exports mining services to the world.

Shared infrastructure. A mine needs power, rail, roads, water and a port. Those can be built as a private channel for one company, or as shared infrastructure that farms, factories and towns along the route can use too. A railway that only carries one mine's ore to the coast leaves nothing behind when the ore runs out. Built to be shared, the same line serves every industry that grows up around the mine.

These four parts don't stop at the mine. Minerals are made into things, and those things go into products, so a processing plant appears, and then a factory. At each one the same questions apply. How do local businesses take part in supplying it? Where will its skills come from? How does it push its own methods forward? Is its infrastructure shared? Apply the framework at every level and the effect compounds. More people and more businesses are included, and more of the value that is created stays in the country.

Applying the framework also means being honest about what the country can do now and what it can't. Some skills, technologies and equipment will have to be brought in from outside at first. That should be acknowledged quickly, and it should never be used as a reason to hold things up. What matters is that there are clear rules for how they are brought in, that whoever provides them earns a fair return, and that the country builds its own capability over time. Geological surveys are a good example. Much of the technology for surveying and studying a deposit has to be brought in, and it matters a great deal who ends up owning the results.

Three more things sit around the framework and can make or break it: funding, tax and ownership.

The framework in one picture: four parts, applied at every level, with funding, tax and ownership around them.

Funding. None of this gets built without money. Investors everywhere ask the same questions. Is the country attractive? Are its mining laws fair? Can I bring my money in, and can I take it out again? Much of the money will come from outside, but I think a portion should be local. Local funders who put money in are taking part, and they share in the upside when it comes. The risk is real, though. Local markets can't carry much of it, and if a project goes wrong, local people lose their money. So the questions are how much should be local, and how that exposure can be limited. The local funder can be the government, as long as it takes part safely and smartly and doesn't take on a burden.

Tax. Tax is part of what investors weigh up, and I think governments can think about it differently. A government collects tax and then decides how to spend it, through budgets that ministries fight over and that don't always deliver. A mining company that is already buying locally, training people and supporting research is delivering some of that benefit directly, and usually faster. If it can prove it has done those things to a standard the government sets, its tax burden should be eased. That reward has to be measured carefully, because companies are good at building structures that look like compliance. Fronting, and other smoke and mirrors, can win a licence while business carries on as before.

Ownership. State ownership is a double-edged sword, especially with minerals. When prices are high there are windfalls, and the government shares in them. When prices fall, which no country controls, the government is a shareholder that has to put money in, and it often has to borrow to do it. Before long that becomes a serious problem, as many state-owned mines have found. So I don't see ownership as the main way a country gets the benefit. That comes from the four parts above. A shareholding is mostly a way to keep oversight of what a mine is doing, and the question is how much is enough for that without becoming a burden. The exception is a mineral where the country holds such a large share of the world's deposits that it can influence the market. There, a bigger stake makes sense. Either way, ownership rules should not become a wall that keeps investment out and costs jobs. Some countries have made state ownership work. Many have not, around the world and not only in Africa. It has to be thought through carefully.

For every part of the framework I'd apply two tests. Does it advance development and competitiveness at the same time? And will it outlast one commodity cycle, one election and one minister?

When leaders move the other way, something is wrong

What I find most useful about a framework like this is that it gives you something to hold a deal up against.

None of what I've described is radical. It's roughly what the countries that did well actually did. So when African leaders, and the people around them who are in a position to decide, sign agreements that move in the opposite direction, I've stopped treating it as a difference of opinion. It's a sign that something is wrong, whether that's pressure, desperation, a private interest or simply a lack of preparation.

The warning signs are easy enough to check:

• The terms aren't published.
• Minerals and security arrive in the same envelope.
• A foreign country gets first pick, ahead of the country's own investors.
• Tax and legal terms are frozen for a decade or more in the investor's favour.
• The investor, rather than the state, ends up holding the best geological data.
• Processing and local suppliers feature in the speeches but not as binding obligations.

The DRC agreement shows most of these. On what's been reported so far, Nigeria's framework may show some of them. The text hasn't been published, so we can't yet tell, and that is itself the first sign.

When a country moves that way, I think the outcome is fairly predictable. The potential won't be realised. The minerals will leave, some money will come in for a while, and thirty years from now we'll be having the same conversation about Nigeria's lithium that we've been having about Nigeria's oil.

It starts with more of us knowing

For decades, if not longer, this continent's mineral wealth has simply been extracted, in ways that have not benefited its people. The poverty is still there. So are the anomalies, like tantalum: it is in the gadgets we all carry, and there is no official record of how much of it is in the ground. We all see it, and we bury our heads in the sand. There is no doubt that a different approach has to be taken.

This has turned out to be a long piece. If you have read this far, I hope the framework has shed some light on something that seems obvious once it is said. There is a different way, and it is open to any government that is serious about the job it was elected to do.

I don't want to downplay how hard that path is. Global powers have no qualms about using military force and destabilisation to remove leaders who refuse to maintain the status quo and give them the access they want. That is another badly kept secret. Choosing this path is difficult and it can be dangerous. We know of leaders who lost their lives trying to put some of these principles into practice.

That is why I want to write a follow-up on the Sahel. Countries there have tried to take control of their mining sectors and have started to push out France, the country that has benefited a great deal from the region. Since then things in France seem to have taken a turn for the worse, with a lot of unrest. Many commentators who are partial towards Africa say that one caused the other. I'd like to find out whether that is true, and whether the cause can actually be shown.

In the end, I believe this comes down to more people knowing. It is about more African citizens knowing better, asking better of their leaders, demanding better, and refusing to accept the signs that a choice is not being made in their interest. If even a small community of Africans understands this, and can look at a deal and say quickly what is wrong with it and why, then this article will have done what I hoped. That, I hope, is where change starts.

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Research and tools

Research: Kimi Deep Research, Claude (Anthropic).

Sources: US Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026; World Bank, Mineral Resources of Africa (2025); OECD-NEA/IAEA Red Book 2024; OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin 2026.

Writing: Claude (Anthropic).

Images: Nano Banana Pro, GPT Image 2, n8n.

Interactive map: Claude Code, Netlify.

Video: HeyGen, fal.ai, ElevenLabs, Suno.

A note on scope: this piece criticises the structure of agreements and the systems that produce them. It is not a judgement on the people of any country, or on every individual involved.