Africa Digs the Cobalt While China Keeps the Profit

Somewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a young man is digging cobalt with a shovel and his bare hands. The DRC produces roughly seven of every ten kilograms of the world's cobalt. Every electric car battery that glides past you carries a piece of that soil. And yet he will earn a few dollars a day, while the ore is shipped, refined and sold by companies whose names he will never learn. That is not a supply chain. That is a sentence passed on a continent, and we have been serving it for over a century.

Ask your grandparents about rubber, ivory and groundnuts. Ask them who set the price, who owned the ships and who kept the account. The pattern never changed; only the flags did. Today the Africa Center for Strategic Studies is preparing to launch a report on 27 October asking whether African governments can finally use their mineral wealth, their young and expanding workforce and their integrated market to strike better deals with outside partners. It is the right question. But a question is not a plan, and we have run out of time for questions.

Consider the numbers that matter. Africa holds dominant or major shares of global reserves of cobalt, manganese, chromium and platinum-group metals, and significant lithium deposits in Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mali and Nigeria. Yet China controls the bulk of the refining that turns these raw materials into battery-grade chemicals, with estimates often placing its share of global cobalt refining around three-quarters. Chinese firms, including CMOC, already run some of the largest industrial copper and cobalt operations in Katanga. The arithmetic is brutal. We dig the metal, they add the value, and the difference between those two steps is where a nation's future gets built or stolen.

Now look at the eastern DRC, where the story turns from economics into bloodshed. Since Rwanda's army, the Rwanda Defence Force, moved deep into Congolese territory alongside the M23 militia, Kigali has sought to pass off a war of aggression as a local rebellion. The UN Group of Experts has repeatedly documented RDF units operating inside Congo, M23 fighters taxing and moving minerals, and a parallel supply chain that carries tin, tantalum and tungsten, the same metals that end up in phones and chips worldwide. Rubaya, a coltan-rich site, fell under M23 control in 2024, and the minerals that flowed from it did not pay Congolese schools or hospitals. This is the Russia-Ukraine playbook transplanted to Central Africa: a regular army doing the fighting, a proxy force providing deniability, and a commodity trade laundering the proceeds. If the world called Moscow an invader in Donbas, it must call Kigali an invader in Kivu. Say it plainly, because the minerals in those hills are being mined with blood.

Who benefits, and who bleeds? The benefits flow to refiners in Asia, battery makers in Europe and North America, and the political elites who sign the licences without publishing them. The bleeding happens in Kolwezi, in Kivu, in the Sahel and in the mining towns of Zambia, where a debt crisis has shown what happens when loans are secured against future resources. Zambia's default and long restructuring after years of heavy external borrowing is the warning every African finance minister should keep on the desk. Angola's oil-backed loans taught the same lesson a decade earlier. The lenders were not villains in a cartoon. They were rational actors, and our leaders were the ones who signed away the collateral.

And the West must answer for itself. Europe and America now talk loudly about critical minerals, supply-chain security and the green transition. Those are legitimate concerns, but they arrive wrapped in the language of democracy. Washington and Brussels lecture us about rule of law while negotiating resource deals with military juntas in the Sahel and governments that suppress their own press. You cannot preach liberal values in Brussels and then sign a mineral contract in Conakry with a junta that jailed its critics. Either the values are universal, or they are a costume worn for the cameras. Africans can tell the difference, and so can history.

So what must change? Start with transparency, because sunlight is the first disinfectant. Every mining contract, licence and loan agreement should be published, read by parliaments and audited by independent institutions before a single tonne leaves the ground. Nations that have moved in this direction show the path is real. Second, export bans on raw minerals can work, but only when paired with genuine processing capacity, stable tax regimes and credible investors. Indonesia's nickel strategy and Zimbabwe's lithium plans prove the principle, but they also prove the risk: a ban designed to enrich cronies will simply create a new monopoly. Third, build sovereign wealth funds with legislative oversight, as Botswana did with its Pula Fund, so that resource rents become savings for the next generation rather than a feast for the current one. Botswana has managed diamonds through a partnership with De Beers while keeping its democratic institutions intact. That is what good governance looks like when it is taken seriously.

Strong institutions are the foundation of everything else. Independent courts must have the power to enforce contracts against foreign and domestic firms alike. Property rights must be real for the small miner and the local processor, not just the large concession holder. Mauritius shows what happens when a small island builds a predictable legal environment and attracts investment through trust rather than favours. Senegal's peaceful democratic transition in 2024 showed that African institutions can absorb shocks and hold the line when citizens insist. And the African Continental Free Trade Area offers the most powerful lever we have ever possessed: a single market of more than a billion people that can build regional battery and industrial chains, set common rules of origin and bargain as a bloc rather than as 54 desperate supplicants.

Rwanda's economic performance deserves credit for its efficiency and ambition, and we will not pretend otherwise. But no economic model excuses an army that occupies a neighbour and buries its own dead in secret. Growth built on invasion is not development. It is plunder with better marketing.

Here is what you can do, and what you must demand. Read the ACSS report when it launches on 27 October. Ask your member of parliament whether your country's mining contracts are published, and if they are not, ask why. Demand that the African Union and regional bodies such as ECOWAS and SADC hold member states to transparent resource governance and that the UN Security Council act on the documented evidence of Rwandan forces inside Congo. Demand that Western governments stop trading democracy for minerals. And demand, loudly and repeatedly, that the young man digging cobalt in Katanga receives a fair share of the wealth beneath his feet. Our minerals, our labour and our market are not bargaining chips to be auctioned to the highest foreign bidder. They are the foundation of our sovereignty. The only question left is whether our leaders will defend it, or whether we will.

Based on reporting by SAIIA