The main pitch of the recently concluded 2026 Mining Indaba in Cape Town, drawing over 11,000 delegates from over 100 countries, bears a sober reality for Africa. Beneath the conference theme, “Stronger Together: Progress through Partnerships,” lies an increasingly zero-sum contest for resource control. The December 2025 U.S.-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement, now colloquially termed the “Washington Accord,” exemplifies this shift. In granting the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium preferential access to copper, cobalt, and lithium, Kinshasa has formalized what was once implicit: Africa’s $29.5 trillion mineral endowment is now an active battleground for hegemonic positioning.

This is not resource diplomacy as practiced in the late 20th century, where multilateral development institutions brokered predictable extraction contracts. Rather, it reflects the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy‘s explicit reordering of priorities, a document that demotes “aid-to-investment” rhetoric in favor of sector-driven interventions designed to counter Chinese dominance in critical supply chains. The strategic pivot is unambiguous: African minerals are now viewed through the lens of great-power competition, not development partnership. Glencore’s planned asset divestment to Orion underscores this recalibration: Western capital is consolidating around supply-chain securitization.

Yet the dominant narrative: that Africa must simply choose between competing patrons, misreads both the structural opportunity and the continent’s latent leverage. The salient question is not who extracts Africa’s minerals, but how their development can be rewired to serve African industrial demand rather than remain tethered to export cycles dictated by Shanghai, Brussels, or Washington. This requires a fundamental shift from extraction-led growth toward what might be termed mineral statecraft: the deliberate use of resource endowments to anchor integrated industrial systems, force local value-addition, and reconfigure power asymmetries within global supply chains.

Infrastructure As A Silverbullet

Africa’s constraint is not endowment but conversion. The continent holds $8.6 trillion in undeveloped mineral assets, roughly 2.5 times its annual GDP, but this figure dramatically understates potential value. Bauxite, for instance, appreciates tenfold when processed into alumina and sixtyfold into aluminum. Manganese ore commands eight to nine times higher prices when converted into ferro- or silicomanganese alloys. The arithmetic is unequivocal: value creation accelerates sharply beyond the pithead, yet Africa remains locked into a perverse equilibrium, exporting raw materials while importing finished products, effectively paying twice for logistics.

Across the continent, the three anchors of mineral project viability: resource endowment, enabling infrastructure (particularly power and transport), and demand, rarely co-locate. South Africa’s long-steel capacity, for example, has been constrained not solely by elevated power costs but by fragmented domestic demand. Meanwhile, infrastructure pipelines across the continent require precisely these products, yet procurement remains dispersed across borders, preventing aggregation at scale. The result: underutilized capacity in some markets, continued reliance on imports in others, and foregone scale efficiencies across the regional system.

The Lobito Corridor represents a counternarrative. By linking Zambia’s Copperbelt and the DRC’s cobalt reserves to Angola’s Atlantic coastline, the corridor does more than reduce transit times, it creates the physical infrastructure necessary for regional beneficiation platforms. Power, rail, and processing must be understood not as discrete projects but as an integrated ecosystem. Without reliable baseload electricity, smelters cannot operate. Without rail connectivity, concentrates cannot reach refineries at competitive costs. Without ports configured for both import of inputs and export of finished goods, value chains remain truncated.
Ghana’s 2025 establishment of GoldBod, the sole buyer and assayer of domestically produced gold, illustrates how institutional architecture can complement physical infrastructure. By formalizing artisanal production and channeling output into national reserves, Accra achieved multiple objectives simultaneously: reserve accumulation (now the largest in sub-Saharan Africa), currency appreciation (41% in 2025, the strongest global performance), and economic formalization. This is mineral statecraft; using resource control not merely for fiscal extraction but for macroeconomic stabilization and structural transformation.

Strategic Asset Reserves and the Lobito Principle

The Washington Accord’s preferential access clause reveals a critical asymmetry: while global powers negotiate offtake agreements, African states negotiate extraction permits. This must be inverted. Strategic Asset Reserves: wherein African governments retain equity stakes in processing facilities, not just mining operations, would shift leverage from pit-to-port logistics toward value-chain participation. Morocco’s recovery of fluorine from phosphate rock at Jorf Lasfar demonstrates this principle: by treating by-products as strategic inputs for downstream fluorochemicals rather than waste streams, Rabat captures value that would otherwise accrue offshore.

The Lobito Corridor must evolve from a transport artery into a value-addition mandate. If Zambian copper and DRC cobalt are to transit Angola, then processing capacity, smelting, refining, cathode production, must be incentivized within the corridor itself. This requires more than tariff waivers; it demands coordinated industrial policy across three sovereign jurisdictions. The model exists: China’s Deng Xiaoping-era port decentralization reforms and Nigeria’s ongoing electricity sector restructuring both demonstrate how infrastructure can be strategically decentralized while maintaining federal oversight.

Africa’s $2 trillion in iron ore at mine-gate value, for instance, translates into $25.4 trillion in steel value. Yet the continent imports primary steel while exporting ore. The strategic imperative is clear: link steelmaking explicitly to Africa’s infrastructure trajectory. With the continent set to account for a rising share of global urbanization and infrastructure demand, steel is not a sectoral ambition but a system requirement for restoring demand, scale, and commercial viability across multiple mineral value chains, including ferro-alloys like manganese, chromium, and vanadium, whose markets have become perversely tied to Asian production cycles rather than African development needs.

Redefining the New Scramble

The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy‘s designation of African minerals as a “battleground for resource competition” need not be passively accepted. What distinguishes the current moment from the 19th-century Scramble is African agency, imperfect, fragmented, but increasingly consequential. The Orion Consortium’s acquisition of Glencore assets, while framed as a U.S. strategic win, also reflects Kinshasa’s recognition that access can be transactional. The DRC did not grant carte blanche; it negotiated a strategic partnership, language that implies reciprocity, not subordination.

This transactional logic must be systematized. African states possess leverage precisely because supply-chain concentration has become a strategic liability for Western and Asian powers alike. China controls 90% of manganese refining and rare earth separation; similar concentration risks afflict chromium, graphite, and tungsten, all critical for aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing. Africa’s role, therefore, is not to replicate concentration but to position itself as a credible alternative at strategically exposed segments of global supply chains.

The first rare earth refinery planned for Angola, Mozambique’s emergence as a supplier outside China’s graphite monopoly, and battery-grade manganese sulphate projects in South Africa and Botswana signal this repositioning. But isolated projects do not constitute industrial strategy. What is required is infrastructure-backed, regionally integrated, and policy-aligned platforms: zones where power, transport, and demand converge to support not just extraction but transformation.

The forward-looking imperative is straightforward: Africa must use its $8.6 trillion in undeveloped assets as strategic leverage to force infrastructure co-investment, demand local processing, and anchor regional value chains. The New Scramble, if African states choose to redefine it, becomes less a contest over who extracts and more a negotiation over who processes, where, and on what terms. That recalibration, from pithead to processing hub, from royalty recipient to equity stakeholder, from extraction to integration, is the essence of mineral statecraft. And it remains, for now, the continent’s unrealized competitive advantage.