WWO Editorial
The green energy transition requires minerals. Electric vehicle batteries require lithium, cobalt, and manganese. Solar panels require silicon and silver. Wind turbines require rare earth elements. The digital infrastructure underlying the modern economy requires copper at scales that existing mines are already struggling to supply. And the majority of the world’s accessible deposits of these critical minerals are located in Africa.
The Democratic Republic of Congo holds approximately 70% of the world’s cobalt reserves. The DRC, Zimbabwe, and Zambia together contain a dominant share of global lithium. South Africa holds the world’s largest platinum group metal deposits. Guinea has the world’s largest bauxite reserves. The list continues.
The geopolitical implication is that the green energy transition — the process by which wealthy countries decarbonise their economies — requires African minerals on a scale that is generating a new wave of external interest in African resource extraction. Chinese state companies have been acquiring mineral rights and building processing capacity in the DRC, Zambia, and Zimbabwe for over a decade. American, European, and Australian mining companies are accelerating operations. The G7 has launched a critical minerals partnership explicitly designed to reduce Chinese dominance of supply chains.
What is largely missing from this conversation is the African perspective on how this extraction should be governed, what domestic value addition should be required as a condition of access, and what environmental and community standards should apply.
The first Scramble for Africa produced colonial extraction that enriched European economies and structurally underdeveloped African ones for generations. The second scramble — dressed in the language of sustainability and clean energy — has the potential to replicate that pattern with solar panels instead of cotton. Whether it does depends on whether African governments, individually and collectively, have the capacity and political will to set different terms.
— Worldwide Observer Geopolitics Desk
