Mining in contemporary African underdevelopment

One of the defining characteristics of capitalism is its remarkable ability to emerge from every crisis even stronger.[1] History has shown time and again that war and militarisation serve capitalism’s interests. And even in the case of the climate crisis – for which capitalism bears the greatest responsibility – we are presented with an alleged ‘win–win’ solution. While multinational companies at least partly withdraw from coal mining (see Tsuji et al. 2026, in this issue), the massive rise in demand for metals and minerals that are needed for ‘clean energy’, digitalisation, consumer electronics, aerospace and militarisation has led to a renewed mining boom, notably of so-called critical raw materials (UNCTAD 2026). In a business-as-usual scenario, demand for these materials between 2024 and 2040 is projected to increase by 353% in the case of lithium, 131% for graphite, 69% for nickel and 49% for cobalt (UNCTAD 2026, 3).

Many of the deposits of these raw materials are located in the global South, with the African continent accounting for about 30% of the world’s critical minerals and metals : for example, 85% of global deposits of manganese (in South Africa and Gabon) and 21% of graphite reserves (in Mozambique, Madagascar and Tanzania). Guinea alone holds one-quarter of global bauxite reserves. South Africa is one of the world’s leading producers of chromium and platinum, while the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the second-largest producer of copper, with a 13% share of global supply in 2024 (after Chile with 24%). Around 70% of the global supply of cobalt is extracted in the DRC (Boafo et al. 2024 ; IEA 2025 ; Cobalt Institute 2026 ; US Geological Survey 2026).

Lithium has become the epitome of the metal needed for energy transition : it ‘embodies the fantasy of a “technological fix”, capable of turning the climate crisis into a political and economic opportunity for those in power’ (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2022, 803). Critical research, political debate and activism has focused on the catastrophic impacts of the expansion of mining in the ‘Lithium Triangle’ (Chile, Argentina and Bolivia) that holds the largest part of global lithium reserves (Ahmad 2020 ; Ciftci and Lemaire 2023 ; Mejia-Muñoz and Babidge 2023). Yet, less attention has been paid to Zimbabwe, for instance, which holds the world’s fifth- or sixth-largest lithium deposits, accounting for almost 10% of current global production (Manduna 2026b, 4 ; OECD 2026, 6) ; or to Mali, which has 700,000 tons of lithium reserves (Chandler 2022, 2). Possibly one of the largest undeveloped hard-rock lithium deposits lies in southern DRC : an exploration licence for the Manono Lithium Project was granted in 2023 to Manono Lithium SAS, a joint venture of Chinese company Zijin Mining and Congolese state-owned Société commerciale et Minière du Congo, whereby Zijin holds a 54.9% majority (Zijin n.d.).

Remarkably, Europe’s largest lithium deposits are located in Ukraine. Ukraine is estimated to hold around 5% of the world’s strategic raw material reserves, including reserves of lithium, graphite, titanium and rare earths. Half of these reserves are in territories currently under Russian control (Baranowski, Jabkowski and Kammen 2025 ; Crescenzi 2026). Multinational companies are interested in the other half : for example, Irish company TechMet Ltd, in a joint venture with Ronald Lauder (heir to Estée Lauder Companies and a personal friend of Donald Trump), was awarded the concession to exploit the Dobra lithium reserve deposit in Kirovohrad by the Ukrainian government in January 2026 (Barba 2025 ; Méheut 2026). Here, too, geopolitical competition for the decarbonisation markets turns out to be a driving force of the war.

‘Critical’ minerals, however, are critical first and foremost for the global North, not for local and national demand and supply on the African continent itself. Very few African countries process and use minerals and metals for low-carbon technologies. This is hardly surprising, given that African states have fewer industries and consequently contribute far less to global greenhouse gas emissions. The G20 states are responsible for almost 83% of global greenhouse gas emissions, notably the EU, the USA, China and India (or, based on per capita emissions, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Australia) (EDGAR 2025).

Resource nationalism on the rise ?
In many African countries, the commodity supercycle fuelled a further wave of large-scale mining, with unequivocal consequences (such as constraints to natural resource-based livelihoods and infrastructure, increasing wage disparities, rising living costs, and tensions within communities and between communities and mining companies : Bowman et al. 2021) that recall the boom-and-bust cycles so familiar to mining-dependent economies (Fraser and Larmer 2010). The recent global growth in natural resources extraction has reinforced old, colonially inherited patterns of extractivism across uneven development as a result of global capital accumulation (Greco 2020 ; Radley 2023a). Even so, or precisely because of this, in many African states the rise in demand for metals and minerals for decarbonisation, militarisation, digitalisation and other uses has been at the centre of political debates on whether mining can drive national development.

Although we know that ‘–win’ is a myth, decarbonisation may, according to some scholars, political elites and corporate actors, represent a ‘window of opportunity’ for some countries in the global South to benefit from ‘green’ value chains, drive forward industrialisation and increase economic sovereignty (see Alami, Taggart and Chodor 2025 ; Cerioli 2026). Whether this is the case in Africa, or applies primarily to middle-income countries, namely those in South-East Asia, remains to be seen. As Ben Radley (2026) has recently argued in a comparative study of cobalt nationalism and structural transformation in the DRC and Indonesia, in a reversal of former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere’s famous dictum that in Africa’s quest to industrialise, ‘we must run while others walk’, it is Asia that is running while Africa walks.

It also remains an open question whether delinking will be enabled if the economy is based on a sector whose demand and markets are controlled by the North. Delinking, a concept developed by Samir Amin, refers to ‘submitting the external relations to the logic of an internal development that is independent from them’ (Amin 1987, 442). If national sovereign projects are to become a reality this will require not only national but also regional industrial development that, if it relies on the extraction of raw materials, must process and use those materials locally. In Africa, attempts to establish resource nationalism policies have emerged in some countries, for example in Zambia, Zimbabwe and the Confederation of the Sahel States (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso) (Caramento, Saunders and Larmer 2023 ; Saunders, Mlambo and Ovadia 2023 ; Manduna 2026a ; Tull 2026). However, these attempts are ‘nowhere near as ambitious as those once attempted by African socialist governments’ (Greco 2020, 511). While Nyerere advocated leaving resources in the ground until the nation was in a position to exploit them for its own benefit (Greco 2020, 511), the current mining reforms being implemented by African governments essentially maintain the practice of resource exploitation by multinational companies. In Tanzania, Ghana and Guinea, mining permits are being revoked under a ‘performance first’ model if companies are not actively using them and do not fulfil their processing commitments and obligations to contribute to national development. Mali and Burkina Faso have increased the state’s ownership stake in industrial mines from 20% to 35% and from 10% to 15%, respectively – which is a significant step but still means that 65% or 85% stakes are held by multinational corporations (Engels 2021, 155).

While resource nationalism pushes the idea that resource extraction can deliver on development promises in Africa, Amin (1978), when discussing whether Marx’s ground rent theory applies to mining, had already warned that the narrow calculation of costs and benefits of extraction in the short term rules future generations out of the equation – reproducing the bourgeoisie’s dystopic ‘après-moi le déluge’ approach to the appropriation of social wealth :

The first of these [special features of mining] is the nonrenewability of the resources to be exploited. This feature imposes a specific cost of production that does not enter into rent, namely, the cost of replacement. … Mastery of social development by society itself implies a considerably longer time prospect than that of capitalist calculation, the rationality of which appears, in this respect, to be relative and short-term. (Amin 1978, 96)

Amin also reminds us that even the supposedly unlimited ‘free gifts of nature’ (Marx’s concept of Gratisnaturkraft : see Moore 2016 ; Battistoni 2025, Ch. 3), such as soil, wind, sun and water, are far from being inexhaustible (Amin 1978, 97). Capitalist accumulation is based on the appropriation and exploitation of nature, thereby abstracting from its physical and material qualities and limitations. This alienation from nature and the alienation of labour are two sides of the same coin (Foster 2018). Based on his understanding of the labour process as ‘a process between man and Nature’ (Marx 1894, 574), Marx concluded that ‘capitalist production [is] simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker’ (Marx 1976 [1867], 638). The capital–nature contradiction is thus part and parcel of the capital–labour contradiction. With the industrialisation of agriculture and increasing land concentration in nineteenth-century Europe, the peasant population was diminishing and industrial population in the cities increasing, with depletion and overuse of soil as one consequence. As early as in the late nineteenth century, Marx, referring to chemist Justus von Liebig, highlighted what we today refer to as ecological crisis. He described the separation of rural agricultural and urban industrial settings as ‘an irreparable break[2] in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life’ (Marx 1894, 531 ; see also Foster 1999 ; Saito 2020).

Capitalist accumulation and uneven development are based on colonial and imperial dispossessions, for whom the oppression, exploitation and destruction of female bodies are constitutive, as emphasised by decades of feminist social reproduction scholarship (Federici 2004 ; Mezzadri 2019 ; Ossome 2024). Building on this, and following Amin, Patrick Bond has argued that the supposed development effects of resource extraction – regardless of whether they are introduced by proponents of resource nationalism or by NGOs such as Publish What You Pay – rely on an ‘environmental and gender eraser’, as they account neither for the ecological costs, nor for the gendered unpaid labour of social reproduction that make the extraction of metals, minerals and fossil resources so profitable (Bond 2025, 103). Class is another key factor that is systematically erased. Neoliberal representations of environmental and climate crises pretend that humanity as a whole was responsible for and affected by the consequences of fossil economies – reproposing the idea that ‘we are all in this together’. In contrast, we emphasise the importance of a class analysis of the current crises and proposed ‘transitions’ to solve them (Greco 2022). Class relations structure all forms of domination – resource extraction, in Africa as globally, remains structurally rooted in the domination of the working poor. So far, questions of labour and class relations have been strikingly absent from debates on extractivism, resource nationalism and green industrialisation – though it is obvious that, as elsewhere, in rent economies based on resource extraction, value is actually produced by workers who extract metal and minerals from the ground.

Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo (wikicommons)
Sacrificed twice
While the debate on resource nationalism in Africa is ongoing, countries that more heavily depend on the mining sector have so far struggled to use it as a source of income to fund national economic and social development plans. Meanwhile, those same countries have borne the ecological and social impact of extractive enclaves which have few or no links with local suppliers, generate no intersectoral linkages at the national level, and often become territorial enclaves ruled by transnational companies (Bebbington et al. 2008 ; Bush 2008 ; Radley 2020). Increasingly, extractive areas are becoming sacrifice zones whose residents are considered by governments to be expendable. The concept of ‘green sacrifice zones’ – ‘the logic of sacrificing … places and populations that will be affected by the sourcing, transportation, installation, and operation of solutions for powering low-carbon transitions’ (Zografos and Robbins 2020, 543) – has been established to highlight the unequal distribution of costs and benefits of decarbonisation economies, within and outside mining countries.

The rural populations of Africa and elsewhere in the global South are thus being ‘sacrificed’ twice : they bear the consequences of the climate crisis, which stems largely from the industrial development and wealth of the global North and the ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen 2021) of the wealthy classes ; and they now bear the consequences of a pathway of decarbonisation that is based on technology and perfectly in line with capitalism, and which relies on the intensified extraction of raw materials from precisely these rural areas. If all humankind were to adopt the wasteful lifestyle of the wealthy classes of the global North, we would likely wipe ourselves out within a few generations by exceeding the planetary boundaries. Instead, the Global Justice Report (World Inequality Lab 2026) proposes striving for sufficiency : reducing high private consumption, getting rid of status symbols, and working half the current average number of hours. The key to this is a radical redistribution that begins by abolishing the billionaire class – the richest 0.001% – and instead ensuring a decent minimum income for all people globally. This is not a utopia, but rather quite feasible (World Inequality Lab 2026 ; see also Parsons and STWR 2026). However, redistribution alone does not create justice, neither globally nor within societies. It must go beyond what the Global Justice Report proposes and begin before and during the production process – ‘pre-distribution’, so to speak – with regard to ownership and control of the means of production, and the different valuation of productive and reproductive labour.

The UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur defines as sacrifice zones those localities where ‘communities are exposed to extreme levels of pollution and toxic contamination’ (UN HRC 2022, 1 ; see also UN HRC 2021). In these areas, extraction has been modifying local ecosystems and landscapes, leading to long-term environmental damage that creates toxic environments that are not fit to live in, violating the ‘human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment’ (UN HRC 2022, 1). Sacrifice zones are often militarised areas where people endure permanent social crisis. It is not by accident that these zones are located in historical sites of extraction in Africa. In the Zambian Copperbelt city of Kabwe, environmental lead exposure is so serious that 95% of children have elevated blood lead levels, which impairs their neurological development, leading to long-term cognitive deficits and, in the most severe cases, ‘blindness, paralysis and death’ (UN HRC 2022, 7). In the Niger Delta of Nigeria, oil pollution causes ‘abnormalities in blood, liver, kidney, respiratory and brain functions, as well as asthma attacks, headaches, diarrhoea, dizziness, abdominal pain and back pain’ (UN HRC 2022, 8), shortening the average life expectancy for local residents to 40 years, below the already low national average life expectancy of 55 years.

Green talk
While the impacts are essentially the same and well known (for example, dispossession and expulsion of local land users, health risks, soil contamination, water scarcity, increase in costs of living and poverty in mining areas), the current resource boom is characterised by the fact that, in addition to the well-established storyline that ‘mining creates economic growth, national development and jobs’, it is increasingly justified by a ‘green’ narrative : the prospect of green modernisation and mitigating climate change. Alternative strategies for tackling the climate crisis are thereby silenced and rendered invisible, while movements and activists mobilising against the disastrous effects of extractive industries are delegitimised as backward and standing in the way of decarbonisation, and are frequently suppressed and criminalised (World Social Forum 2023). In such ‘green extractivism’ (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2022 ; Riofrancos 2025), the extraction of raw materials becomes a means to an end, which is presented as a ‘win–win’ solution : ‘extraction and valorisation of mineral resources is rendered not only compatible with “sustainable development”, but necessary to it and the possibility of a “lowcarbon” future’ (Voskoboynik and Andreucci 2022, 803 ; emphasis in original).

Today, as in previous decades and centuries, the global South serves as a reservoir of cheap nature and cheap labour for the global North. Hickel et al. (2022 ; see also Hickel, Hanbury Lemos and Barbour 2024) have attempted to quantify this unequal exchange. Based on environmental input–output data and footprint analysis, they calculate that the total amount of resources (raw materials, land, energy and labour) appropriated by the North from the South between 1990 and 2015 was US$242 trillion (Hickel, Hanbury Lemos and Barbour 2024). Labour thereby plays a key role : the North appropriates roughly twice as much labour as it has available itself ; consequently, this labour is not available to contribute to production and social reproduction in the South. The North’s wealth is clearly based on the immense global wage gap : workers in the South contribute 90% to the global economy but receive only 21% of global income (Hickel et al. 2022). This applies equally to the extraction of resources in efforts to supposedly combat the climate crisis. The continuation of colonial relations of exploitation of labour and nature, and of dispossession for ‘renewable goals’, is therefore referred to as ‘green colonialism’ (Hamouchene and Sandwell 2023) and ‘green imperialism’ : the way in which companies and governments of the North control territories outside their national borders in order to profit from decarbonisation through the extraction of raw materials there (Radley 2023b, 324).

Green technological modernisation, the strategy of decarbonisation promoted by governments to fulfil their promises regarding their climate targets (a technocratic euphemism for their hypocritic response to the climate crisis), fits perfectly into the logic of neoliberal capitalism. It represents a technological fix for capitalism’s crises : technological and market-based ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis. Green modernisation is based on a substantial and rising need for metals, minerals and land, cheap labour for the extraction of resources, and the ‘free gifts of nature’, such as water, wind and sun, for renewable energies. ‘Green’ capitalism, too, needs an outside from which raw materials are appropriated and into which the ecological and social costs are externalised (see Luxemburg 2003 [1913]). With this type of crisis management, the historically anchored structures between the centres of industrial production and the resource-rich countries of the periphery are reproduced in the form of unequal development (Smith 1984) and asymmetrical power structures, albeit under new auspices and changing conditions. The crisis of neoliberalism was clearly articulated in the 2007–08 global economic and financial crisis, disastrous neoliberal austerity policies in response to this, and food price increases and uprisings worldwide as a consequence. Despite all this, current crisis management strategies remain firmly rooted in neoliberal logic and are increasingly dominated by military and ‘security’ interests – in the reactionary sense of the security of national borders, rather than the security of the health, nutrition and well-being of people worldwide.

The articles in this issue
The first two contributions to this issue deal explicitly with the impacts of global decarbonisation. Hiroyuki Tsuji, Kei Otsuki, Joshua Kirshner and Griet Steel examine the effects on labour relations. In Mozambique, multinational companies such as Rio Tinto withdrew from coal mining and Indian companies entered the scene. This had a major effect on labour conditions, especially as Indian companies operate under looser conditions than Rio Tinto and are more prone to employ subcontractors who do not comply with safety regulations. This led to a drastic decline in workplace safety measures, which had a heavy impact on workers given that mining is one of the most dangerous sectors. The shift from Rio Tinto to Indian companies also had implications in terms of class relations.

Kennedy Manduna provides a detailed empirical analysis of Chinese investment in Zimbabwe’s lithium sector. Examining in four local case studies who benefits and who loses from lithium megaprojects, he argues that Chinese investment in resource extraction in Africa represents new forms of unequal ecological exchange. According to Manduna, the construction of processing plants in the country is more window-dressing, intended to appease public discourse : the lion’s share of lithium ores is still being shipped unprocessed. Political attempts to indigenise the extractive sector in Zimbabwe have also been reversed, with multinational companies again allowed to fully own and control a mine. Investments in resource extraction, Manduna concludes, might help to make a state richer but not to be independent.

Siyabulela Christopher Fobosi examines the agency and practices of resistance of precarious workers in informal sectors. His ethnography of minibus taxi drivers in Johannesburg outlines imali yesokisi, ‘money in the sock’, as a main strategy used by workers to navigate exploitative labour relations by keeping a portion of their earnings hidden. Fobosi understands imali yesokisi as ‘everyday resistance’, a ‘weapon of the weak’, in James Scott’s (1985) terms, in a setting where collective organisation of workers is weak and hindered by violent extortion and minimal state regulation and protection. By hiding some of their earnings from the taxi owners, drivers respond to their material precarity and exercise agency in a structurally constrained work environment.

Mebratu Kelecha builds on dependency theory to analyse Ethiopia’s debt regimes, arguing that unequal power relations among states, international institutions and private investors shape the political processes behind debt restructuring in Ethiopia. Far from being a neutral technical exercise, debt restructuring is an arena of struggle within the global financial order. Kelecha stresses that domestic political choices matter and details the specificities of different debt regimes across Ethiopian history ; at the same time, political choices are restricted by the constraints posed by a global financial system that is structured around unequal power relations. These constraints have resulted in a narrowing of policy options for successive Ethiopian governments, leading to reforms that prioritised debt repayment over long-term development plans and public provisioning for social needs.

Laura Paramoer, Hamish Evans and Anne Pollock analyse the prospects of medical manufacturing in Africa in the post-Covid-19 period by contrasting it with the immediate post-independence period. They observe that while in the post-independence period medical manufacturing was promoted within the broader imperative of import-substituting industrialisation and broader paradigms of national development, in the neoliberal era priorities have moved away from social transformation and towards health security. In the post-Covid-19 conjuncture, this had a profound impact on the meaning of solidarity and sovereignty, and while contemporary initiatives in African medical manufacturing are not as radical as those proposed in the 1960s and 1970s, they still bear some potential to catalyse tangible transformations and should not be underestimated.

In their briefing, Bülent Gökay and Zehra Vildan Serin also deal with Chinese investments in Africa. They analyse the Belt and Road Initiative, in which Africa has become a leading region, with energy and mining being key sectors. Energy investments in Africa ‘represent both the “dirtiest” and “greenest” composition in BRI history’ (406), investments in fossil fuels more than tripled from 2024 to 2025, while at the same time investments in renewable energies (wind, solar and waste-to-energy) also reached record highs. Apposite to the extractive themes of this issue, Bettina Engels reviews Kennedy Manduna’s Extractive industry indigenisation in Zimbabwe : neoextractivism, resource nationalism and uneven development.

In addition to these pieces, we are delighted to announce that this year’s Ruth First Prize was awarded to Antonater Tafadzwa Choto for her article, ‘Zimbabwe 1995–2000 : rereading Gramsci’s organic intellectual in contemporary working-class struggles’ (Choto 2025). ROAPE presents the award annually for the best article by an African author published in the previous calendar year in the journal for the first time. Our editorial notice discusses Choto’s article and sets out the reasons for this decision, along with a profile of the author and her work.

Finally, Jon Abbink and Mohamed Salih remember the late Fantu Cheru, a contributor and friend of ROAPE and former member of its international advisory board. Fantu left us on 31 May 2026. His countless critical analyses of African political economy and development have shaped a generation of young radical scholars and are a precious resource to inspire future ones.

Notes
1This editorial is, as always, a collective effort. Many thanks to the editorial collective for comments, corrections and amendments.

2Depending on the translated edition of Capital, Vol. III, the term used is ‘break’ (Bruch) or ‘rift’ (Riss). Even if these slightly differ in their literal sense, this does not significantly change the substance.