The announcement of the inaugural African Mining Week (AMW 2025), to be celebrated in Cape Town alongside Africa Energy Week (AEW 2025) in early October, is a clear signal that Africans are exercising new muscle toward regaining control of the continent’s vast mineral resources.
The event, sponsored by the Africa-focused global investment platform Energy Capital & Power, will highlight initiatives aimed at enhancing Africa’s mineral value chains and promoting local processing to drive economic growth. Formerly called the Critical Minerals Africa conference, the rebranding reflects the integrated opportunities across the continent’s energy and mining sectors and aims to drive a culture of collaboration among those strategic sectors.
The event will center on the theme, “From Extraction to Beneficiation: Unlocking Africa’s Mineral Wealth,” will convene global investors, policymakers, and industry leaders to explore opportunities in Africa’s midstream and downstream sectors, featuring panel discussions, project showcases, and high-level deal signings.
Together with the AEW conference, whose theme is “Invest in African Energies,” AMW 2025’s dynamic platform seeks to foster cross-sector synergies and showcase the continent’s energy and mining potential while positioning Africa as a premier investment destination for capital, technology, and project developers.
Research indicates Africa could generate up to $2 billion in additional mining revenue and create up to 3.8 million jobs by 2030 through expanded manufacturing of value-added mining products. Africa’s mining industry is on track to reach a market value of $135 billion by the end of 2027, with an annual compound growth rate of 5.6%, driven by factors such as rising demand, supportive government policies, and advanced mining technologies.
The rapid pace of African nations and entrepreneurs to take back control is astonishing, given that in less than two decades after winning independence from colonial masters, short-lived African control of the mining sector had retrogressed into what amounted to neocolonialism.
Retrogression toward neocolonialism
A little over a year ago, British political economist Ben Radley, in his book Disrupted Development in the Congo: The Fragile Foundations of the African Mining Consensus, lamented that, since the 1990s, transnational corporations again became the dominant force as owners and managers of major African mining projects.
Within just a few years after shaking off the chains of centuries of colonialism, African governments asserted sovereignty over their metal and mineral resources long exploited by European mining corporations. The return of transnational dominance was carried out through a three-stage process beginning with a misguided reading of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards.
According to Radley, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) [then called Zaire] quickly required all foreign-based companies to establish their headquarters in the DRC and nationalized the largest Belgian-owned colonial mining subsidiary. By 1970, the Congolese public sector controlled 40% of national value added, with steady increases in copper production and state revenues topping out at US$630 million in 1970.
But the same oil crisis that hit the U.S. in 1973 hit hard, and the global copper price fell by two-thirds by 1975 at the same time government loan repayments came due and interest rates rose as the U.S sought to control inflation via monetary policy. The West, however, blamed industry declines solely on state intervention and government corruption.
The reversion to colonialism was hastened by US$1.1 billion in World Bank grants and loans to 15 of Africa’s 17 mineral-rich, low-income countries. This gave the Bank leeway to implement a Eurocentric strategic vision for organizing and managing African mining. African economies grew increasingly dependent upon foreign direct investment and control into the current decade.
The final hurdle, said Radley, for transnational mining companies was to criminalize labor-intensive indigenous miners who recover gold, diamonds, silver, copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum, iron ore, aluminum, tungsten, wolframite, phosphates, precious and semi-precious stones, and rare-earth minerals (like lithium).
To undermine the legitimacy of indigenous miners, the World Bank, dependent African governments, and scholarly literature began casting them as “primitive,” “basic,” “inefficient,” “rudimentary,” and “unproductive.” This led to actions such as the 2017 displacement of 70,000 miners by the Ugandan military and police to make way for a Canadian-listed mining corporation.
While several African governments recently adopted mining code and policy revisions that push back against foreign dominance, those small steps fell well short of a fundamental challenge to the dominant model of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining industrialization on the continent and a far cry from the heyday of African resource sovereignty in the 1960s and 1970s.
A formula for repatriation
Meanwhile, in 2021, attorney NJ Ayuk, incensed that the European-sponsored Africa Oil Week was being relocated to Dubai, proclaimed that Africa was “ready and capable” to hold a continent-wide energy event in Africa, with a focus on finance, natural gas, electrification, hydrogen, upstream, and a just transition. The event’s success apparently sparked continent-wide confidence that Africans should indeed oversee their own mineral wealth.
In February 2023, Ayuk laid out a four-point platform by which African could become a key player in the global minerals market. Africa, he said, harbors great potential for mining and exporting minerals used in emerging technologies that rely on the continent’s abundant supplies of cobalt, copper, lithium, and other rare-earth minerals.
All that is needed, he said, is for African governments to prioritize and develop sustainable mining techniques, invest in skilled labor and training, and modernize existing infrastructure.
And one more thing.
By putting regulatory frameworks in place that are crystal clear and transparent to the public, African governments can satisfy prospective investors’ needs for certainty about their investments and build public confidence.
African governments, it appears, are getting the message, even the military junta that took over Mali and demanded $500 million in back taxes from Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold and $380 million from Resolute Mining. As Justice Malala wrote last December in Japan Times, companies should expect perhaps a gentler type of pressure from other African nations.
Malala said that, after decades of largely being sidelined while profits from their mineral resources accrued to foreign firms and kleptocratic local leaders, Africa’s new leaders (both democratic and autocratic) want a greater slice of the pie.
He warned that this movement, whether one calls it decoloniality or “resource nationalism,” Africans are increasingly conforming to the view, expressed by South Africa’s international relations minister Ronald Lamola at the United Nations last September, that his nation’s priorities would include dealing with “issues of predatory mining by some countries and corporations, especially in the quest for Africa’s raw material and critical minerals.”
The sponsors of Africa Mining Week (and Africa Energy Week) have a different focus. In their view, Africa’s energy and minerals industries are on the precipice of accelerated growth, yet Africa has barely scratched the surface of its energy and mining industries’ potential.
With much of the continent’s natural and mineral resources underdeveloped and underexplored, there is a critical opportunity for global and African players to collaborate and invest in Africa – with Africans as full partners in building an African century.
Africa’s private sector, and hopefully African governments, are growing up – and the world would do well to take notice.
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