The global race for technological supremacy now runs on cobalt, lithium, rare earths, and coltan – the minerals that make possible everything from electric vehicle batteries to semiconductors and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Rare earths, a group of 17 metals essential to electronics and defence technologies, and coltan, the ore used to produce tantalum for smartphones and aerospace components, have become the building blocks of twenty-first-century power. Whoever controls their supply controls the infrastructure of our digital age.
China understood this decades ago and built a near monopoly, commanding around 70 percent of global rare earth mining and roughly 90 percent of the processing capacity that turns raw ore into usable material. The US and its allies are now scrambling to catch up. But what rarely features in coverage of this great power competition is that the minerals at the centre of it are overwhelmingly located in African soil.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alone holds roughly 70 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves, alongside vast deposits of coltan and copper. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Mozambique possess significant reserves of graphite, lithium and nickel. Africa is not peripheral to the technology economy. It is foundational to it. Yet most African producers remain confined to the lowest-value end of the supply chain, exporting raw ore while refining, manufacturing and profit accumulation take place elsewhere.
It was against this backdrop that the US, on 4 February 2026, hosted its first Critical Minerals Ministerial. More than fifty countries gathered at the State Department to announce a preferential trading bloc – effectively a club offering favourable trade terms among its members – alongside coordinated price floors designed to stabilise mineral markets. A new partnership, FORGE, was unveiled, as well as Project Vault, a $12 billion strategic stockpile intended to shield US industry from supply disruptions.
Vice President Vance spoke of ending dependence on foreign suppliers. Secretary of State Rubio warned that supply chains had been “weaponised”. Hundreds of billions of dollars in mining investment were promised. The visible story was one of Western coordination to counter China’s dominance. The less visible story – and the one more consequential for Africa – begins earlier.
From conflict to contracts
In February 2025, as M23 rebels operating in eastern Congo – widely reported to be backed by Rwanda – occupied the cities of Goma and Bukavu, displacing millions, President Félix Tshisekedi wrote to President Donald Trump offering US access to the DRC’s critical minerals in exchange for security assistance. The Washington Accords followed in June 2025, brokering peace between the DRC and Rwanda under US mediation and paving the way for bilateral strategic partnership agreements that granted American companies preferential access to Congolese minerals.
By December 2025, the arrangement was formalised at a signing ceremony where Trump declared that “everybody’s going to make a lot of money.” The day before this year’s ministerial, the US-backed Orion Critical Mineral Consortium signed a memorandum of understanding – a preliminary commercial agreement – with Glencore to acquire a 40 percent stake in Mutanda Mining and Kamoto Copper Company, two of the DRC’s largest copper and cobalt operations, in a $9 billion transaction. The consortium gained the right to direct sales to nominated buyers. Glencore retained operational control. US strategic interests secured the output.
The immediate implications are stark. A country negotiating under acute military pressure traded access to its most valuable geological assets for a peace that remains fragile. Fighting continues in eastern Congo. The DRC entered these arrangements from profound vulnerability, and the imbalance in bargaining power shaped the outcome.
The deeper implications are structural. The architecture Washington is building is not designed to transform producing countries into industrial economies. It is designed to reroute the flow of raw materials away from Chinese processing plants and toward Western ones.
Coordinated price floors may protect mining investors from market volatility, including price suppression by dominant buyers. They do not guarantee that producing countries will capture greater fiscal rents – the government revenues derived from natural resources. Nor do the bilateral agreements signed at speed appear to expand policy space for African governments to impose export levies, require local processing (often referred to as beneficiation), or mandate local content rules that prioritise domestic labour and suppliers. Historically, such tools have been central to moving resource-rich economies up the value chain.
What remains largely invisible in this emerging minerals regime are the inequalities it may entrench.
The first is pricing. Stabilising mineral prices protects investment calculations in Western capitals. It does not automatically translate into stable or enhanced public revenues in Kinshasa, Lusaka or Harare. There is no clear mechanism ensuring that the DRC’s state mining company, Gécamines, or the Congolese treasury benefits directly from these new arrangements. Price floors without revenue guarantees secure returns for investors while leaving producing states dependent on contracts negotiated under pressure.
The second is governance. Many bilateral mineral frameworks include investment protection and dispute resolution provisions that allow foreign investors to challenge regulatory changes through international arbitration rather than domestic courts. The US-DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement calls for “clear, predictable and transparent” regulatory environments – language that signals stability to investors but may constrain governments seeking to revise mining codes or introduce domestic processing mandates as they reassess the value of their resources.
The third inequality is industrial. The structure of the trading bloc assumes a familiar division of labour: African countries mine; Western economies refine. There is little in FORGE or Project Vault to suggest large-scale investment in mineral processing capacity on the African continent. Without it, employment generation, technological learning and downstream industrial development will continue to accrue elsewhere.
“African countries mine; Western economies refine.”
The fourth is geopolitical. As supply commitments are locked into nominated buyers and investment protections accumulate, the room for manoeuvre narrows. The ability of African states to pivot between partners – whether China, India, Gulf states or Western powers – diminishes as they become embedded in a US-centred supply chain architecture. Exiting such arrangements can be framed as instability or non-compliance, raising the political cost of autonomy.
The technology economy of the twenty-first century, like the industrial economy of the nineteenth, is being built on African raw materials extracted under terms largely shaped elsewhere. The vocabulary has shifted. “Strategic partnership” has replaced “concession.” “Supply chain resilience” has replaced “imperial preference.” Yet the underlying pattern – geological inputs sourced from Africa, value captured in Washington, Brussels, Tokyo and Beijing – remains strikingly familiar.
Until African mineral-producing states possess stronger fiscal institutions, domestic processing capacity and collective bargaining power to shape the terms of extraction, the critical minerals revolution may power the world’s AI systems and green transition while leaving the communities living atop these deposits with depleted landscapes and limited returns.
