Africa:
A Conference of Sharks

Feb 16, 2026

This article is translated from the February 13 issue, #3002 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

A big conference on mining in Africa began in Cape Town, South Africa on February 9. Around 10,000 attendees representing mining corporations and African governments are competing to strip the continent’s population of the wealth that could have lifted Africans out of poverty.

The International Energy Agency expects global demand for minerals to quadruple by 2040, with prices rising accordingly. The proliferation of digital technology and giant data centers and the promised phasing out of fossil fuels will fuel this growth. This technological revolution alone would suffice to stoke rivalry for access to mineral resources. But there is also the global economic war raging between the U.S., China, and Europe. Every government and mining company is more determined than ever to lock in its supplies.

In this context, the African continent is the focus of intense attention. Even now, a big part of global mineral production is extracted in Africa. South Africa and Gabon dominate the manganese market. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) produces 75% of the world’s cobalt. Madagascar and Mozambique dominate the graphite market. But most of all, Africa’s untapped reserves are impressive. Taken as a whole, they amount to a third of the world’s reserves. Many mines could one day open in areas where political insecurity now delays industrial exploitation. Currently some veins of ore are exploited only by self-employed miners. The almost total lack of freight transportation makes it prohibitively expensive to ship ore to processing plants and ports. Motorcycle couriers playing cat and mouse with highway robbers make up somewhat for the lack of trains. But what is not profitable today could become profitable tomorrow if demand and prices rise.

China owns a large share of Africa’s mines, but the U.S., locked in a power struggle with China, leads the charge for minerals. Under U.S. auspices, a peace agreement was signed in Washington in December between the DRC and Rwanda. This let Trump boast that the U.S. is getting a large share of Congo’s mining rights. The U.S. and Europe are also financing a rail and highway corridor between the mining city of Lubumbashi in the DRC, Zambia’s “copper belt,” and Angola’s port Lobito.

African government representatives attending the conference will try to secure a few crumbs for themselves by driving up prices. Of course higher sales will not benefit ordinary people, but will inflate the wealth of politicians. In the DRC, being president or even governor of a mining province like Katanga means the chance to build a financial empire in the midst of one of the world’s poorest populations.

Commentators like to talk about the “resource curse.” In fact, they mean the curse of imperialism.