Your role at ECFR involves analyzing political and business risks in sub-Saharan Africa. What are some key themes that we’re seeing right now?
On the investment side, we’re seeing Africa increasingly coming to the fore when it comes to different companies, but also governments as well, trying to get more access to Africa’s raw materials, particularly the critical raw materials needed for energy and industrialization. And then we’re also seeing, on the side of the African governments themselves, that they are certain that this time around we don’t just want to extract and export raw minerals, but rather we want to add value to that. What that means is to create the industries that are needed to process, to beneficiate, and create further downstream opportunities.
You mentioned the value add there. How do critical minerals serve as a force of domestic industrialization for African countries, and what are some of the ways to drive this while ensuring a secure and stable supply of the minerals that we have in Africa?
This is really one of the big conversations that many African governments have had, certainly over the last 50 years, that you can use the extractives industry to drive broader, sustainable development. And this would be in terms of the jobs that you create upstream, midstream, and downstream, and this is not lost on a lot of governments.
However, you also need certain key policy drivers to make that happen. For example, on the issue of energy, if you want to, say, take bauxite and make aluminium, you need a lot of electricity to be able to turn that bauxite into alumina and then alumina to aluminium. And many of our countries don’t have some of the electricity to even start with. And even if they do, it can be quite expensive as compared to other places like China and other markets. So you really need competitive and stable supply of electricity to drive that.
You also need the skills base, your educational system, the people that you trained to be engineers, geologists, and metallurgists to work within the industry.
You would also have to create the enabling infrastructure that drives that. For example, the roads, the railways that would move the minerals or the finished product to the relevant market. And these are all big things that both government and investors and even the development partners are working to try and address.
Are we seeing any policy advances or shifts there? And where are we falling short?
I think certainly in the last maybe two, three years, we’ve seen a lot of advances on policy at an individual country level. But where we’re seeing quite a significant push is also the regional level where now the economics of these projects is such that it may make sense to extract the mineral in one country, and probably because another country has good electricity, you process and beneficiate those minerals in another country. And we are seeing quite a lot of push in that respect. For example, the Lobito corridor between Zambia, DRC, and Angola. They’re also talking of another energy corridor in Namibia, South Africa, in West Africa as well, and even in Eastern Africa. But it’s really the idea that no one single country can do it alone, and there’s a need to collaborate and coordinate to improve the economies of skill of these projects.
Off the back of that then, we’re at Mining Indaba this week. What are you most looking forward to about being here and what conversations do you want to be having?
Indaba is always great. You meet people from government, from industry, from academia, from civil society, and every one of them brings a very unique perspective to the conversation. Some of the things that I’ve mentioned on energy, on training, on education, there’s not a single silver bullet to them. And for me, what I’m looking forward to is the conversations that are needed to drive this forward and particularly also translate into actual investments on the ground that creates the jobs that are needed and ensures that our respective countries and regions benefit in terms of industrialization.
