Africa battles to capitalise on mineral resources

Mechanical diggers are hard at work in the bleak landscape of the Moanda open-cast mine in Gabon, using giant jaws to rip out manganese and then dump the ore into trucks.

“We’re lucky here in Moanda. We find it about five to six metres below the surface,” said manager Olivier Kassibi, whose mine yields 36 tons of manganese each day.

Element No 25 on the periodic table, manganese has traditionally been perceived as a useful if humdrum material widely employed in steel and alloys.

More recently, though, the silvery metal has gained star status, thanks to its emerging role in rechargeable car batteries, helping to wean the world off carbon-spewing fossil fuels.

Soil rich in manganese

Decarbonisation of the world economy will take centre stage at the UN’s COP27 climate talks in Egypt next month. And as the great transition goes into higher gear, eyes are turning to Africa.

Its soil is rich in manganese, cobalt, nickel and lithium – crucial ingredients in cleaner technology for generating or storing power.

Moanda contains as much as a quarter of global reserves of manganese, according to the Compagnie minière de l’Ogooué, a subsidiary of French group Eramet which operates the site.

But hopes the mineral boom will translate into a new dawn of prosperity on the world’s poorest continent are clouded by memories of what happened with oil.

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In Africa’s oil-producing countries, black gold meant a gush of wealth for a well-connected few, but drops for the needy majority.

Corruption sucked the dollars out of plans for roads, hospitals and schools and environmental damage was often all that remained.

Africa’s potential in new-age minerals ‘huge’

Africa’s potential in new-age minerals is “huge”, said the former chief economist of the African Development Bank, Rabah Arezki, who pointed out that reserves are not known because so little exploration has been done.

But, he said, “there is very little reason to think this windfall will benefit the people of Africa, particularly because of governance concerns”.

New metal deposits are following one after the other at a giddying pace.

In one example, Firefinch Ltd of Australia was looking for gold at Goulamina in southern Mali when it came across lithium, said Seydou Semega, geologist and local director of the firm.

Firefinch then created a local offshoot, Leo Lithium, and inaugurated the mine this year. It says the facility could create 1 200 jobs and generate more than $100 million (about R1.85 billion) a year for Mali in taxes and dividends.

“Could Africa be the main source of lithium in the world?” asked Simon Hay, director of Leo Lithium. “Absolutely.”

A big problem is that Africa is typically used as a source of raw materials and rarely for processing them into goods of higher value, said Gilles Lepesant, a geographer at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

“If activity is limited to mining … Africa will reap no benefit from the energy transition in Europe. It’s absolutely necessary to invest in the value chain,” he said.

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He pointed to the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose soil is estimated to contain half of the world’s reserves of cobalt, as an example of something that is “both an opportunity and a curse”.

Poorly regulated mining leads to environmental damage and encourages child labour, a phenomenon that is hard to resolve when a family’s livelihood depends on it.

Analyst Hugo Brennan of British firm Verisk Maplecroft said African nations had to strike “a tricky balancing act”, providing incentives for investment while enforcing social and environmental standards to ensure their mining boom does not go the same way as oil.