Will Africa’s metal boom suffer the same curse as oil?

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

Manager Olivier Kassibi said: “We are lucky to be here in Moanda. We found it to be about 5 to 6 meters (about 18 feet) below the surface,” said mine manager Olivier Kassibi, whose mine produces 36 tonnes of manganese per day.

Element number 25 on periodic tableManganese has traditionally been considered useful if the humdrum material is widely used in steels and alloys.

More recently, however, silver metal has become a star thanks to its emerging role in rechargeable car batteries, helping the world phase out carbon-emitting fossil fuels.

Decarbonization of the world economy will be the focus at the UN’s COP27 climate talks in Egypt next month.

And as the big transition goes to the next level, people are looking to Africa.

Its soil is rich in manganese, cobalt, nickel and lithium – important ingredients in cleaner technology to generate or store electricity.

According to the Compagnie Miniere de l’Ogooue (Comilog), the Moanda region alone contains up to a quarter of global manganese reserves, according to Compagnie Miniere de l’Ogooue (Comilog), a subsidiary of the French group Eramet, which operates it. this location.

The curse of oil

But hopes that the mineral boom will become a new dawn of prosperity in the world’s poorest continent are clouded by memories of what happened to oil.

In the oil-producing countries of Africa, black gold means a bountiful source of wealth for the well-connected few – but only a decline for the impoverished majority.

Corruption sucks all the dollars out of plans to build roads, hospitals and schools, and environmental damage is often all that’s left.

Africa’s new-age mineral potential is “huge,” said Rabah Arezki, chief economist at the African Development Bank. little exploration is done.

However, he said, “there is little reason to think this downpour will benefit the people of Africa, especially given governance concerns.”

New metal deposits are coming one after another at breakneck speed.

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

Firefinch then created a local subsidiary, Leo Lithium, and inaugurated the mine in early 2022 – a facility it says could create 1,200 jobs and generate more than $100 million a year for Mali. taxes and dividends.

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

Comilog, which has operated the Moanda mine since 1960, claims to create 3,400 direct and 6,000 indirect jobs, contributing approximately $345 million annually to the National economy in various forms, plus millions of dollars in providing health and education services to people.

“You need to have a social policies it’s committed to sharing this wealth as much as possible,” said its CEO, Leod Paul Batolo.

Comilog is interested in listing its green principles, including restoring and replanting mining sites, decarbonizing plants’ energy mix, and “setting limits” on encroachment. wildlife areas.

But overall, countless studies show that resource extraction in Africa has a long and dark history of unequal wealth distribution, corruption, environmental destruction and rights violations.

‘Value Chain’

Gilles Lepesant, a geographer at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), says a big problem is that Africa is often used as a source of raw materials and is rarely processed into valuable goods. higher.

“If activity is limited to mining and extracting ore, Africa will not benefit from the energy transition in Europe. Value Chain“he said.

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

Poorly managed mining leads to environmental damage and encourage child labora phenomenon that is difficult to deal with when a family’s livelihood depends on it.

In the field of tropical forestry, many Rich countries has asked for wood and labor traceability to reassure concerned consumers.

But this is a lot harder to achieve for metals used in car batteries and other devices, Lepesant said.

“In many cases, the metal that is mined is exported for refining to other countries, such as China, and then combined with other metals, so it’s hard to tell if the cobalt you have in it. Does my production line really come from this type. mine is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” he said.

African countries have had to make “a difficult balancing act” —providing investment incentives while enforcing social standards and environment — to make sure their mining boom doesn’t play out like oil.

© 2022 AFP