The New Scramble for Africa: How the Clean Energy Transition Is Reshaping Colonial Dynamics

The language has changed. The mechanics have not.

On 16 May 2026, Deprose Muchena, director of the Resources Futures in Africa programme at the Open Society Foundations, told a gathering of policy researchers that the global race to secure African critical minerals — lithium, cobalt, copper, manganese, platinum group metals — is tracking along a trajectory that historians will recognise from the Berlin Conference of 1884 and its aftermath. The analogy is not rhetorical. The structural features are identical: external actors arriving with capital and technology, extracting raw value from sovereign territory, leaving the producing countries with a fraction of the processed commodity's final worth.

Muchena's warning landed in a context that makes it difficult to dismiss as hyperbole. Demand for the minerals that underpin electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and grid-scale storage is projected to multiply several times over by mid-century. The International Energy Agency estimates that satisfying current climate commitments will require a fourfold increase in lithium supply and a tripling of cobalt output by 2040. Africa holds roughly 30 percent of the world's mineral reserves critical to clean energy. That geological endowment, long a source of frustration for the continent's policymakers — wealth underground, poverty above — is now a geopolitical asset of the first order.

The Partnership Architecture and Its Critics

The European Union and the United States have each established partnership frameworks explicitly designed to redirect critical mineral supply chains away from China, which currently processes the majority of the world's cobalt and a significant share of lithium. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act and the US Inflation Reduction Act both include provisions incentivising diversification toward African producers. The African Continental Free Trade Area secretariat has welcomed the capital inflow but repeatedly stressed that partnerships must be structured on terms that build African processing capacity, not merely transport raw ore to foreign refineries.

Critics argue that the partnership architecture, however well-intentioned, replicates the commodity-dependency trap that has constrained African industrialisation for decades. When a mine opens in the Democratic Republic of Congo — which produces roughly 70 percent of the world's cobalt — the value chain is typically structured so that extraction generates revenue for the foreign investor, royalties flow to the government, and the ore leaves the country for processing abroad. The argument for why this dynamic should change is straightforward: if the DRC were to capture even a modest share of the battery-cell manufacturing currently done in China, South Korea, and Japan, the employment and technology-transfer benefits would transform economic prospects for one of the world's poorest nations.

The Open Society Foundations has argued consistently that the current framework treats African nations as suppliers of raw inputs rather than participants in the higher-value segments of the supply chain. Muchena's intervention on 16 May reframed this critique in historical terms: the scramble is back, but this time the colonisers are corporations backed by sovereign wealth funds and multilateral development banks rather than flags and charter companies.

Competing Visions for African Industrial Policy

Several African governments have moved to assert greater control over their mineral wealth. Zambia's government has renegotiated copper mining licences to increase the state's equity stake in new projects. Zimbabwe banned the export of unprocessed lithium ore in 2022, seeking to attract processing investment domestically. The DRC, which signed a infrastructure-for-minerals deal with Chinese state enterprises in 2023, has simultaneously engaged with Western partners, deliberately cultivating a competitive dynamic among external investors.

This hedging strategy reflects a genuine shift in negotiating leverage. African producers are no longer competing solely among themselves for foreign capital; the demand for their resources is now acute enough that they can set conditions. Whether those conditions translate into durable industrial policy outcomes — rather than one-off rent-extraction deals — remains the central question.

Analysts at the African Development Bank have noted that the window for structural transformation is narrow. The clean energy transition creates a temporary demand spike for specific minerals, but battery chemistry is evolving rapidly. Sodium-ion and lithium-iron-phosphate technologies, already entering commercial production, require fewer critical minerals or none of the cobalt that has defined Congo's export profile. A country that fails to build domestic industrial capacity during the current demand surge risks being left with depleted mines and no downstream economy when the transition matures.

The Governance Deficit

The comparison to colonial-era scrambles is not merely about the structure of trade. It extends to the governance environment surrounding new mining projects. Civil society organisations operating across sub-Saharan Africa report that community consent procedures — nominally required under national law and international standards — are frequently honoured in the breach. Land rights for rural and Indigenous communities, often poorly documented, are overridden by fast-track permitting processes that prioritise investment timelines over due process.

The Open Society Foundations has documented cases in which mining revenue agreements were negotiated without meaningful parliamentary oversight, and in which the terms of benefit-sharing with affected communities were never disclosed publicly. These are not exclusively African governance failures; the investment agreements often involve clauses that restrict host governments from changing fiscal terms, a legacy of concession-era deal structures that developing-country negotiators, working with limited legal resources, have historically accepted.

There is also the question of environmental liability. Mine closure and remediation obligations are frequently underfunded, leaving sovereign governments with the long-term costs of pollution and landscape degradation while the extracting entity has long since departed. This dynamic — costs socialised, profits privatised — is perhaps the most direct structural parallel to the concession companies of the 19th century.

What Comes Next

The stakes of this moment are not abstract. If the clean energy transition is financed on terms that replicate the extractive colonial relationship, the result will be a green economy built on the same inequity that the climate crisis is partly a product of. African nations will bear the environmental and social costs of extraction while the industrial benefits — battery manufacturing, vehicle assembly, technology employment — accumulate elsewhere. The countries that industrialised on the basis of coal and steel will now, in the name of saving the planet, prevent others from following the same path through a different energy paradigm.

Whether that outcome is inevitable depends on choices being made right now in boardrooms, finance ministries, and multilateral forums. Muchena's warning is that those choices will not be made correctly unless the historical parallel is taken seriously — not as a moral argument about the past, but as a structural prediction about what happens if the same logic is allowed to operate unchecked.

The Berlin Conference was convened to prevent conflict among European powers over African territory. It ended with borders drawn in the interests of the convokers. Something resembling it is happening again, this time without the formal conference, without the borders, and without any comparable mechanism for African governments to shape the rules of the engagement. That absence — of African agency at the negotiating table — is the defining feature of the new scramble, and the one that most clearly distinguishes it from a genuine partnership.

This publication's culture desk has prioritised historical and structural framing for this story over wire-service narrative conventions, which have tended to cover African mineral partnerships as straightforward development-positive stories.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/africaintel