Who gets paid for the green energy transition?

Back in the 1880s, European leaders sat around a table in Berlin and divided Africa among themselves like it was a birthday cake. Not a single African nation was invited to that meeting, and the borders they drew still shape the continent today.

Fast forward about 140 years, and there's a new race for Africa happening right now, but nobody is bringing armies this time. They're bringing railways, loans, and mining contracts, and the prize is the set of minerals that power the device you're currently reading this on.

The Scramble for Africa is back, and this time it's for batteries.

I've been following all of this closely as a student of international relations with a focus on technology, including a year studying in Nanjing, and the thing that strikes me most is how badly the coverage serves anyone trying to understand it. The "America good, China bad" framing you see in most US reporting, or the exact reverse depending on your algorithm, misses the part that actually decides who ends up richer. The question nobody in Washington or Beijing wants to ask out loud is whether Africa finally gets to keep the value this time, and over the past eighteen months that question stopped being rhetorical, because African governments went ahead and answered it themselves.

The DRC mines more than 70 percent of the world's cobalt and refines almost none of it

Here is the shape of the race as it actually stands. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces more than 70 percent of the world's mined cobalt, the metal inside nearly every EV and smartphone battery on earth, and China owns or holds a stake in fifteen of the country's nineteen cobalt mines. Africa holds roughly 30 percent of the world's known mineral reserves, and almost none of the refining happens there.

That gap between digging and refining is the whole story, and it has a name. Economists call it the resource curse, and it describes how countries sitting on the most valuable resources in the world routinely end up worse off than countries with none, because the wealth attracts extraction and corruption and conflict instead of development. The money was never in the rock. It's in what you do to the rock afterward, and for a century that step has happened somewhere else. Zimbabwe's raw lithium concentrate sells for something like $570 a tonne while battery-grade lithium carbonate sells for around $7,000, and the entire argument is contained in the distance between those two numbers.

Africa has lived that story before, which is exactly why what happened next matters so much.

Congo suspended cobalt exports entirely and the price went up 160 percent

In February 2025, with cobalt sitting at a nine-year low of around $21,000 a tonne because the market was drowning in supply, Kinshasa did something nobody expected. It stopped exports altogether. Not a tax, not a quota, a full suspension of the thing that accounts for most of its foreign earnings, at the worst possible moment to be giving up revenue.

It worked. By last October the suspension was replaced with a quota system capping exports at 96,600 tonnes a year for 2026 and 2027, which is less than half of what the country produced in 2024, and the price has since climbed about 160 percent to more than $57,000 a tonne. Of that cap, roughly 87,000 tonnes get parcelled out to producers and the remaining 9,600 sit with ARECOMS, the state minerals regulator, as a strategic reserve it can release or withhold whenever it decides the market has gotten too comfortable. At the end of June, Kinshasa went further and ordered every unused quota from the first half of the year forfeited into that same reserve.

Look at what that did to the companies. Glencore cut its cobalt output 39 percent in the first quarter and pivoted its Congolese mines to copper instead, because there was no point producing metal it wasn't allowed to ship. CMOC kept mining at record levels and simply stockpiled the difference, betting it can outlast the rules. Semafor's read on this is that the DRC has started behaving like a swing producer in the mold of OPEC, and that for the first time in a very long time it isn't just watching other people set the price of its own wealth.

This is not the 1880s. Congo is at the table now, and everyone at that table had to change their plans.

Zimbabwe moved eleven months early and only one plant was ready

Zimbabwe went further, and faster, and this is the part most coverage still hasn't caught up with.

The country is Africa's largest lithium producer and it had already banned raw ore exports back in 2022. In June of last year the mines minister announced that lithium concentrate exports would be banned starting January 2027, which gave the industry eighteen months to build processing plants inside the country or lose access to the market. That was the deal, and it was a reasonable one.

Then on February 25 of this year, Zimbabwe scrapped its own timeline and banned everything immediately, suspending exports of all unprocessed minerals indefinitely, including shipments already loaded and in transit. The government said it had found lithium being pulled out of the ground and stockpiled across the border ahead of the deadline, and it wasn't going to wait around and watch. Lithium prices jumped. Zimbabwe had exported 1.128 million tonnes of spodumene concentrate the year before, around 15 percent of everything China imported, and it turned that tap off in a single afternoon.

That is the most aggressive thing any African government has done in this space, and it is worth sitting with the fact that it worked, in the narrow sense that the market moved and the buyers had to react.

The lithium plants going up in Zimbabwe belong to the companies that own the mines

Here's where I have to complicate my own story, because the beneficiation push is working exactly as designed and the design has a hole in it.

Zimbabwe told mining companies to process lithium inside the country. Those companies are Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, Sinomine, Yahua, and Chengxin, all Chinese, and they are the ones building the plants. Huayou commissioned a lithium sulphate facility last October and it remains, as of the middle of this year, the only finished plant in the country. Sinomine has announced a $500 million plant at Bikita. Two more are under construction and the state-owned Sandawana project is still at feasibility study.

So the refining step is genuinely moving onto Zimbabwean soil, and the ownership of that step is not moving at all. The value chain shifts a few hundred kilometres west and stays in the same hands. Zimbabwe collects royalties, taxes, and jobs, which is not nothing and is considerably more than it got before, but the thing the whole policy was built to capture is the margin between $570 and $7,000, and that margin still belongs to Huayou.

The timing problem is worse. The Lithium Producers Association went to the Chamber of Mines conference in Victoria Falls a few weeks ago and admitted that only one of seven major producers can currently comply with the January deadline, and asked for six more months. The government has said nothing. If it holds firm with one operational plant and a 16 percent export tax already squeezing the cash flow that would fund the others, it will have written a policy that shuts down its own second-largest industry.

LFP batteries use no cobalt at all

And then there is the thing that makes all of this feel like it's happening slightly too late.

Lithium iron phosphate batteries contain no cobalt whatsoever. Tesla has already moved its standard-range vehicles onto them and other manufacturers are following, and LFP has been taking share from the cobalt-heavy chemistries for years now. Congo has built genuine pricing power over a mineral that the industry is actively engineering out of its products, and every month the quota holds and the price stays above $57,000 is another month of cathode chemists being handed a very good reason to design cobalt away entirely.

There's a second problem underneath that one. Peter Major, a mining analyst who has watched this region for decades, makes the point that a quota system only binds the people who follow rules, and the DRC has an enormous informal mining sector that does not. Restricting legal exports raises the value of illegal ones, and the burden falls hardest on the large transparent producers rather than the opaque ones. Kinshasa also suspended artisanal processing centres by decree shortly after signing with Washington, which landed on the miners least able to absorb it.

The US signed its minerals agreement four days after brokering the peace deal

The American side of the race deserves more scrutiny than it gets, and the sequencing is the part to watch.

On December 4 the United States signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement with the DRC giving American companies preferential access to a designated list of Congolese mineral assets. It arrived alongside the Washington Accords, the peace framework Washington brokered between the DRC and Rwanda after M23 took Goma. Two months later the administration launched a project called Vault to build a US strategic reserve of critical minerals, backed by an initial $10 billion from the Export-Import Bank. A State Department official put the goal about as plainly as it can be put, which is that Washington wants African critical minerals to flow westward.

There is a railway race attached to it. The Lobito Corridor runs roughly 1,300 kilometres from the Angolan port of Lobito inland toward Katanga and the Zambian copperbelt, and the Angolan section has been running since 2023 under a thirty-year concession while the Congolese section is still being negotiated with construction targeted for late this year. When it's finished, minerals could reach the Atlantic in five to eight days instead of around twenty-five. It is a genuinely useful piece of infrastructure and it is also, unmistakably, a set of rails pointing away from China.

Tying peace to mineral access made a lot of Congolese people uneasy, and in January a group of lawyers and human rights defenders took the agreement to the country's constitutional court. That case is worth following more closely than the ribbon cuttings.

My Take

I'm still cautiously optimistic, and I want to be honest about how much narrower that optimism has gotten.

The leverage is real and the leverage is a wasting asset. Congo can act like OPEC for as long as cobalt matters, and cobalt is on a clock that the DRC does not control and cannot see. Zimbabwe can force processing onshore, and it has, and the processors are the same Chinese firms that owned the mines, which means the country has successfully relocated a refinery without relocating a single dollar of the margin that refinery earns. Both governments did the boldest thing available to them. Neither one solved the problem, because the problem was never where the value chain sits. It's who owns it.

So the honest reading is that beneficiation without ownership is the resource curse with better paperwork, and that's the part I'd want anyone quoting the Zimbabwe ban approvingly to sit with.

But I don't think that's the whole of it, and here is what I think genuinely changed. For as long as this pattern has existed, the assumption baked into every mining contract was that African governments would take what they were given, because the alternative was losing the revenue and they could not afford to lose the revenue. Congo shut off its own export tap at a nine-year price low and ate the pain. Zimbabwe tore up its own deadline and stranded cargo mid-shipment. Both of those were expensive, both were unilateral, and both worked, in the specific sense that the market moved and the buyers had to reorganise around a decision made in Kinshasa and Harare rather than in Geneva or Beijing. That assumption is now dead, and you cannot un-prove a thing like that.

What's missing is coordination, and it's the same gap I keep running into every time I look at this. Congo and Zimbabwe are each negotiating alone against buyers who are not alone. If African producers moved as a bloc the way the oil exporters learned to, and made access conditional on ownership stakes in processing rather than just its location, the arithmetic would change. Nobody is doing that yet. But the last eighteen months proved the willingness exists, and the willingness was always the harder half.

The green energy transition is real, and it's necessary, and it runs directly through Africa. If you care about climate change, you also have to care about who owns the refinery, because those were never two separate stories.