How African countries lost control to foreign mining companies
Stage one: Blame the African state
IN the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Joseph-Désiré Mobutu took steps early to place resources under state control when he was the country’s president. The Bakajika Law of June 1966 required all foreign-based companies to establish their headquarters in the DRC, then known as Zaire, by the end of the year.
In addition, the largest Belgian-owned colonial mining subsidiary, Union minière de Haut Katanga, was nationalised the same year.
It became Société générale Congolaise des minerais (Gécamines).
Nationalisation had no immediate adverse effect.
In the DRC, copper production increased steadily between 1960 and 1974 from around 300 000 tonnes to 500 000 tonnes.
It grew over the same period from 500 000 tonnes to 700 000 tonnes in Zambia.
In the DRC, state revenue tripled from US$190 million in 1967 to US$630 million in 1970. A national health system numbering 500 000 employees was established.
It was seen as a model for primary health care in the Global South.
The country also achieved 92 percent primary school enrolment and increased access to the secondary and tertiary sectors.
But soon after, the oil price began to rise. Commodity prices fell due to recession in the Global North.
In the DRC and Zambia, the copper price crashed from US$1,40 per pound in April 1974 to US$0,53 per pound in early 1975 and stagnated thereafter.
Around the same time, from 1973 to 1977, the cost of oil imports quadrupled.
In addition, as African government loan repayments became due, interest rates on the debts began to rise as the United States sought to control inflation through monetary policy.
Mining production levels stagnated or dropped. Growth slowed and debt grew across the continent. Between 1980 and 1988, 25 African countries rescheduled their debts 105 times.
In the DRC, copper and cobalt exports decreased sharply, eventually collapsing by the early 1990s.
Of course, external shocks were not the sole cause of the reversal. Nationalisation measures undertaken in 1973 and 1974 were poorly planned and implemented, and went badly awry.
Agriculture had been neglected, receiving less than 1 percent of state expenditure from 1968 to 1972, and the Congolese manufacturing sector was in decline.
Yet, a consideration of the impact of external shocks, alongside recognition of the progress made by newly independent African governments in the short time frame up until this juncture, was largely missing from influential
Processing facilities at Tenke Fungurume Mine, one of the largest copper and cobalt mines in the world, in south-eastern
analyses of the 1980s seeking to understand the causes of African economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onwards.
Instead, misguided African state intervention and government corruption were put forward as primary causal explanations, to the exclusion of other factors.
Stage two: Liberalise and privatise
Between 1980 and 2021, the World Bank provided US$1,1 billion in mining sector grants and loans to 15 of the continent’s 17 mineral-rich and also low-income countries.
This gave the bank significant leeway to implement its strategic vision for how mining should be organised and managed: “The private sector should take the lead. Private investors should own and operate mines. Existing state mining companies should be privatised at the earliest opportunity.”
With the regulatory framework overhauled, foreign investment was unleashed to seek out fresh opportunities.
Mining exploration in Africa increased from 4 percent of total mineral exploration expenditure worldwide in 1991 to 17,5 percent in 1998.
Overall mining investment in Africa doubled between 1990 and 1997.
The start of a commodity price surge in 1999 gave fresh impetus.
In 2004, the US$15 billion invested in mining in Africa represented 15 percent of the total of mining investment worldwide, up from 5 percent in the mid-1980s.
From 2002 to 2012, a period spanning most of the supercycle, mineral exploration spending in Africa rose by more than 700 percent, reaching US$3,1 billion in 2012.
The dramatic increase in foreign direct investment (FDI) growth since the 1990s has altered the composition of these economies, which have become increasingly dependent on FDI as a source of development financing.
This level of dependence is greater today relative to other country groups and regions.
The underlying logic of the World Bank’s African mining strategy continues to hold.
In 2021, the lender had ongoing mining reform programmes in seven African countries, ranging from Niger (US$100 million) to the Central African Republic (US$10 million).
Each programme was geared towards institutional and regulatory change within a general framework giving overall priority to capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining.
Stage three: Criminalise African miners
There was one last hurdle for transnational mining corporations.
Some prized deposits were already occupied by labour-intensive miners.
They mined gold and diamonds mainly. But they were also involved in the production of silver, copper, cobalt, tin, tantalum, iron ore, aluminium, tungsten, wolframite, phosphates, precious and semi-precious stones, and rare earth minerals.
Globally, labour-intensive mining contributes up to 30 percent of total cobalt production; 25 percent for tin, tantalum and diamonds; 20 percent for gold; and 80 percent for sapphires.
Labour-intensive African mining directly employs millions of workers across the continent. It has grown significantly since the 1980s, driven by a number of factors.
These include rising commodity prices, especially during the supercycle of 1999–2012, which pushed up mining wages and profits.
Despite the sector’s importance to rural employment, African miners have typically been cast by the World Bank, African governments and parts of the scholarly literature as “primitive”, “basic”, “inefficient”, “rudimentary” and “unproductive”.
In 2017, 70 000 miners were displaced by the Ugandan military and police to make way for a Canadian-listed mining corporation.
Forcibly displaced and removed from the best deposits, African miners are restricted to working in less productive areas.
The final act?
Recent mining code and policy revisions led by African governments such as Tanzania, the DRC, Sierra Leone and Malawi have begun to push back against this dominance.
They draw inspiration from the Africa Mining Vision, a framework developed by the African Union in 2009 to deepen the linkages between foreign-owned mining and national economies. The vision also seeks to strengthen government capacity to negotiate with and secure developmental benefits from foreign mining corporations.
But these are short of a fundamental challenge to the dominant model of capital-intensive, foreign-owned mining industrialisation on the continent. They remain a far cry from the earlier period of the 1960s and 1970s African resource sovereignty.
Ben Radley is a lecturer in International Development at the University of Bath.
IN the last weeks, Zimbabwe, as were Malawi and Zambia, declared a drought emergency, requesting US$2 billion in support to respond to the drought. The total cereal harvest is expected to be around one million tonnes, about half the quantity of the previous year, leaving a big gap to meet total demand, which means cereal imports will be essential.
We knew this was going to be an El Niño season.
There were early warnings, recommendations to plant drought-resistant crops and suggestions to plan for the worst.
And, unlike many climate predictions where there are more uncertainties, the impacts are well-documented, with close correlations between El Niño events and maize outputs repeatedly seen.
The consequences are now being felt all over the region.
El Niño events are not new.
The major droughts of 1982/1983; 1991/1992; 2009/2010; and 2015/2016, among others, were all linked to El Niño.
El Niño is a naturally occurring phenomenon and emerges when surface temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean increase.
This has an impact on global circulation patterns and drought is usually experienced in Southern Africa (while just to the north, in east Africa, El Niño years are unusually wet).
Severe droughts in the past have been retrospectively linked to similar climate anomalies back in the nineteenth century, although today’s accelerating climate change makes things worse.
Food insecurity
This year, through a very uneven season, farmers have gone to great lengths to get a crop.
I do not know how many Western Union transfers I made to pay for yet another round of seed after the last one failed due to another extended mid-season drought.
Cropping results are patchy, depending on luck, timing and local micro-climatic conditions.
Those with access to riverbank or vlei gardens or a small irrigation pump set will fare better.
This is a year when Pfumvudza/Intwasa should have come into its own, with moisture conserved even if rainfall was minimal.
But this again was not guaranteed, and many dug and dug to no avail.
All this is having a huge impact on food security and the World Food Programme reckons there are currently 2,7 million Zimbabweans in need of food, with many more expected in the coming months.
Significant investment in small-scale irrigation will be a major factor in improving food supplies this year
Like El Niño years before, this is going to be a tough period.
Luckily, the previous years have seen good harvests and many have stores of food to help tide them over, especially in resettlement areas, but nevertheless many will be reliant on assistance.
Most of this food will come from relatives who have food or funds, but Government, private sector and international aid support will be important too.
Poor media reporting
The media reporting on the drought is once again disappointing.
This El Niño event is being experienced all across the region; it is not just a Zimbabwean story.
El Niño is a particular, long-established weather event that may become more severe with climate change. However, it is not climate change per se, as so often suggested.
The tired story that Zimbabwe has imported food each year since land reform is simply not true. The falsehoods are found in poorly researched articles, particularly in the foreign media.
The capacity to cope with the situation this year has been improved by land reform. Much of the food currently being distributed to communal areas is coming from resettlement farms.
Much more interesting media stories would focus on how people are managing in spite of the drought; what new networks are being formed to support the needy; and the role of social mobilisation across urban and rural divides amidst this situation.
But these are not story lines for making cheap political points.
Sadly, the quality of rural reporting (and mostly X commentary) in Zimbabwe (with some notable exceptions) is poor, with limited understanding of changing rural dynamics and little attempt to find out what is really happening.
Droughts are always political
The media commentaries emphasise once again that droughts are always political.
Whether it is a government or an international agency, everyone wants to make a point (and raise money) from a drought.
As P. Sainath argued long ago in relation to India, “everybody loves a good drought”.
While rainfall deficits and global weather events take their toll, drought impacts are mediated through economic, social and political relations.
There is, of course, no such thing as a natural disaster, as vulnerabilities always emerge from particular contexts.
The smallholder farmers who got farms during land reform are partially insulated from other problems. Having land to self-provision from, even if yields are low, is vital in generating resilience.
The significant investment in small-scale irrigation in these areas is especially important and will be a major factor in improving food supplies this year.
As we have documented before, land reform farmers, especially in the A1 areas, are the ones who export food and support others, both in communal areas and in towns. The new food economy, particularly in drought periods, remains poorly understood, certainly by journalists, and also by those in international agencies.
Let us hope that, like in previous years, the predicted disaster will not be as bad as feared.