JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Africa does not have the luxury of treating regional cooperation and regional beneficiation as afterthoughts. If the continent continues to negotiate in small, fragmented units, the result will be a patchwork of export restrictions and incentive schemes that strain investor confidence without building the connective tissue of shared infrastructure and industrial capacity.

If, instead, leaders use projects such as the Lobito Corridor as prototypes for how to align geology, logistics, and industrial policy at a regional scale, the continent can begin to shape global value chains rather than simply feeding into them.

This way forward for the continent is advocated for by Absa CIB managing principle and coverage head for resources and energy Shirley Webber and Absa CIB managing executive for public sector growth capital solutions Stephen Seaka, who highlight that regional corridors are needed to bridge Africa’s dispersed minerals endowment and report on a trial run on the Lobito Corridor reducing a six-week journey to eight days.

“It shows how a corridor can become the organising unit of industrial strategy, because the infrastructure that moves ore and the systems that govern its movement naturally operate beyond national borders. It also forces a more fundamental question onto the table: if the next generation of global industry is going to draw on Africa’s critical minerals, what scale of planning can genuinely support that opportunity? In practice, the geology is regional, but industrial policy is still national. Lobito exposes that mismatch and demonstrates how coordinated corridors can begin to bridge it,” Webber and Seaka point out.

They outline regional cooperation as including tariff alignment, customs procedures, rail and port concessions, environmental and social standards, power-pool governance, dispute-resolution mechanisms and the regulatory treatment of long-term public-private partnerships.

They add that regional beneficiation, by contrast, is about where along the value chain different activities are positioned and how those activities are sequenced. Ore can be crushed, concentrated, smelted, refined, turned into precursors, assembled into components and eventually integrated into finished products.

Some of these steps require substantial power and water; some are knowledge-intensive; some are highly trade-exposed and shaped by logistics costs, with it seldom making sense to duplicate each step in every country that hosts a deposit.

“It’s more efficient to map which segments of a copper-cobalt-manganese-lithium chain should sit in which locations along a corridor, then design fiscal regimes, power investments, and skills programmes accordingly.

Interestingly, they observe that the continental policy landscape is beginning to move in this direction, which they see as being exemplified by the African Union’s Green Minerals Strategy in that it positions critical minerals as a regional industrialisation opportunity and promotes integrated value chains and corridor-based infrastructure planning.

Regional economic communities, such as the Southern African Development Community, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa and the Economic Community of Central African States, are held up as examples of sub-continental platforms that could support this kind of coordination.

“In practice, turning these frameworks into functioning corridors requires a different discipline from governments. It means treating a corridor as a single planning unit for power, water, data connectivity and skills, even while it traverses several jurisdictions.

“It means aligning fiscal terms enough to prevent destructive competition for smelters and refineries, while allowing differentiated incentives where countries have distinct industrial strengths.

“It also demands joint approaches to environmental and social governance, so that high standards become a feature of the corridor rather than a source of regulatory arbitrage.

“These elements form the operational foundation on which regional value-chain design can take shape. The private sector sits at the centre of whether this works. Mining companies and their supply chains will not commit to multi-decade smelting or refining investments unless they see predictable corridor-wide frameworks on transport, power pricing, fiscal regimes and environmental standards.

“Battery and EV manufacturers will only treat African corridors as strategic production nodes if they can access sufficient scale, consistent quality and credible delivery timelines. Regional banks and DFIs will structure project finance and corporate facilities more confidently when risk is shared across a corridor with pooled revenue streams rather than tied to the fiscal position of a single sovereign,” Webber and Seaka state in an article to Mining Weekly.

AFRICA NEEDS ACTION

“Africa needs action,” is a point that has been emphasised by Investing in African Mining Indaba executive advisory board chairperson Frans Baleni, ahead of the Indaba, which takes place in Cape Town from February 9 to 12. As Africa’s biggest mining platform, the Indaba is going all out to build momentum towards the realisation of a timely new Africa partnership era.

At the same Indaba media conference, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa economic affairs officer Dr Marit Kitaw drew attention to “putting our voices together” and “having an African agency”, at the upcoming Indaba, which is Africa’s biggest mining platform.

The journalists present also heard from Kitaw that “critical minerals have now become a currency. We talk about cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, manganese in South Africa, graphite in Mozambique, platinum and gold in South Africa, and I can go on, so we have the endowments, but to have economies of scale and bargaining, you need to have regional integration” she emphasised ahead of the Indaba, which is expected to showcase what regional collaboration can look like.

FUTURE-FACING MINERALS

As Webber and Seaka record, Africa holds close to a third of the world’s known reserves of future-facing minerals.

These include the metals driving the global energy transition – copper, cobalt, manganese, graphite, nickel, lithium and the platinum group metals (PGMs) – as well as a broader suite of inputs used in advanced manufacturing and emerging digital technologies, from rare earth elements to titanium and vanadium.

But they are dispersed: copper and cobalt across the Central African Copperbelt; lithium, nickel and graphite across Southern Africa; manganese and PGMs across South Africa and Zimbabwe; bauxite concentrated in Guinea; and rare-earth prospects emerging through Namibia and parts of East Africa, which makes the call by Webber and Seaka to turn fragmented mineral belts into coherent regional value chains compelling.